Make friends with your evil twin
Find the person who disagrees with you for a living. Buy them coffee.
We’ve disagreed entirely, violently, and calmly.
Nobody raised their voice. If you have to raise your voice, you’ve failed.
When I was seven visiting my homeland of Macedonia, my cousin Darko told me (with the authority only a eight-year-old can muster) that everyone in the world has an evil twin somewhere.
Not merely a lookalike. A real proper evil version of you. Same face, same voice, opposite everything. He told me if I ever met mine, I’d know, but being all the way over in Australia, it was much harder for me to find mine. So I was safe.
I believed him completely. For the next few weeks of our overseas travel I studied every other kid I met. Making use of the precious time we had away from the antipodes, looking for one whose smile was just a little bit wrong.
By the time I was home in Sydney, I’d comforted myself with the notion that tyranny of distance would keep me and my doppelgänger forever at bay.
I’m older now, and don’t believe in that kind of evil twin anymore. But I’ve come to appreciate a different kind. The kind who agrees with you about almost nothing and, somehow, is one of the most valuable people you’ll discover.
Mine is Peter Lewis.
Same room, different view
Peter runs Essential Media. I run General Strategic. On paper, we’re in neighbouring pews of the same chapel — research, strategy, communications, politics. In practice, we’d often be called to opposite ends of the same issue. His clients and ours sometimes sit on different sides of the table. Occasionally they even sit on the same side and still disagree about the furniture.
We work on the same briefs from different angles. We read the same research and polling and draw different lines through it. We watch the same press conference and come away with different assessments of who won the room. Same stage. Different seats. Wildly different reviews.
And I think it might be one of the most important professional relationships I have.
For the love of disagreement
There’s a weird assumption about people who work in our industry (ie. politics and adjacent) that those on the opposite side of the aisle are enemies, and your most useful peers are the ones who see the world the way you do. Who you’ve been in the trenches with while working for this Minister or that. The people you can shorthand with. The ones who nod along when you float a hot take, because they already agree. It’s comforting, and comfort is seductive, but it’s also how your thinking quietly atrophies without you noticing.
My evil twin doesn’t let me get comfortable.
When I run a view past him, I already know I won’t get a nod. I’ll get a question. Usually a good one. Sometimes the kind that makes me stop mid-sentence because he’s pointed at the load-bearing wall of my argument and asked whether I’ve actually checked the footings. Occasionally I notice I haven’t, and then realise the whole argument needs a rebuild.
And I love it.
What the trenches actually look like
If you’ve never worked across-the-table from someone you genuinely like, it’s hard to explain. It’s not hostility. It’s not performed collegiality either. It’s two people who take the work seriously, respect each other’s read of the terrain, and understand that disagreement is a feature of democracy, not a failure of it.
Often time, you’re in the ‘same’ room, just in different places. Where his research framed the political weather and my strategy was trying to change it. Where my advice was to push and his data was telling his client to hold. Where we were both quietly right about different parts of the same problem, and clients get the benefit of a full picture neither of us could have delivered alone.
We’ve disagreed entirely, violently, and calmly. Nobody raised their voice. If you have to raise your voice, you’ve failed.
The professional dividend
There’s a measurable benefit to having an evil twin. You get a permanent stress test for your thinking. You get a translator for a worldview you’d otherwise only caricature. You get someone who, when they tell you something is wrong, has earned the right to say so.
You also get sharper. Not at being contrarian. Sharper at being honest. When you know a serious peer is going to read what you wrote, you don’t waffle. You don’t equivocate. You don’t hide behind jargon. You don’t lean on the mushy middle. You say what you think, and you say why.
An evil twin is the most efficient bullshit filter I’ve ever installed.
The personal dividend
Friendship wasn’t on the brief.
I thought we’d end up as cordial competitors who’d nod across a conference. Instead, he’s become a friend. Not the kind who’d agree with my Linkedin posts, because he’d never agree with my Linkedin posts. The kind who remembers a detail from a conversation six months ago and asks how it landed. The kind who forwards you an article he thinks you need to read, with three words attached that tell you exactly what he thinks of it. The kind whose company you actually enjoy, because they’re interesting, because they care, and because they think.
A friendship that starts with a suggestion of a book they might enjoy, and is cemented by knowing they actually read it.
I don’t have a lot of professional relationships that leave my thinking sharper than they found it. I have one that reliably does.
Finding your evil twin
You’re probably not looking for a twin the way Darko told me to. You’re looking for something more specific, and easier to miss.
Look for the person in your field or area of interest whose views sit meaningfully different from yours, but whose intellectual honesty you trust completely. Who’ll disagree with you on substance and still defend you on character. Who reads widely, changes their mind when the evidence earns it, and has never once treated an argument as a personal attack. Who wants, more than anything, to get closer to the truth of a thing. Even if the truth is uncomfortable for their side. Especially then.
That person is worth cultivating. Get coffee. Drink whiskey. Keep doing it. Read what they write. Send them what you write. Disagree generously. Steelman their position when you summarise it, even when you’re about to reject it. Especially when you’re about to reject it.
You’ll both become better at your jobs. You’ll both become better at holding your own beliefs with appropriate humility. And if you’re lucky, genuinely lucky, you might end up with a friend.
Darko was wrong, of course. Nobody has the exact evil twin he described. The world doesn’t work like that.
But he wasn’t wrong about the feeling. He said that if you ever met your evil twin, you’d know.
You do.