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Tag: reputation

  • Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated Like One

    Don’t be too humble. You will be treated the way you treat yourself. You will be thought of the way you think of yourself. Project confidence and a regal demeanor and others will respect you for it. If you act humbly, and only ask for just enough, and shuffle around quietly, you will be treated with little respect. This fits into other Laws Greene talks about such as “Play to People’s Fantasies.”

    The idea is: people will try to make sense of whatever you present to them. If you act very confidently, they will see this as a sign of deep inner confidence, either that or you are a mad man. People rarely see through the masks others wear, and so, if you think it’s a good idea to demote your personal status to accommodate the feelings of others, know that it can often backfire.

    Louis Phillipe’s life story serves as a cautionary tale. When it became his turn to become king, he assumed a very different attitude from his predecessors. He associated with the bankers and business people instead of the elites. He wore the same clothes, walked the same streets, and was interested in the same things as the bankers. He did this proudly. And perhaps, his aim was to make the people feel that they were equals – that the best politics of the day would be exemplified by a leader who could act as the man of the people, but none of this worked.

    Louis Phillipe’s attitude only projected weakness and this attracted resentment and anger. One time, he was late for a meeting, and was publicly berated by Rothschild. Resentment was being built up in the minds of his people, and they finally took to the streets. Feeling under pressure, Louis Philippe fired his Prime Minister and replaced him with a liberal, but this only highlighted how weak he was. He was eventually forced to resign along with his staff. They shamefully packed their bags, like a travelling circus, and left.

    The opposite of Louis Phillipe’s story is that of Christopher Columbus. Columbus did not have a royal background, but he acted like he did. His father was a humble businessman, but he told others that he came from a royal bloodline. He made bold and sometimes even outrageous claims, but in the company of royalty, he only made them feel comfortable. When he was about to embark on his voyage, he asked to be given grand titles, and inherit a certain percentage of the proceeds that would come out of the adventure, but while he wasn’t given all of his lofty demands, he wasn’t treated as a silly man either. He was seen as someone who knew his worth and carried himself well. He was respected.

    By asking for the moon, he had instantly raised his own status, for the king assumed that unless a man who set such a high price on himself were mad, which Columbus did not appear to be, he must somehow be worth it.

    A couple of years later Columbus moved to Spain, he maneuvered through the Spanish court repeating the request for the financing of his voyage. After many rejections Columbus would not back down. He then realized the only person that could meet his demands would be Queen Isabella. In 1487 he had managed a meeting with the Queen, he failed to convince her to finance his voyage, but he completely charmed her and became a frequent guest of the palace. After the wartime burden on her treasury lifted, Isabella decided she would adhere to his request, pay for three ships, equipment, and a modest salary for Columbus.

    Even though he had hired the best navigator he could find he was unable to find the passage to Asia. Yet even when Columbus proposed the queen finance a second more audacious voyage the following year, she agreed. She had come to see Columbus as destined for greatness…so what happened next? Well the rest is history, Christopher Columbus is now talked about in millions of schools around the world.

    It is up to you to set your own price. Ask for less and that is just what you will get. Ask for more, however, and you send a signal that you are worth a king’s ransom. Even those who turn you down respect you for your confidence, and that respect will eventually pay off in ways you cannot imagine.

  • Recreate Yourself

    Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions—your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

    3 Ways to Be The Consummate Chameleon

    1. You must learn to enlarge your actions through dramatic techniques such as surprise, suspense, the creation of sympathy, and symbolic identification.
    2. You must be constantly aware of your audience—of what will please them and what will bore them.
    3. You must arrange to place yourself at the centre, to command attention, and never to be upstaged at any cost.

    Because of his own obsessive interest in drama, Julius Caesar was perhaps the first public figure to understand the vital link between power and theatre. He sublimated this interest by making himself an actor and director on the world stage. Even while dying, he kept his sense of drama. Drawing the top of his gown over his face, he let go of the clothes lower part so that it draped his legs, allowing him to the covered and decent. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, his final words to his old friend Brutus, who was about to deliver a second blow, were in Greek, and as if rehearsed for the end of a play: “You too, my child?”

    Our culture despises being lied to and deceived while authenticity is heralded. Well, that’s what they say, and often what we say and what we do are two very different things. In order to excel in a particular field, you may have to morph your character to fit within the reality of your circumstances, as Dudevant did. Dudevant did not moan and complain about the lack of women’s rights within her society, she did not let the current state of her reality dissuade her from pursuing her ambitions. Instead, she conformed to the cliche, “if you can’t beat them, join them”. In order to excel in some area’s, you must mould your character and adapt. It’s not about creating a “fake persona” and trying to harm or be destructive to your environment. It’s about understanding the current state of culture and becoming a chameleon to your circumstances.

    Many may believe we have never lived in a time that is so “fake” and “disingenuous” with an ever-growing society of “fake entrepreneurs” and ‘20 page marketing click funnels’ trying to pursue us to believe the dream and buy the product. The internet has given everyone a platform to communicate and mould their own unique character. Some will try and manipulate and adopt a nefarious attitude with the intent to take, other’s will forge new identities in an effort to give themselves the opportunity to be virtues and give. It’s up to you to be able to tell the difference and conversely pick who you want to be.

    Your new identity will protect you from the world precisely because it is not ‘you’; it is a costume you put on and take off

    Re-create yourself with a powerful new image that stands out and draws attention, rather than letting others define you. Then change your appearance and emotions to suit the occasion, or stage riveting dramas as backdrops for your actions.

  • Court Attention At All Cost

    Part I: Surround Your Name With The Sensational And Scandalous

    The court of the Louis the XIV was filled with many talented creatives, beautiful women and people of nobility.

    But there was no one more talked about than the Duc de Lauzun. For comparison, this Duke represented the personality type many know as Tyrion Lanistor, of the HBO series Game Of Thrones. The Duke was dwarfish, he slept with the king’s mistress, openly insulted not only other courtiers, but the King himself — very similar to how Tyrion behaved.

    Louis, however, was so beguiled (enchanted) by the duke’s eccentricities that he could not bare his absences from the court. It was so simple. The strangeness of the Duke’s character attracted attention. Once people were enthralled by him, they wanted him around, at any cost.
    “Society craves larger-than-life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity. Never be afraid, then, of the qualities that set you apart and draw attention to you. Court controversy, even scandal. It is better to be attacked, even slandered, than ignored.”

    Thomas Edison would create dazzling experiments to display his discoveries within electricity and boast about future inventions that seemed amazingly breakthrough for the time.

    He would talk loudly about all these future inventions which drew the public’s attention as Edison become a frequent topic of conversation. He did everything he could to make sure he received more attention than his rival Nikola Tesla, who arguably may have been more brilliant and talented than Edison, although far less known.

    In 1915 it was rumored that Edison and Tesla would be joint recipients of the years Nobel prize in physics. However, the prize wasn’t given to either of them in the end. It was later discovered the committee had actually approached Edison on a joint Nobel prize, but he had turned them down refusing to share the prize with Tesla. By that time Edison’s fame was much more secure than Tesla’s, thus he thought it was smarter to refuse the honor than allow his rival the attention that would’ve come from sharing the prize.

    If you find yourself in a lowly position that offers little opportunity for you to draw attention, an effective trick is to attack the most visible, most famous, most powerful person you can find.

    When Pietro Aretino, a young Roman servant boy of the early sixteenth century, wanted to get attention as a writer of verses, he decided to publish a series of satirical poems ridiculing the pope and his affection for a pet elephant. The attack put Aretino in the public eye immediately. A slanderous attack on a person in a position of power would have a similar effect. Remember, however, to use such tactics sparingly after you have the public’s attention, then the act can wear thin.

    Part II: Create An Air Of Mystery

    In the past, the world was filled with the terrifying and unknowable—diseases, disasters, capricious despots, the mystery of death itself. What we could not understand we re-imagined as myths and spirits. Over the centuries, though, we have managed, through science and reason, to illuminate the darkness; what was mysterious and forbidding has grown familiar and comfortable. Yet this light has a price: in a world that is ever more banal, that has had its mystery and myth squeezed out of it, we secretly crave enigmas, people or things that cannot be instantly interpreted, seized, and consumed.

    That is the power of the mysterious: It invites layers of interpretation, excites our imagination, seduces us into believing that it conceals something marvellous. The world has become so familiar and its inhabitants so predictable that what wraps itself in mystery will almost always draw the limelight to it and make us watch it.

    Do not imagine that to create an air of mystery you have to be grand and awe-inspiring. Mystery that is woven into your day-to-day demeanor, and is subtle, has that much more power to fascinate and attract attention. Remember: Most people are upfront, can be read like an open book, take little care to control their words or image, and are hopelessly predictable. By simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways, you will emanate an aura of mystery. The people around you will then magnify that aura by constantly trying to interpret you.

    Both artists and con artists understand the vital link between being mysterious and attracting interest. Count Victor Lustig, the aristocrat of swindlers, played the game to perfection. He was always doing things that were different, or seemed to make no sense. He would show up at the best hotels in a limo driven by a Japanese chauffeur; no one had ever seen a Japanese chauffeur before, so this seemed exotic and strange. Lustig would dress in the most expensive clothing, but always with something—a medal, a flower, an armband—out of place, at least in conventional terms. This was seen not as tasteless but as odd and intriguing. In hotels he would be seen receiving telegrams at all hours, one after the other, brought to him by his Japanese chauffeur—telegrams he would tear up with utter nonchalance. (In fact they were fakes, completely blank.) He would sit alone in the dining room, reading a large and impressive-looking book, smiling at people yet remaining aloof. Within a few days, of course, the entire hotel would be abuzz with interest in this strange man.

    All this attention allowed Lustig to lure suckers in with ease. They would beg for his confidence and his company. Everyone wanted to be seen with this mysterious aristocrat. And in the presence of this distracting enigma, they wouldn’t even notice that they were being robbed blind.

    An air of mystery can make the mediocre appear intelligent and profound. It made Mata Hari, a woman of average appearance and intelligence, seem like a goddess, and her dancing divinely inspired. An air of mystery about an artist makes his or her artwork immediately more intriguing, a trick Marcel Duchamp played to great effect. It is all very easy to do—say little about your work, tease and titillate with alluring, even contradictory comments, then stand back and let others try to make sense of it all.

  • So Much Depends On Reputation Guard It With Your Life

    The people around us, even our closest friends, will always to some extent remain mysterious and unfathomable. Their characters have secret recesses that they never reveal. The unknowableness of other people could prove disturbing if we thought about it long enough since it would make it impossible for us really to judge other people. So we prefer to ignore this fact and to judge people on their appearances, on what is most visible to our eyes—clothes, gestures, words, actions. In the social realm, appearances are the barometer of almost all of our judgements, and you must never be misled into believing otherwise. One false slip, one awkward or sudden change in your appearance, can prove disastrous.

    This is the reason for the supreme importance of making and maintaining a reputation that is of your own creation.

    That reputation will protect you in the dangerous game of appearances, distracting the probing eyes of others from knowing what you are really like, and giving you a degree of control over how the world judges you—a powerful position to be in. Reputation has a power like magic: With one stroke of its wand, it can double your strength. It can also send people scurrying away from you. Whether the exact same deeds appear brilliant or dreadful can depend entirely on the reputation of the doer.

    In the ancient Chinese court of the Wei kingdom, there was a man named Mi Tzu-Hsia who had a reputation for supreme civility and graciousness. He became the ruler’s favourite. It was a law in Wei that “whoever rides secretly in the ruler’s coach shall have his feet cut off,” but when Mi Tzu-hsia’s mother fell ill, he used the royal coach to visit her, pretending that the ruler had given him permission. When the ruler found out, he said, “How dutiful is Mi Tzu-Hsia! For his mother’s sake, he even forgot that he was committing a crime making him liable to lose his feet!”

    Another time the two of them took a stroll in an orchard. Mi Tzu-Hsia began eating a peach that he could not finish, and he gave the ruler the other half to eat. The ruler remarked, “You love me so much that you would even forget your own saliva taste and let me eat the rest of the peach!”

    Later, however, envious fellow courtiers, spreading the word that Mi Tzu-Hsia was actually devious and arrogant, succeeded in damaging his reputation; the ruler came to see his actions in a new light. “This fellow once rode in my coach under the pretence of my order,” he told the courtiers angrily, “and another time he gave me a half-eaten peach.” For the same actions that had charmed the ruler when he was the favourite, Mi Tzu-Hsia now had to suffer the penalties. The fate of his feet depended solely on the strength of his reputation.

    In the beginning, you must work to establish a reputation for one outstanding quality, whether generosity or honesty or cunning. This quality sets you apart and gets other people to talk about you. You then make your reputation known to as many people as possible (subtly, though; take care to build slowly, and with a firm foundation), and watch as it spreads like wildfire.

    A solid reputation increases your presence and exaggerates your strengths without your having to spend much energy. It can also create an aura around you that will instil respect, even fear. In the fighting in the North African desert during World War II, the German general Erwin Rommel had a reputation for cunning and for deceptive manoeuvring that struck terror into everyone who faced him. Even when his forces were depleted, and when British tanks outnumbered his by five to one, entire cities would be evacuated at the news of his approach.

    As they say, your reputation inevitably precedes you, and if it inspires respect, a lot of your work is done for you before you arrive on the scene, or utter a single word.