CONCLUSION
WHAT NOW?

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning.

—LOUIS L’AMOUR

Having read through these chapters, you have studied the condensed results of hundreds of studies, essays, and books. But what remains when the dust has finally settled?

“Well, well,” you might tell yourself, “very interesting”—and then continue about your day, taking the same approaches you’ve always taken and doing the same things you’ve always done. Chances are you will continue working on becoming even more competent in your area of expertise. Good, but not enough. Don’t forget that competence alone isn’t enough—you must also focus on the perception of your competence. Think about this book as a personal reference library and guide to help you show your competence, and work on internalizing the advice given throughout.

You are likely wondering how in the world you will be able to remember all of this advice. Another question to consider: How in the world are you able to drive a car in the age before self-driving cars? Imagine that you had no idea what a car is,¹ and so I explained that it is something made out of a couple of tons of steel or aluminum that, after a few days of practice, you’d be able to drive around alone. Then I told you that with only the slightest effort, you will be able to steer this colossus through narrow streets that have no clear boundaries and are defined by simple white lines that you can only see, more or less, in the daytime.

And then I continued to describe how, while driving, you must always keep an eye on these white lines, even though you must also look straight ahead at the same time. And, of course, you need to look not only in front and to the side of you but also behind you using your mirrors—rear view, left, and right (and don’t forget that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear!). And you have to shift gears using both feet and your right hand. But, after shifting, please get both hands back on the steering wheel immediately. Now and then, you must signal for turns. Turn on the windshield wipers. Choose the best route to your destination. And watch out! If you drift over the left white line even if just for a half second, your trip could end fatally, or—if you are luckier—in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. And please do not forget to look over your shoulder.

Of course, even if you do everything flawlessly, you are not alone on the road. Every day, there are thousands of others who drive past you, among whom are, potentially, drunk drivers, confused people going the wrong direction down a one-way street, and those with a death wish. If a driver coming toward you falls asleep for just a second, be prepared to live out the remainder of your days as a patient in an assisted-living facility.

How would you react to this description? You would refuse to even set your foot in such an infernal machine, and you would find it unthinkable that an ordinary human being could drive such a monster at all—let alone that billions of people do it every day.

Given the foregoing, compared to the daily drive to work, the effort to translate the methods described in this book into behavior in your daily life is not too great. And it will take you a long way, much further than any car.

Think of it in another way: How are the big four accounting firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young, different from one another? Or big law firms such as Latham & Watkins and Freshfields? Or consulting firms like Bain and the Boston Consulting Group? Are there any differences between them? If you ask around among their employees, you will probably hear a lot about gigantic differences in company culture and social interaction levels—things that you would hardly notice as an outsider.

The Swedish business thinkers Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström have described this situation aptly: “The ‘surplus society’ has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, working in similar jobs, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality.”²

The good news is that even when the services and products your competitors and you are offering resemble one another, it is still possible to differentiate yourself. Just look at products that are virtually identical in chemical composition regardless of the producer. For example, even with sugar or flour there are certain brands that customers trust the most and are willing to pay more for. That is what this book is all about: explaining this kind of differentiation, this inexplicable advantage over others who can deliver a similar quality, and all the other techniques that will enhance your level of perceived competence.

Do you, however, still secretly think that it is somehow objectionable to actively seek to establish a better impression of your own competence? Do you feel that it is somehow disgraceful to want to shine more brightly? Then have a look around you:³ You go to the hair stylist so that your hair will look better than it actually does. You spray yourself with deodorant and perfume to smell better than you actually do. As a woman, you probably wear heels to appear taller than you actually are. You wear lipstick and nail polish to make your lips and nails a different color from what they actually are. Do you find any of these actions objectionable?

We all have only one life at our disposal, and there is nothing wrong if we want to achieve our personal best while we’re here. This book is not supposed to be a summons to deceive others with trickery. Your credibility, composed of a mixture of competence and trust, is in the long run even more important than competence alone.⁴ Trust, in turn, is based on factors such as fairness, reliability, loyalty, and integrity.⁵ Within these, boundaries, there is nothing wrong with putting yourself in the right light. To take an example from the world of the human, or all-too-human, efforts to present an attractive appearance: the idea is not to fill up the bra with socks to create the illusion of a huge bust but to find a bra with a perfect fit—a little push up is fine!

This view, that exceptionally positive effects can be achieved for everyone involved by the conscious use of these impression management techniques, is supported by research.⁶ For one thing, your audience receives information about you that they otherwise could have missed, and for another, employers, especially, will consider it very valuable that their employees present the best possible appearance and thereby represent the company in the best possible way.⁷ Therefore, do not hesitate to apply the techniques outlined here in this book.

But of course, as has been stated here again and again, you do need a certain amount of tact or situational awareness to judge the correct dosage for some of these techniques. If others notice an attempt at conscious manipulation, they will react defensively.⁸

And all of this advice applies to men and women alike. In the individual chapters, gender-specific mechanisms are pointed out repeatedly, but in general, the following can be said: while men, even a few decades ago, were generally seen as more competent, today’s research shows no differences between the sexes—at least in the Western world.⁹

With many of these techniques, I am talking about small details, but it is precisely these that make the difference, especially today, when the competition is harder than ever before because you compete with the entire world. As mentioned in chapter 1, your customers will compare you not only to your competition a few blocks away, like they did in the past, but they will use the best in the world as their benchmark. The American economist Sherwin Rosen speaks of the “economy of superstars”:¹⁰ only a tiny lead, a sprint that is one-hundredth of a second faster; a certain feel in the pianist’s “attack” that sounds just a tad more elegant; or a single technique that increases our perceived competence could make the difference in determining whether you will be celebrated as a master or ignored as a loser. Winner takes all! Would you prefer to buy a track by a no-name violinist for two dollars or pay 50 cents more for one by the violin talent of the century, Joshua Bell?

One more example with Joshua Bell, the great violin virtuoso, who played his Stradivarius with barely any audience in the metro station in Washington, DC. Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post journalist who conceived the experiment, described the amazing result by using the concept of “art without framing”: even a major painting, which we would marvel at in a museum, would hardly be noticed if it were displayed at a restaurant, outside its normal museum context, and could be bought for a couple of dollars.

The British artist Banksy, whose works are otherwise sold for millions of dollars, delivered a powerful illustration of this hypothesis when he or she (Banksy’s identity is still a mystery) let his or her pictures be sold anonymously for several hours in New York’s Central Park.¹¹ Banksy had the same experience as Joshua Bell: after one hour, the first customer purchased two pictures for the price of one—for a total of 60 dollars. The pieces could have gone for millions, but they didn’t because they lacked the right “framing.”

What else did Joshua Bell have to say about his experiment? “When you play for ticket-holders, you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted.” That is the purpose of the methods described here: justified recognition. Without anyone having to buy a ticket.