Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Over at NRO, Jonah Goldberg’s got a piece up on “Clinton Nostalgia”.

Clinton, a political prodigy of the first order, loved the human side of politics. He listened to the hoi polloi more than he listened to the Harvard faculty. It made him a less consequential but more democratic president.

Meanwhile, Obama’s “People of Earth Stop Your Bickering” aloofness often makes him seem exasperated with the country he leads. He doesn’t seem to care what the people think. If voters disagree with him, that’s their mistake.

He’s lost — if he ever had it — his appetite for persuasion. Oh, he can explain things just fine. But there’s a difference between explaining your position and selling it. Clinton, the consummate salesman, understood the difference.

It seems a bit unfair to single out Obama on this one; lots of people seem to think that the way to demonstrate the rightness of a position is to slowly and patiently explain it, so that others will be compelled to abandon their previous beliefs and adopt new ones based on irrefutably airtight logic.

This is foolishness. Explanation has its place — indeed, it’s vitally important — but it is only a part of persuasion, and it’s a peculiar kind of arrogance to assume that the part can substitute for the whole.

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Scott Adams put an interesting post up on his blog. The whole thing is worth reading, but I especially liked this bit:

Prior to the Dale Carnegie course I believed that conversation was a process by which I could demonstrate my cleverness, complain about what was bugging me, and argue with people in order to teach them how dumb they were. To me, listening was the same thing as being bored. I figured it was the other person’s responsibility to find some entertainment in the conversation. That wasn’t my job.

I think it a common misconception that people are liked (or disliked) primarily due to their character, abilities, or personality. I believe, rather, that it is the impact of one person on another’s feelings about himself that will determine whether the second person finds the first attractive or not. This has implications.

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I was watching David Mamet’s “House of Games” the other day — more specifically, I was listening to the David Mamet/Ricky Jay commentary track. Jay’s patter is interesting; he’s presenting himself as an expert on confidence games, but 90% of what he says is straight out of David Maurer’s “The Big Con” (TBC). By this I mean that I believe that I could, based upon my knowledge of that single book, have stood in for him on the commentary track, and done as good a job of presenting myself as an expert as he does. That said, he does present one very interesting idea that I don’t remember reading in TBC: A con man should never take more than his victim can afford to lose.

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A few days ago Seth posted a piece on Sprezzatura, “an archaic Italian word for being able to do your craft without a lot of visible effort”. It’s not a bad piece. I’m not sure the archaic Italian was strictly necessary, but then perhaps people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Seth’s post reminded me of one of my own. The gist of both is that it’s attractive to (appear to) enjoy your work.

I’m pleased to announce that AAPL has approved v2.0 of my iKnowPeople application, and that it’s now available on the iTunes store. This version includes some minor UI tweaks, the ability to create contacts from your address book, a spiffy new icon, and Full-Text Search, which I may have mentioned once or twice.

I word about the new icon: I got it through 99designs, and I couldn’t be happier with their service. A fellow going by the handle “surmise” submitted the winning design.

Since I’ve released a new version, I have new promo codes. If you’d like to try this app for free, please send an e-mail to iknowpeople@fairoakslabs.com, and I’ll send you a code. (While supplies last.)

Mark Twain famously wrote:

Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and that man can sleep till noon.

Which, if you can get the former, is all well and good. But what if you’re unlucky, and have to deal with an unfavorable reputation? I would suggest that not only is it futile to argue about it, it’s not even productive to try to disprove it through action.

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Having written a bunch about Dale Carnegie’s views on persuasion, I’d like to share an anecdote of my own. I was getting my car washed the other day, and, for the first time ever, was “upsold” a hand wax. I provide more details below, not out of raging narcissism, but because the sales pitch was top-notch and I think illustrative of more general questions.

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I was reading a piece about H. P. Lovecraft the other day, which revealed him to be another one of these impoverished-in-life-popular-in-death types. It seems to me that this sort of fellow pops up a lot: In addition to Lovecraft, you’ve got (off the top of my head) Poe, van Gogh, and (more or less) Dick. All these guys had reputations for being a little difficult to deal with, and I wonder if their greater success after their deaths was entirely coincidental.

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Consider this line from the movie “Layer Cake”:

The art of good business is being a good middleman…putting people together. It’s all about honor and respect.

It’s an interesting idea. (Quick review of the movie: Stylish, but not particularly good. Did wonders for Daniel Craig’s career, has got a really fun soundtrack, and features a very cute Sienna Miller.)

The same ground is covered somewhat more seriously in this post. Either way, I think it’s an excellent point. In strictly utilitarian terms, the number of people you’ll meet who will be directly useful to you, or to whom you’ll be directly useful, is a small fraction of the total number of pairs of people you know who would like to meet one another.

To put it another way: The overall value of your social network increases as the square of the number of nodes. The immediate value of your social network to you increases linearly in the number of nodes. You can create a lot more value by focusing on the former, as opposed to the latter.