The Rawness

Pickup artists have one of the best definition for charisma that I think I’ve ever heard: Charisma is the ability to suck other people into your reality. People enter into every interaction with a frame: for example a dominant frame, a submissive frame, a negative frame, a positive frame, whatever. Every interaction between two people is a collision of frames. What happens when the two frames collide determines the dynamic between the two people.

For example, when an aggressively hostile frame meets a submissive and meek frame, the dynamic is dominance or outright bullying. Another way to dominate without resorting to outright bullying is to have a confident, yet larger than life frame that attracts people and sucks them into your reality. This dynamic is charisma.

If you actively and overtly try too hard to actively drag people into your reality, you’ll drive them away because you’re being too pushy or come off desperate or insecure. People who want to be charismatic but keep failing often can’t tell the difference between sucking people into their reality by being appealing and interesting and imposing their reality on people by being loud, bragadocious and eager to impress. The frame needed for charisma is like the movie Field of Dreams: if you build it right, people will come on their own, almost unconsciously and against their will. It’s the difference between “Hey, I’m acting crazy and over-the-top because I think it will impress you and I want you to like me” and “Hey, I’m acting crazy and over-the-top because that’s unapologetically who I am and what I enjoy. I’m just bringing you along for the ride, if you want to come. If not, no skin off my back.”

Some people use charm and charisma interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing. Charm is when you try to get people to like you. When you have charisma, though, people try to get you to like them. Charm is an external set of behaviors calculated to impress people. Charisma is an internalized way of being that naturally makes people want to impress you.

Using rap as an example, this is one reason why I think in the hip-hop world Nas was always inferior overall as a public persona to Jay-Z, regardless of what you may think of their individual talents.

Two great pieces on the level of unconscious genius that goes into fast-paced athletics.

First is one from the blog The Situationist. It uses baseball players as a specific example.

The other is an older, but related piece from the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Physical Genius.”

Not much commentary from me on this. Both links are pretty self-explanatory.

I predict a lot of people will be talking about Fox’s new show Moment of Truth. Yes, it looks like typical Fox tackiness. Yes, it looks controversial, exploitative and in poor taste. But damn if I’m not going to watch every last minute!

As a guy who’s into human nature and the raw, unfiltered truth, this show will be like crack to me if done right. I love the tagline too: “Controversy comes to Fox!” When does controversy ever fucking leave Fox?

Here are some previews:

My wife feels like the contestants are being expoited and embarassed. But my take on it, if these people know the premise and are willing to sell their dignity for some cash and fame, then they deserve to be made uncomfortable for our entertainment.Show premieres on January 23. Thoughts?

UPDATED: Desiree in the comments section left this gem:

I read somewhere that they had a show very similar to this in another country. I want to say somewhere in South America, but it could?ve been Europe?whatever that is unimportant. The impotant part was that they had to cancel the show when a woman confessed she paid someone to try and kill her husband. Now THAT is gangsta.

It sounded so crazy that I thought it had to be an urban legend. I did a little google checking and lo and behold that craziness really did happen! Check it out:

The hit Colombia TV game show, in which contestants submitting to a lie-detector test must truthfully answer 21 increasingly invasive questions to win US$50,000 (?35,000), has been canceled by Caracol Television after a contestant admitted on air to hiring a hit man to kill her husband. Tuesday was the show’s final day.

However a U.S version called “Moment of the Truth” is expected to be launched on the Fox network in the coming months along with spin-offs in England, Australia, Germany, Italy and Spain, according to Howard Schultz, the Los Angeles-based creator of the show.

If anyone can track down the Youtube for this, please pass it along.

Somewhat sad news. Chess champion Bobby Fischer is dead. The story of his life is one of great triumph followed by great tragedy:

Fisher went on to become a bizarre, shadowy figure (hence the irony of the title of the 1993 movie about a child chess prodigy, Searching for Bobby Fischer). Over the years, his eccentricity seemed to blossom into full-blown madness as he railed against the United States, went on anti-Semitic tirades (although his mother was Jewish) and was essentially in exile from the U.S. after breaking sanctions by playing a match in Yugoslavia.

Too often, in the world of competitions, a person reaches the pinnacle of his or her life at a very young age. And nothing after that can ever match what they did at age 30 or 25 or even 18. That’s tough. But if they handle the reality with grace and intelligence, what they did in their youth can be a springboard. In the case of Fischer, who was on top of the world at age 29, it didn’t have to work out the way it did. Chess isn’t that kind of game. You can be superb for years. In fact, Fischer was. But there were other things going on — invisible demons is the best way to put it, I guess — that contributed to making him a victim of his own early phenomenal success.

Long, long before the end, Bobby Fischer had lost himself, never to be found again.

I find the contrast between Fischer and a later American chess champion Josh Waitzkin to be fascinating. Josh Waitzkin was the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer and also had his problems with early chess celebrity. But unlike Fischer, Waitzkin is very well-adjusted and a lot less eccentric. He has given up chess, but is now a world champion martial artist and author.

This story reminded me of this piece, where I talked about how loving something motivates you to master it, but mastering it too well, or solving the mystery, causes you to stop loving it. I called it the mystery/mastery paradox. You have to mentally reframe the challenge in order to stay engaged. Like once you figure out a game inside out, you change your focus to beating other masters of the game to stay engaged. Once you beat the other masters of the game, you may focus on spreading your fame or writing books about the game. It’s still about the original game, but only tangentially. I think this is what led Michael Jordan to try baseball for a while.

I don’t know much about Bobby Fischer’s life, but maybe he didn’t cultivate anything besides chess. From what I know, it was an all-consuming passion for him from a very young age. Maybe when he fell into his own mystery/mastery paradox and it stopped being fun for him, he had no other outlet to switch to, because being so consumed with chess from so young never allowed him to figure out his identity outside of chess.

At some point, however, it seems Josh Waitzkin did figure out his identity outside of chess. He explains it in this NY1 profile he did:

About ten years ago, to escape the phenomenon of, “Hey, you’re the ?Searching for Bobby Fischer? guy!” he spent a year living in Slovenia and traveling around Europe.

And he came to a realization.

“Transitional moments were affecting me in chess and in life. And when I took them on in one, it helped me with the other,? said Waitzkin. ?And so that became my manner of studying of chess, which was to look at my psychological being was manifesting itself over the board. So that kind of led to this way of thinking about chess, life, tai chi, the martial arts, in a manner which was basically looking for thematic interconnections, as opposed to looking at one art at a time.?…

“I didn’t grow up learning chess or competing in a protected environment,? says Waitzkin. ?I grew up kind of in a raw environment and that’s been kind of central to my life in all these things, because life as a competitor is brutal.”….

“It caught up to me, and I started to become externalized through the chess, which was very sad, very sad,? says Waitzkin. “When you?re defined by something from the age of six on, the idea of letting that go and redefining yourself completely, it?s naked and raw and terrifying.?

But the transition was eased when the Columbia University graduate discovered tai chi, and his new passion resulted in an international championship in 2004.

Now his goal is to use these two parts of his life to create a multi-disciplinary learning center for kids.

So he went from competitive chess to martial arts champion. And note how, as he masters martial arts, he already sets up his next challenge, his plan for a multi-disciplinary learning center for kids. I think this technique he has of setting up his next challenge ahead of time shows how he’s able to avoid the mystery/mastery paradox. He realizes when he’s falling out of love with something and as he masters it, he sets up the next challenge for himself.

I also think that’s why celebrities like Michael Jackson, and Bobby Fischer go insane once they achieve their goals. They only focus on mastering one thing, and once they achieve it and naturally start to fall out of love with it and it just becomes a grinding job or crushing responsibility, they have nothing else to channel their energy into. They hate what their doing, but they also love the security blanket of knowing they have an area they have mastered and are afraid to leave it behind despite how unfulfilling it has now become.

Not being prepared to channel your energies into something else is also what I think contributes to the alcoholism of the guy in this story who turned his hobby into a job, along with other people who turned to substance abuse after they turned their passion into a career and hit the top. The problem wasn’t turning their passion or hobby into a career, it was not being prepared for what the void that would come up once they mastered that hobby (doing something for a living is the ultimate form of mastery I think). They became victims of the mystery/mastery paradox.

I have been recording American Idol on my DVR, but I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. I’m really not enthused about the show anymore after an incredibly lackluster last season. I prefer the criminally underrated sister show So You Think You Can Dance, but since Idol is the show people talk about at the water cooler, I feel obligated to keep up with it.

I’m not always good at picking who’ll win, but I can usually tell at least one type of singer who’ll always lose, and that would be the dominating strong starters. Whenever people start incredibly strong early on in the auditions, whether it’s Paris Bennett or Melinda Doolittle or whoever, they’re usually doomed to lose. The people who usually win Idol or any reality competition show for that matter are usually the ones who started off under the radar and consistently gave the impression of improvement. And the people who dominated or were frontrunners from the start usually don’t win.

I think it has something to do with how our senses work. See, our senses aren’t geared toward noticing objects, smells and temperature. They’re geared toward noticing changes and contrast in objects, smells and temperature. It’s a subtle but important difference. The more the external stimuli change, the more our senses pick them up. For example, have you ever noticed that if you are sitting in a room, you don’t notice a certain smell? Yet if you leave the room and come back in, suddenly the smell is suddenly obvious? Same with temperature. If you just walk into a room, you’re more sensitive to the temperature because it’s a big change from the temperature outside, but once you’re in the same room long enough you notice the temperature less. With sound, we’re picking up vibrations, or movements in the air. Even when we’re watching still objects, what’s actually happening is that your eye is vibrating across the image. That’s right, our eyes are constantly vibrating on a minute level that we can’t notice, and this vibrating movement is what helps us see still objects. To illustrate this, there’s actually a laser projector that can project images onto an eyeball while tracking and matching the eyeball’s vibration. And what happens is that your eye only see the images for a split second and then they disappear. Color doesn’t exist by itself even. What we see as color is created by contrasting relationships – what the color is next to, what surrounds it. Fixed colors don’t exist. In a different context they will be changed completely.

As a survival mechanism, it makes sense for us to be more aware of things that are changing than things that are remaining the same. Paying extra attention to the changes in your environment lets you know when danger is afoot. At one point in human history there may have been human beings who gave static conditions the same importance as changing conditions, and if so, they’d have ended up weeded out of the gene pool. A new predator could have entered their field of vision and started moving toward them, and they wouldn’t pay extra attention to them. The smell of toxic chemicals could have entered a room and they wouldn’t have given it the exact same importance as the smell already in the room. Natural selection would have weeded them out. The fact that our senses register changes in conditions more than they register static conditions was an important survival tool that allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce. We wouldn’t be here today if our ancestors’ senses didn’t work this way.

To our bodies, if a condition exists in our environment, remains there over time and still hasn’t injured or killed us, it starts getting categorized as safe. By categorizing it as safe and ignoring it to a degree, this frees up our senses to focus on new elements that enter our environment or changes that happen around us, the things we have not categorized as safe yet.

Here’s another way to illustrate it if you don’t believe me. Say I show you a pair of shoes, describe the brand, materials and craftsmanship and tell you the cost is $100. Then I tell you they were originally $700 last week. That $100 shoe would register as a great value. Now say I gave you the same description of the shoes, down to the brand, materials and craftsmanship, and told you the cost was $100, but I told you instead that the original price was $50. Now you’d feel like you were getting ripped off. Same shoe, same quality, same price, but you can’t judge it in a vacuum, you can only judge it in contrast to something else. How many times have you bought something at a price you normally wouldn’t just because it was a huge drop in price? Advertisers and retail people call this the contrast principle.

Or imagine two sibling students. One gets straight As. The other gets straight Fs. One day the A student comes home with her usual A, while the F student comes how with a surprising C for once. The A student has the higher grade, an A, but the F student’s latest grade will register more strongly and be more noticeable because it’s a greater change. This is unfair to the A student, because given that she’s already at the top, how much more can she improve? Maybe get an A+? That’s about it. It’s all about change, change, change, and when you start off with perfection, the only change you have available to you is downward change. So those are your two choices when you’re perfect: stay perfect and get taken for granted, or change in the downward direction and have it register negatively with people.

Despite thousands of years of technological and societal advancement, our senses still work the same way as they ever did. And that goes a long way to explaining why top performers don’t win American Idol. When we first see them, they overload our senses. We go right from seeing a mediocre applicant and low-key moments to incredibly powerful vocal. Our senses are incredibly stimulated. Week after week of that brilliance, our senses categorize it as “safe” and become less responsive to it. Since the room for improvement is so small, the only option they have to register as strongly with our senses is a drastic drop in quality, except that will register in a negative way, which further defeats the purpose of winning.

And this is why I actually cringe when an American Idol contestant knocks it out of the park too strongly during the audition phase. The judges will gush at first, rave, make a huge deal, and then their senses adjust to it and it all becomes a little less impressive each time. They start criticizing them for not improving as much as the other people (which is unfair because it’s harder to improve on excellence than it is to improve on mediocre or average). The audience starts takes their greatness for granted and votes for the improving underdogs instead. In every season of American Idol that I’ve seen (I haven’t seen many), it’s never the early leader that wins the whole shebang. It’s the biggest improver. Because as I described, we’re programmed to primarily notice change, and it’s harder for excellence to change in a positive direction. Even Kelly Clarkson, the most successful Idol to date, did not dominate right away. She was considered underwhelming by the judges at first and improved a lot every week.

So when I finally get around to watching Idol on my DVR, and I see the knockout supertalent that gets pegged early on to win the whole thing, I know they’ll end up losing eventually. As unfair as it seems, overachieving and early excellence don’t always pay off.