The Rawness

Continuing from this post.

The 3 steps to building compliance, as mentioned before, are:

1. Cred
2. Earn-Reward Method
3. Intermittent Rewards

To get compliance, you first need to establish cred, which is short for credibility, or more specifically, credible authority.  There are many ways to do this, but the easiest way is to just have an authoritative title and position. Owner. President. CEO. Of course that’s not always enough. If you have an authoritative position and title but are known as a pushover, for example, you still lack credible authority because no one believes you will follow through on your threats. It’s the equivalent of pulling out a gun on the streets when everyone knows you’re too much of a pussy to actually use it. People end up testing and challenging you even worse than if you didn’t have the gun at all.

You see this all the time in toxic organizations that have weak management. The subordinates will test and challenge the weak management constantly and you’ll end up with the inmates running the asylum. On the flip side, if you lack any official status or authoritative title yet exude a ton of confidence and charisma, you can still convey credible authority just by the way you carry yourself. Even a violent criminal can exude credible authority just by showing a reckless disregard for rules and societal norms and displaying a willingness to fight or kill you. (This type of credibility is called street cred).  Credible authority boils down to displaying confidence, having the ability to punish and demonstrating a willingness to follow through on said punishment. Punishment can range from anything from simple social snubbing to employment termination to outright violence.

Once you have established some cred, then you have to move on to step 2, which is the Earn-Reward method. I got the term from Tariq Nasheed’s The Mack Within book. What it basically boils down to is that you make someone earn ever reward before you give it to them. The opposite would be Reward-Earn, where you reward someone first in hopes that they’ll work to earn the reward afterwards.

It seems like a ridiculously common sense principle, and we all practice it to a degree, but thanks to compartmentalized thinking we often forget to transfer this principle into every area of our lives and end up getting frustrated. For example, with a child most of us know not to reward the child first and hope for good behavior later because what you end up with is a spoiled, uncooperative child with a sense of entitlement who views such rewards as a birthright. They don’t even feel they need to earn the reward anymore. Same with training dogs, if you reward the dog with a ton of treats first and then try to get it to do tricks and behave afterwards, it’s not going to work. With both children and dogs, good parents and trainers practice Earn-Reward.

Yet many of the same people who grasp this principle when applied to kids and animals won’t transfer this principle elsewhere. For example a guy will buy a girl a drink when they first meet and wonder why he’s not getting the instant cooperation he expected. Or a woman will give a guy sex way too soon and wonder why she’s not getting wined and dined and romanced afterward in the way she expected. Some hippie teacher will give ever kid in class a gold star and give them all an A to boost their self-esteem, then wonder why they aren’t motivated to excel.

A good illustration of Earn-Reward is federal entitlements. Regardless of how you feel about entitlements in general, most people, both liberal and conservative, can at least agree that older entitlements from the New Deal era like the G.I. Bill, Social Security and Unemployment Insurance have been more successful than Lydon Johnson’s Great Society welfare entitlements that came about in the ’60s. What was the difference between the two sets of entitlements? The first set were in accordance with the Earn-Reward method. G.I. Bill: you serve in the army first (earn) and you get money for school later (reward). Social Security: you work at a job for years and pay a small part of your salary (earn) and you get retirement money later (reward). Unemployment insurance: you have a job first and pay a portion of your salary regularly (earn) and you get money during periods of unemployment later (reward). Later benefits were created in accordance with the Reward-Earn method. We’ll give you a welfare check now (reward) and expect you to look for work later (earn). We’ll give you housing for next to nothing now (reward) and expect you to value and improve the property later (earn). And so forth. The problem with Reward-Earn is that it’s in our human nature to both devalue and feel entitled to things that we get without earning, and as a result, we’re less motivated to alter our behavior and try to prove ourselves worthy of said reward. If anything, we start demanding more rewards.

I touched on this principle during pimp week, when I described how a pimp won’t have sex with one of his prostitutes unless she pays him first. It’s a cardinal rule of pimping. If he breaks it, he’s moved into the Reward-Earn method and the whole dynamic will begin to slowly unravel. If you want any type of compliance in any relationship, whether it’s boss/employee, boyfriend/girlfriend, parent/child, donor/beneficiary or just plain friends, you have to demand the correct behavior first and only then can you reward. If you get in the habit of rewarding first and expecting compliance later, you are screwed. In fact, once you set a reward-earn dynamic, it’s almost impossible to reverse the sense of entitlement you’ve created, and your chances of fixing the damage are close to zero. At that point you’re better off just terminating the old relationship and establishing a fresh one under the right dynamic.

Another crucial element to the Earn-Reward method is to punish disrespect. It’s not enough to just reward cooperation, you also have to clearly punish lack of cooperation and disrespect. Otherwise you send a message to the person that such behavior is tolerable. Avoiding negative results is an even more powerful motivator to people than gaining positive rewards, so it’s crucial that you punish bad behavior as well as reward good behavior. Even if the punishment is something small in response to a trivial transgression, you have to do something and not just let it slide. If you get stood up on a date for example, don’t just pick up the phone and act business as usual the next day like nothing happened. Avoid the person for a while, or briefly, but clearly, mention that you didn’t appreciate being stood up, and then move on to another topic. Maybe make the person work a little harder to get you back out again. Or if it was done in an extremely disrespectful or cavalier way, never go out with them again. Just always do something. Never let any form of disrespect go unchecked. It sends a subconscious signal to the transgressor, to obsevers, and most importantly to yourself that it is okay to disrespect you. And that’s a message you do not want to internalize.

Next time is the final component of the compliance recipe, intermittent rewards.

Recommended Reading:

One of the things I like to encourage people to do when analyzing human nature is to avoid compartmentalizing their insights. To compartmentalize an insight means that you have learned a specific insight but are only able to understand and apply it in the original context in which it was taught to you.

For example, let’s take a guy who is good at his career and knows how to advance. He may understand how to knock out job interviews perfectly. He takes care in his presentation. He researches the company thoroughly before approaching it. He anticipates every question he’s likely to hear and has a prepared response. He projects confidence, tries not to seem too eager to please, knows and communicates his value and shows just enough of his fun side to seem enjoyable but not so much as to communicate that he’s a clown. This is a result of specific job interview advice he’s solicited and received. This exact same guy may go to a club or bar that night and try to pick up a woman by doing all the exact opposite behaviors: approaching meekly, showing eagerness by offering to buy things, displaying low value and messing up the humor by joking too hard (thereby becoming an entertainment monkey) or too little (boring).

Why does he do all the right social techniques in one setting, the job interview, yet doesn’t transfer the same social techniques into the other setting, the bar pickup? Because he’s a compartmentalized thinker and need someone to explicitly tell him to use those same social techniques in the new setting. On his own, he can’t pull back, see the bigger picture and notice the general, transferable principles that link seemingly different scenarios. He needs every specific scenario and piece of advice specifically laid out for him. He may be great at memorizing, but he’s horrible as improvising and innovating because his mind is lazy or untrained. He is incapable of great leaps in logic.

You need to be a big picture thinker and not a compartmentalizer. I think that is my great gift, actually. Not the amount that I know, which really isn’t that much, but rather the common threads that I see in seemingly unrelated things and my ability to find unifying principles behind them. I see connections.

Which leads to this post about compliance. I see tons of articles about getting compliance in different areas of one’s life: getting cooperative kids, winning over a mate, motivating employees, etc. Instead of being compartmentalized and focusing on teaching how to get compliance in one specific situation, I’m going to show the basic elements of building compliance that apply to every situation one may encounter.

The ultimate recipe for compliance comes down to just three ingredients:

1. Cred
2. Earn-Reward Method
3. Intermittent Rewards

I’ll break down each element in the next two parts. Click here to move on to part 2.

I wanted to do something a little different today. First, this week is pretty busy so I won’t be able to post as often as I’d like. But also, I figure it gives me a good opportunity to satisfy my curiosity.

I track visitors to this site, and I get a fair amount. Many people find this site and read every single post in one sitting. Yet the same handful of people comment or give feedback over and over.

So I’m going to try something different, an open thread. Which is always risky because if you make an open thread and no one comments in it then you look like a dick, but so be it.

Delurk and post a comment about anything you want in this thread. Your feelings about a particular post on this site in general, something interesting you read elsewhere, what you had for breakfast, your questions and concerns about life, why you love this site, why you hate this site, your dog, your chronic halitosis, what you want to see more of on here, what you want to see less of, who you are and where you’re from, the best TV show you’ve seen recently….whatever.

Ever since Governor Eliot Spitzer’s scandals, newspapers everywhere are doing profiles on call girls left and right. Some are about individual call girls, others are about the overall call girl industry, but the one conclusion many of these stories have in common is the description of a secret segment of sex workers that come from good backgrounds, have day jobs (some of them quite reputable), don’t walk the corners like streetwalkers and cater to wealthy, esteemed clients.

Many of these women live a secret existence that their family, friends and even, yes, their boyfriends, have no idea about. You could be meeting these women in clubs, in your social circles or at work and have no idea you’re dealing with a call girl. That fresh faced girl you see in the hottest clubs that you assume must be living in Manhattan or Williamsburg through a trust fund or on daddy’s dime? She might be a ‘tute!

The NY Times had a good article about this quiet phenomenon. But here’s a part of the article describing a call girl named Xi’an that really jumped out at me:

While it is impossible to know exactly how such a shadowy enterprise operates, what is clear is that sex is being sold for high prices.

And when it comes to price, Ms. Xi?an shared a secret. When someone pays her $1,250 an hour, he gets exactly what he would for $200, her rate when she started out. The difference is psychological, she explained: ?The more somebody pays for you, the more they?ll respect you.?

“Tell a guy you’re $100 and they’ll treat you one way ? tell them you’re $1,500 and they’ll treat you better,” Ms. Xi’an said in a telephone interview from her home on Long Island. “I’ve heard a lot of girls saying, ‘Is this girl getting $5,500 an hour because she’s more beautiful? Is she doing something I don’t?’ The answer is no. But that girl is able to look a guy in the eye and say, ‘This is what I’m worth, and this is what you have to pay if you want me.’ And you have to be able to do that, and believe it.”

It’s funny because even though Pimp Week is supposed to be over, this article about prostitution offered such a good life lesson that I had to revisit the world of sex workers yet again (Really I’m not obsessed, I swear). The life lesson is, don’t ever sell yourself for cheap in the short run in hopes for a long-term benefit.

This goes for women packaging themselves as a fuck buddy in hopes of getting a relationship later, for men packaging themselves as girlfriends with penises (aka emotional tampons) in hopes of getting sex later, for service providers charging clients ridiculously cheap prices in hopes of getting loyal, more lucrative business later or a skilled, experienced employee asking for much less than he’s worth for a salary in hopes of being better rewarded later. (This of course doesn’t apply to entry-level positions where you don’t yet have the experience or credentials needed to demand a higher salary, regardless of how skilled you may actually be. In these cases, it makes sense to be paid low at first to get your foot in the door and gain experience)

I read a marketing book a few years back called The Invisible Touch: The Four Keys to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith (highly recommended!) that perfectly breaks down why discount customers are horrible:

Discount customers come and go. They are more likely to appear in red ink than black; your hidden costs of acquiring and serving them as clients probably exceeded what they paid you.

Discount customers refer no one to you; they don’t stay long enough to form an impression – and they are not very good judges of quality anyway. If they were, they would know that most economies are false ones, and that few service providers are low-cost providers by choice.

Discount customers are not your business; at best they are cash flow. But most likely, they are a cost that you do not need and should not incur.

The discount client is not buying you, or the quality of your work, or her regard for you and your service. She is buying your price tag. She is not loyal to people and companies; she is loyal to price tags. You cannot build a lasting business on discount shoppers, and you cannot build a satisfying business and experience with them either, because they do not value you and your work. In fact, in their continual efforts to get you to charge less, they are vividly communicating to you that your work is not worth to them what it is to you. You do not want or need these customers, and yet service businesses take them on by the millions every day. And then they wonder why their work – never mind their income – is not more satisfying.

And to prove the book right, look at what happened to our call girl Xi’an when she started off charging cheaply: “[Xi'an]’s first employer farmed her out on Craigslist for $200. Her first client lived in a project on the Upper East Side, and afterward refused to pay.”

The attitude of the discount customer is the same as that of the fuck buddy who won’t commit, the chick that keeps you in the friend zone to listen to her problems nonstop and the unappreciative, low-paying boss. In fact try this exercise: reread the above passage from Invisible Touch substituting “discount customer” with terms like “fuck buddy” or “friend zone girl” or “unappreciative boss” and the word “business” with “relationships” or “career” and you’ll see the analysis still holds up perfectly. They are not buying your quality and they will never fully appreciate you; they are buying your cheapness.

Know Your Worth.

Recommended Reading:

I’m not a big fan of Cindy Adams, but I have to give it to her….it takes balls to write this:

March 12, 2008 — NO way to write today about the Lindsays, Parises, K-Feds, Katies, Toms, Nicoles or whocares. No body cares about anything except New York’s Gov. Must be something in the water in the Northeast because we’ve managed to upend three governors – McGreevey of New Jersey, John G. Roland from Connecticut and now Spitzer the shpritzer. But while the world addresses his situation legally and politically, I want only to address his wife.

I want to tell her – so what. She may not longer be New York’s first lady, but a husband hooking up with a hooker is not reason enough to no longer be a married lady.

Sex, a primal need, outpoints fear, hunger and love as mankind’s No. 1 driving force. Unless you’re a pig or a monk, many an able-bodied – and I use that term deliberately – 48-year-old husband of 21 years has grazed. I’m not advocating it. I’m merely saying, so what? It’s like takeout food. Less work for mother.

In Louisiana it’s the currency. In Nevada those odds beat the tables. In DC it’s a revolving door. In California they marry the hookers. In France he becomes president.

A man who adores a woman enough to make his family with her and wants her forever as No. 1 in his life in a drawing room or dining room might also respect and treasure her too much for what he wants in a bedroom.

Paying a pro isn’t disrespect to his wife. Disrespect is keeping, supporting, housing a mistress with whom there’s an ongoing relationship and with whom you share not only time but emotions and thoughts and life. Disrespect is dumping into a trash bin that partner, long out of the workforce after giving her all including her youth, to marry whatever new twinkie works your male menopausal pinky. This “f – - – ing steamroller” didn’t do either. If he did, it wouldn’t be enough for his wife to hate him – we’d all hate him.

George Washington buried his wooden teeth in ladies other than Martha but, predating the Internet, texting, computers, cellphones and cable TV, his itch was kept quiet. Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate son fostered this 1884 ditty: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa; gone to the White House, ha ha ha.” Married Warren Harding laid on so many mattresses he could’ve died of bedsores. There was a little Andrew Jackson stickiness. And Eleanor Roosevelt’s social secretary Lucy Mercer took more than dictation. She took FDR.

Forgetting Bill Clinton, there was Dwight Eisenhower and his WWII driver Kay Summersby, who went riding even out of the car. JFK? Please. I mean, please. Jackie supposedly knew about Judith Exner, Angie Dickinson, Marilyn Monroe and the cast of thousands. Lyndon Johnson’s healthy appetite was never satisfied by Angus beef. Jimmy Carter and his peanut? We know he actually said he’d “committed adultery in my heart many times.”

The one-time candidates? Womanizer Wendell Wilkie? Newt Gingrich, who had an affair then divorced the missus then had an affair then divorced the second wife who was suffering from cancer. And 1988 gave us Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, who left Mrs. Hart home while he dandled and diddled Donna Rice and blew his election chances. And everyone knows about R. Giuliani.

The Bushes. Adulterous brother Neil zapped his longtime wife who bore him three children, Sharon.

And these holier than thous – besides the Catholic priest scandal, there’s Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Jim Bakker, Rev. Ted Haggard and the heavy into family values Sen. Larry Craig, who’s getting an airport bathroom named after him, and something named Livingston, who was forced to resign en route to becoming House speaker.

What exactly it is about men in power needing some extraspecial release, I don’t know. I only know that sex – missionary style, whambamslam style, deviant or pristine – is so primal a force it has been known – as in the OJ and Robert Blake cases – to end up with the wife suddenly dead. But whereas these guys are free to golf, Spitzer’s facing jail.

Look, with only addressing his situation humanly and personally, not legally or politically, the plain fact of handling your needs with a professional is a so what. It’s maybe the only way out (or in) for those in the white-hot spotlight. In any case, not a reason to walk away from long-term marriage.

Probably the real reason for this highly intelligent woman to react with fierce anger is toward her husband’s stupidity. He’s Mr. Clean, who has himself wiped out prostitution rings. He’s a law enforcer who knows from the Mann Act. Even apart from the headlined Joe Bruno and Dick Grasso and Hank Greenberg, he’s made powerful enemies up the kazoo. So, who knows who tipped off whom?

I love Silda Spitzer. In truth, handsome, educated Silda might want to smack him. But leave him purely and simply because he grabbed a little sex on the side? Or wherever he grabbed it? Naaahh. If this lawyer wife really wants to get him, she might just cool it a few years then run for president.

Heh.