The path of fame

Fame is a good Dominant Value to look at first, because as we saw in chapter 3 it’s become a major driving ambition of a whole new generation. There have never been more available avenues for becoming famous than there are today, and it’s also the most visible model we have of rich people.

In fact, it’s one of the few ‘positive’ models we have of the rich. Celebrities are the ‘good rich’, while business people are often portrayed as the ‘evil rich’. Everyone loves celebrities and hardly anyone loves their boss.

But before the days of mass media it used to be that if you were famous, it was for something. You were famous because you were a champion sports star, a famous author or a major industrialist. The only group of people famous for nothing was royalty!

Most people didn’t know very many people outside of their small towns. If you managed to achieve fame you had to do something extraordinary to achieve it. You had to actually develop some skills.

And increasing your skills is one way to increase your productivity — that is, how much value you can create, and therefore how much wealth.

Back then, the desire for fame above all else may have paid off. With cinema came the rise of movie stars, but compared to today they were relatively few in number. It wasn’t until recently that people even knew what their politicians looked like. With careful management of the press, Franklin D Roosevelt, the president of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, managed to keep from the public an illness that confined him to a wheelchair. That’s unimaginable today with politicians tweeting pictures of themselves hourly.

Reality TV, blogs, YouTube and Twitter now mean that if you desire fame you can have it relatively easily. You can have more fans than celebrities of old — without having to develop any discernible skill at all — all for the cost of a webcam and an internet connection! Now you can achieve the highest level of fame (for a brief period of time at least) without ever achieving any wealth along the way.

… fame today is a desire that is relatively easy to fulfil cheaply.

So fame as a Dominant Value may not drive you to the great heights it once did. Although we are constantly presented with examples of the ‘rich and famous’, fame today is a desire that is relatively easy to fulfil cheaply, so if you are driven by a desire for fame you probably won’t end up rich at all. And if you’ve been on the internet or watched reality TV, you may have noticed that sometimes people who have been consumed by a need for attention end up worse off as a result.

You may not be a millennial or, like Melissa, you may be part of the 50 per cent of millennials who don’t have fame as a major value. There are some things you just know you don’t value.

On the other hand, it’s easy to think you value something only to keep finding that for some reason you never seem to end up getting the thing you think you value. That’s because ‘the things we value’ are actually subconscious desires, and sometimes it can be hard to see them clearly ourselves.

A friend of mine, Andrew, is a great example of this. I met him through the gym after I’d been retired for a few years. We both had a health background so we hit it off immediately. Like me, he seemed to value being financially free, but as the years went by he kept working his job – although he always had a new idea or venture that he’d be pursuing on the side. I used to encourage him to ‘quit and commit’.

He had a bunch of business ideas that he’d throw himself into; he’d set up the meetings, open trust funds and set up company structures with his solicitor, and have lunches with all the ‘important’ people. He’d get very busy, but for some reason the businesses would never take off and free him from his job.

In hindsight I’ve realised there are certain traps, or pitfalls, that come from not being free. The longer you’ve progressed along the ‘work a job for life’, ‘climb the comfort ladder’ path, the harder it is to shake off the effects those traps can have on your thinking. Earlier, I alluded to the fact that the way you earn money could influence what you value. I’ll talk about that more in part II.

The effects of a regular job aside, my buddy worked for a major drug company as a rep, and they’ve got all sorts of tricks up their sleeves — such as company cars and laptops — to keep their reps addicted to the job. Who would have thought a drug company would be good at keeping people addicted?

To talk to him you wouldn’t think anyone could want to be free more. He was right into working on his psychology: he even got a big tattoo on his arm of an eagle holding a banner with the word ‘Freedom’ on it. To be honest, I think it was partly so he could have an excuse to show girls his ‘guns’. But still … that’s got to count as commitment to being free, right?

One day we were catching up and I asked him, ‘Would you want to be rich if you could only achieve that by starting a “vanilla” business? Something totally boring. That no-one else would even know about. You might do all your work from home or online, and your neighbours might assume you’re a bum. Like, say, you’re the paper king of Brisbane? You supply paper to all the paper stores. That’s it. Would you be prepared to give up your corporate job and your company car, the inevitable promotions into management and the status of wearing a suit to work to do that sort of “no collar” business if it got you free?’

It wasn’t an easy question for Andrew to answer.

Although fame may not function that well at making you rich if it’s your Dominant Value, it can be something you achieve if you have it as a lesser value. The problem with fame as a Dominant Value is that people who primarily desire fame seem to have such a limited view of what it means to be famous. They look around them at those who already are famous and get their inspiration from there.

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t.

Tyler Durden in Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

But those who go on to achieve great fame often do it by standing out in completely new ways, by treading paths that no-one has done before. Benjamin Franklin comes to mind as a good example. He’s a guy who nearly everyone knows of even today, someone who achieved great and lasting fame. But it would be hard to argue that fame was his Dominant Value.

The path of status

Status is becoming more and more ethereal.

Once, you could display your status by having radically different things than most people could afford. The rich had cars, the poor didn’t. As standards of living increased, it wasn’t enough to have different types of things, you had to have different brands of things to differentiate yourself. Now, the whole concept of luxury goods is being challenged as more and more people can afford branded goods.

Once, if you wanted to have status, and if you valued it strongly enough, you may have worked harder than others so you could afford to buy more stuff. And while wasting your money on status objects may not be the fastest way to accumulate wealth, at least you had to be able to afford them first. And at least you still had the big home and the big car as a store of value, after displaying your status.

As status competition became more democratised, we shifted from buying big status objects to displaying high-status lifestyles too: eating at expensive restaurants, drinking boutique coffee and so on, leaving us with little to show for it. But now that we have easy personal credit, the cost of displaying status is not just that you waste all your money — it can mean that you end up in debt as well.

But that’s not the end of the evolution of status competition. As you go from the third world to the first, the dividing line shifts from the more tangible to the less. Being higher status is not about whether you went to school or not in the first world, but which one. The struggle to display status shifted from different things, to different types of things, to different brands of things and finally away from the tangible altogether to displaying different behaviours and habits (food is no longer a luxury as everyone can afford to be obese. In primitive tribes you signalled wealth by being fat; now you signal wealth by showing that you can afford the costly habit — in terms of effort and time — of preparing good food and exercising).

But it’s gone even further than displaying different habits — and has become even more intangible — to displaying different beliefs.

To understand what I mean you need to know that the path of status is all about signalling. A great example of signalling can be seen in the animal kingdom. In certain four-legged prey animals — several deer in North America, and more famously perhaps Thomson’s gazelles and springboks in Africa — a curious behaviour called stotting has been observed. When a predator approaches a herd of prey, some of the prey animals break into a series of highly energetic leaps in the air. They just leap around on the spot, which seems crazy at first. Instead of running away or conserving their energy by disappearing into the crowd, these animals draw attention to themselves and waste precious energy doing this funny little dance. What’s going on?

… the path of status is all about signalling.

Evolutionary biologists have concluded that what the gazelles are doing is sending a message or signalling to the lions that are stalking them. Lions stalking herds want to pick out the oldest, the slowest or weakest prey to attack to guarantee the chances of a kill. What the prey are doing in effect is shouting out, ‘Hey look at me, I’m so fit and full of energy that I can waste energy jumping around like a maniac and you still couldn’t possibly catch me — so don’t even try.’

But here’s the catch — the signal they send has to be believed, which is why the gazelle developed a signal that involves so much energy. If stotting was easy and every gazelle started doing it, the lion would quickly catch on that some of them were faking; they might be acting full of energy, but some of them were actually old or slow. And the effort to jump around would only tire out these old gazelle, leaving them no energy to run when the lion attacked. Stotting effectively signals health because it comes with a real cost of energy, and only the fittest can afford to do it.

And so it often has been in the human world. You display wealth by signalling to others that you have more to spend. You can afford to ‘waste’ money on an expensive car, rather than a perfectly serviceable regular one, because even with all the money you wasted you can still put food on the table. Successful signalling involves cost. A signal is more believed the more it is seen to cost us. But in today’s world with easily available credit, that signal is not as clear: has that person got money to burn, or have they just maxed out their credit card?

Status as a Dominant Value may not motivate you to accumulate much wealth anymore, and may in fact cause you to go into debt.

So if in our jostling for status we are starting to move away from having different stuff to having different beliefs, then what is the cost? In the past, status was found in owning things that the average person couldn’t. In our cognitively stratifying society the greatest status concern for many people is to be seen to be more intelligent than others. (In chapter 5 I’ll share one way that valuing ‘seeming smart’ directly costs you as an investor.)

One way to signal that you are smarter is with a better education, which nowadays comes with much greater cost than in the past, for less tangible gain. The risk–reward ratio for higher education is becoming less favourable. In the past, seeking out a degree often meant earning more money as a side effect of your pursuit of higher status. Today, with ballooning debt and a tight job market, that’s often not the case.

On top of that, as more and more people now go to university, signalling you are smarter than others by having a degree is giving less cache and less status.

Another way to instead signal that you are ‘more intelligent’ and high status is to believe things that are counter intuitive. The average person believes what their lying eyes tell them, while the ‘enlightened’ person ‘understands’ the more complex reason why that which seems to be true, really isn’t.

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

So the race to gain status has moved on to signalling that you are more moral than others, that you have superior beliefs. As the status war heats up we seem to be rushing to adopt more and more extreme moral plumage to stay ahead of the pack.

‘Moral exhibitionism’ is the vice that cloaks itself as virtue. Signalling that you were smarter in the past may have at least involved getting a degree that may have had some value — but signalling that you are more moral than others doesn’t require you to do or achieve anything anymore. So valuing status today is unlikely to lead you to accumulate anything either — other than Facebook likes.