Vertex Views

Tag: Keep

  • Keep Your Hands Clean

    You’ll inevitably make mistakes or need to take care of messy problems. But it’s imperative to keep your hands clean. Find scapegoats to blame and use cat’s paws or fixers to handle problems while disguising your involvement.

    Your good name and reputation depend more on what you conceal than on what you reveal. Everyone makes mistakes, but those who are truly clever manage to hide them, and to make sure someone else is blamed. A convenient scapegoat should always be kept around for such moments.

    Mistakes themselves don’t hurt powerful people — it’s how they deal with them that counts. Making excuses or offering apologies are the worst possible responses. Excuses never satisfy anyone, and apologies dig a deeper hole for you. They raise questions about your competence (maybe you’ve made other mistakes too?), intentions, and motives.

    The more quickly you can shift attention to someone else the better. You need a scapegoat to keep your hands clean.

    The practice of using a scapegoat has a long history — Hebrew priests transferred the sins of the people to a goat (originating the term “scapegoat”), which would be abandoned in the wilderness. In some civilisations, a human scapegoat would be sacrificed to the gods.

    It has become a natural response to not look inward after a mistake or crime, we look outward to try and affix blame and guilt on a convenient object instead of taking responsibility for our actions.

    The bloody sacrifice of the scapegoat seems a barbaric relic of the past, but the practice lives on to this day, if indirectly and symbolically; since power depends on appearances, and those in power must seem never to make mistakes

    This point is especially relevant in the modern political sphere. Mistakes in this arena can equal a ‘symbolic type-death’ by your country or city.

    In the fable, the Monkey grabs the paw of his friend, the Cat, and uses it to fish chestnuts out of the fire, thus getting the nuts he craves, without hurting himself.

    If there is something unpleasant or unpopular that needs to be done, it is far too risky for you to do the work yourself. You need a cat’s-paw— someone who does the dirty, dangerous work for you. The cat’s-paw grabs what you need, hurts whom you need hurt, and keeps people from noticing that you are the one responsible. Let someone else be the executioner, or the bearer of bad news, while you bring only joy and glad tidings.

  • Know Who You Are Dealing With — Do Not Offend The Wrong Person

    There are many different kinds of people in the world, and you can never assume that everyone will react to your strategies in the same way. Deceive or outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge. They are wolves in lambs’ clothing. choose your victims and opponents carefully, — then never offend or deceive the wrong person.

    In 1920 there was a con artist by the name of Joe Furey. Furey had made hundreds of thousands of dollars running a con-artist ring in Denver, Colorado. Furey met yet another victim who fell for his con named J. Frank Norfleet who lost $45,000 to Fury.

    Furey and his men had worked such cons hundreds of times over, and the sucker was usually so embarrassed by his gullibility that he quietly learned his lessons and accepted the loss. But Norfleet was not like other suckers.

    The police couldn’t help him so he decided to take matters into his own hands. Norfleet told the detectives “I’ll get them if it takes the rest of my life”.

    He scoured the country searching for the group looking for others who had been fleeced in the same game. He managed to get one of the con artists locked up through this, he kept going.

    He tracked down another in Montana, roped him like a calf, and dragged him through the muddy streets to the town jail. He traveled all the way to England, Canada and Mexico in search of Joe Furrey and Furrey’s right hand man, W.B. Spencer.

    Finding Spencer in Montreal, Norfleet chased him through the streets.

    Spencer escaped but Norfleet stayed on his trail catching up with him in Salt Lake City. Preferring the mercy of the law to Norfleet’s wrath, Spencer turned himself in.

    Norfleet found Furey in Jacksonville, Florida and personally hauled him off to face justice in Texas. But he wouldn’t stop there: He continued on to Denver, determiend to break up the entire ring. Spending not only large sums of money but another year of his life in the pursuit, he managed to put all of the con ring’s leaders behind bars. Even some he didn’t catch had grown so terrified of him they they too turned themselves in. After five years of hunting, Norfleet had single-handedly destroyed the country’s largest confederation of con artists. The effort bankrupted him and ruined his marriage, but he died a satisfied man.”

    Understand: Deceive and lie enough and you will eventually come across people like this who will go to all ends of the earth to stop you. Proceed with caution.

    In judging and measuring your opponent, never rely on your instincts. You will make the greatest mistakes of all if you rely on such inexact indicators. Nothing can substitute for gathering concrete knowledge. Study and spy on your opponent for however long it takes; this will pay off in the long run.

    Never trust appearances. Anyone with a serpent’s heart can use a show of kindness to cloak it; a person who is blustery on the outside is often really a coward. Learn to see through appearances and their contradictions. Never trust the version that people give of themselves—it is utterly unreliable.

    If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous. Never reject them with an insult until you know them better; you may be dealing with a Genghis Khan.

    To wield power it’s essential to be able to read people and know who you’re dealing with. If you don’t understand your targets — choosing the wrong person or doing the wrong thing — you’ll waste time at best. At worst, you bring trouble on yourself, for instance, by insulting people when you think you’re flattering them, or by triggering their insecurity.

  • Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability

    Because people crave predictability and a sense of control, you can throw others off balance and even terrify them by cultivating an air of unpredictability. While your opponents are stressing themselves out by trying the explain and anticipate what you’re doing, you can achieve your objectives almost unnoticed.

    Unpredictable, sudden events like tornadoes and flash floods terrify people, leaving them in fear of the next one, you can have a similar effect on people by cultivating an air of unpredictability.

    We want other people to be predictable, and we ourselves follow patterns and routines, out of laziness, a preference for comfort, or a desire to keep the peace. Animals follow patterns as well, which allows us to hunt them successfully.

    But unpredictability is an important tool for wielding power — by suddenly doing something no one expected you create fear and confusion, which keeps others off balance, allowing you room to manoeuvre. It may also prompt them to make mistakes.

    You can use this tactic effectively even if you are the underdog. For instance, during the Civil War General Stonewall Jackson confused and stymied the much larger Union forces that were marching on Richmond, by repeatedly moving north and then back south again. In response, Union General George McClellan slowed his forces, while trying to figure out what was going on, which gave the South time to reinforce Richmond.

    Understand: A person of power instils a kind of fear by deliberately unsettling those around him to keep the initiative on his side. You sometimes need to strike without warning to make others tremble when they least expect it.

    This reminds me of a story Tony Robins told in his book ‘Awaken The Giant Within’. Every time Tony would go on his walk he would give a particular homeless man some money. He decided to make this a habit. One instance when he went to reach for his wallet he found he didn’t have any cash on him. Tony apologized, but the homeless man became aggravated and upset. Tony had conditioned the homeless man to receive money every time he passed him. The one time the homeless man didn’t receive it, unstable emotion and a minor conflict resulted.

    If Tony had been more unpredictable with his actions and intermittently given money to the homeless man, than the above situation may have never occurred because he wouldn’t have known when to expect the stimuli. If the money was given sporadically then the habit is never created as your constantly left on edge not knowing when the next reward will come.

    Scrambling your patterns on a day-to-day basis will cause a stir around you and stimulate interest. People will talk about you, ascribe motives and explanations that have nothing to do with the truth, but that keeps you constantly in their minds. In the end, the more capricious you appear, the more respect you will garner. Only the terminally subordinate act in a predictable manner