The Rawness

For all the flak Paris Hilton gets, deserved and undeserved, I give her credit for one thing; she has basically created a new type of celebrity: the tabloid star. The tabloid star is not the old model of stardom where someone appears in the tabloids because of movie, music, television or fashion stardom. This type of celebrity is always primarily considered an actor, musician or fashion designer. They just happen to appear in the papers a lot. No, the tabloid star is a new model where someone gets work in movies, television or fashion because they appeared regularly in tabloids first. Instead of being entertainers and fashionistas that end up as constant tabloid stories, they start off as constant tabloid stories and parlay that exposure into entertainment and fashion work. And the patron saint of this new category of stardom is Paris Hilton. For better or worse, she’s basically changed the nature of the fame game more than anyone else in recent history.

Sure there were people who got well-known off reality shows in the past, like in the early seasons of The Real World, but they would never become regular tabloid fodder. They just earned more appearances on Real World followup shows. After Paris Hilton hit the scene though, people realized that it was possible to get constant tabloid exposure and greatly increase public awareness of yourself without having any notable accomplishments beforehand. And then the floodgates opened up as tons of wannabes and used-to-bes went out of their way to appear and be photographed at any major event where paparazzi would be and aspiring socialites even started hiring publicists.

The reason for this is simple: there are simply too many outlets out there devoted to celebrities. We have a ton of channels now thanks to cable. Hundreds of channels. A lot of those channels have a celebrity gossip show. One channel, E!, is solely devoted to celebrities. Two if you count the current incarnation of VH1. Then there’s the rise of celebrity gossip magazines. Then there’s the blogosphere, where celebrity blogs are proliferating and are among the most popular blogs. Anyone with a celeb obsession, a PC and too much time on their hands can create a popular celeb blog with an immediate following. So when you have this many outlets to cover celebrities, how do you fill up all that space with content? By generating celebrities! This is why we have the rise of the B-lister and C-lister and why the fame and accomplishment threshold for appearing in tabloids has been lowered so drastically: there simply aren’t enough A-list notable celebrities to fill up all those shows, magazines and blogs. You need to start scraping the bottom and getting people from The Bachelor. Paris Hilton took advantage of this media climate and staked her claim to fame.

These seem to be the main routes to becoming a tabloid star:

1. Be born obscenely rich or be related to a famous icon. (Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie)
2. Be a nobody who gained notoriety on a “storyline” reality show (Omarosa or anyone from The Hills or Laguna Beach)
3. Be a relatively new entertainer trying to catapult their fledgling entertainment career into mainstream success (Lindsey Lohan, Jessica Simpson, anyone from Making the Band)
4. Be a formerly huge entertainer trying to resuscitate a flagging career (Britney Spears, Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, anyone who has appeared on Dancing with the Stars)
5. Any combination of the above four categories (Brooke Hogan)

The major drawback to being a tabloid star though is that once you become one, it’s extremely hard to be taken seriously as anything else. This is the big folly of anyone who tries to become a successful entertainer through appearing on storyline reality shows and continual tabloid appearances. They become pigeonholed as tabloid stars and end up stuck going back and forth between tabloid appearances and reality shows and never get a foothold into the A-list arena. Sure they may get occasional cameo appearances on TV shows or a small role in a cheesy movie, but they’re always that reality or tabloid person that just happens to be in a TV show or movie. Paris Hilton will never be truly considered an actress or a pop star, no matter how many movies and songs does; it will always be about the novelty of a tabloid star doing a movie or a song. Lauren Conrad will never really be taken seriously as a fashionista either. Winners of America’s Next Top Model will never actually be taken seriously by anyone in the modeling industry except for the judges. Winners often complained that after the show, when they got sent on castings, people kept telling them “Oh, you’re that reality girl” rather than treating them as a bona fide fashion model.

The winners of American Idol get bona fide success as artists, but keep in mind that (1) American Idol isn’t a storyline reality show and (2) they don’t usually go out of their way to appear on the tabloids, Page 6 or the blogosphere every minute of every day after winning. If anything, I have a feeling that their handlers try to keep them from getting overexposed after they win and instead rush them to the studios to start recording.

Jessica Simpson, after the success of her reality show Newlyweds, tried to keep the fame game going by becoming daily tabloid fodder like Paris Hilton. She appeared everywhere she could. As her exposure grew and she became a household name, she really seemed to believe that she was on the path to music stardom. Yet people still don’t flock to buy her albums. Instead they keep flocking to the magazine stands to read her latest personal exploits. Tabloid stardom, instead of becoming a means to an end, has just become an end.

Similarly Lindsey Lohan and her publicists, seeking to help her make the jump from niche Disney teen queen to household name A-list movie actress launched a tabloid barrage. She appeared on every red carpet, hot nightclub, awards show and celebrity event…basically any place where paparazzi were guaranteed to be. She did outrageous things to guarantee she’d receive salacious reports in the tabloid press. And as far as increasing her fame, it’s totally worked. But how long will it take you to name the last three movies she was in? And did you see them? Now try to name her last three tabloid scandals. I’m sure that’s much easier. Her tabloid career ended up overshadowing her legitimate career. Sometimes people even forget she’s supposed to be an actress.

Brooke Hogan is another good example. It’s easier to remember her last tabloid buzz (her dad applying suntan lotion to her) than it is to remember the name of any of her singles. If she wants to get legitimate pop success, she’s going about it the wrong way. She’s more likely to just end up with a string of VH-1 reality shows and a bullshit fashion line for tweens. Britney Spears and Whitney Houston crossed the threshold from legitimate pop stars to tabloid stars and are now trapped in that role. Brintey can sell papers much easier than she can sell albums now, as opposed to Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera, who don’t generate as much nonstop tabloid fodder and therefore can still be primarily known for legitimate pop careers. The acting career limbo of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes right now shows you how much their media barrage a few years ago helped their careers. Katie Holmes ended up with tabloid stardom instead of movie stardom while Tom Cruise’s box office pull has plummeted. Amy Winehouse is currently a music industry darling, but if she keeps up the tabloid exploits I’m sure her music career will eventually suffer and be replaced by tabloid stardom.

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are two actors who endangered their blockbuster acting careers by courting the tabloids too much. If you notice, they’ve both seriously scaled back their publicity hounding considerably and have done their best to get their past tabloid notoriety to die down. Both their careers are still suffering from that tabloid period.

What’s the human nature lesson here? Repeating someone else’s actions will earn you the same results and reputation as that person. People thought they could take the publicity route of a Paris Hilton by acting like airheads, seeking out and posing for every paparazzi in site like an obvious publicity whore and constantly generate salacious fodder for tabloids by appearing drunk in public, partying, drinking, drugging and making sex tapes, yet somehow avoid the loss of respect and the bad reputation that comes along with it. People do this all the time in their everyday lives. They adopt the questionable behavior of others because they want the benefits that come with that behavior, but for some reason they are surprised when they also get the same negative side-effects that come with that behavior. Similarly, in the case of rising stars, washed-up celebrities and nobodies trying to duplicate Paris Hilton’s lifestyle and publicity whoring, they got the positives (increased buzz), but also got the negatives that come with it (worse reputation and the inability to be appreciated for anything but appearing in tabloids and reality shows).

In your life, whenever you see a person benefitting from a certain behavior and you want to model that behavior and receive the same benefits, make sure you also understand all the negatives that person receives from that certain behavior because you’re sure to receive those too. Too many of us suffer from what’s calld optimistic bias: we perceive ourselves to be invulnerable and unique and therefore immune to the same risks as others. Surveys consistently show that people always believe they can chain smoke but be less likely than the average chain smoker to receive cancer, that they can try highly addictive drugs but be less likely than the average drug user to get addicted, that they can drink and drive regularly but be less likely to get into an accident than the average drunk driver, that they can engage in high-risk sex behavior but somehow be less likely than others to get pregnant or get VD, that their marriage is immune to the possibility of divorce, even after hearing sobering divorce statistics…the list goes on and on and on.

Optimistic bias is why there will always be another Eliot Spitzer scandal with politicians, even after tons of earlier politicians have been taken down by sex scandals. Or why people will still engage in pyramid scheme behaviors despite all the evidence that they are scams that bankrupt the average participant. Or why rock stars will do the fast life of drugs, sex and booze that is the foundation of every Behind the Music special yet still think they’re immune to the eventual downward spiral and rehab stint that happened to everyone else. Or why a woman thinks she has that “magic pussy” that will allow her to be the exception when she marries a guy who has cheated on and left every woman he’s been with before her. Or why women date pro athletes and expect to be the only athlete wife whose husband remains faithful and avoids groupies. These are people who all repeat the behavior of their predecessors to get the same benefits, yet believe they’ll be immune to the same negative effects.

Always remember that you’re not as special as you think you are.

Related Recommended Reading:

One of my favorite books of all time for gaining insight on human nature is the The Autobiography of Malcolm X : As Told to Alex Haley. It’s got some great insightful quotes, and I’ve decided to phone one in take this time to share some of them. What follows are Malcolm’s views on various issues.

On getting what you want:

I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked my why I couldn’t be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.?

On competitive strategy:

Mr. Gohannas was close cronies with some other men who, some Saturdays, would take me and Big Boy with them hunting rabbits. I had my father’s .22 caliber rifle; my mother had said it was all right for me to take it with me. The old men had a set rabbit-hunting strategy that they had always used. Usually when a dog jumps a rabbit, and the rabbit gets away, that rabbit will always somehow instinctively run in a circle and return sooner or later past the very spot where he originally was jumped. Well, the old men would just sit and wait in hiding somewhere for the rabbit to come back, then get their shots at him. I got to thinking about it, and finally I thought of a plan. I would separate from them and Big Boy and I would go to a point where I figured that the rabbit, returning, would have to pass me first.

It worked like magic. I began to get three and four rabbits before they got one. The astonishing thing was that none of the old men ever figured out why. They outdid themselves exclaiming what a sure shot I was. I was about twelve, then. All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life, that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business, you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.

On Women:

In Harlem, years later, a friend of mine called Sammy the Pimp taught me something I wish I had know then to look for in Laura’s face. It was what Sammy declared was his infallible clue for determining the “unconscious, true personality” of women. Considering all the women he had picked out of crowds and turned into prostitutes, Sammy qualified as an expert. Anyway, he swore that if a woman, any woman, really gets carried away while dancing, what she truly is at least potentially will surface and show on her face.

On Your Woman’s Exes:

Never ask a woman about other men. Either she’ll tell a lie, and you still won’t know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.

On Wives And Prostitutes:

Domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands were responsible for the early [client rush to the brothel]. These wives were so disagreeable and had made their man so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men. To escape this tension and the chance of being ridiculed by his own wife, each of these men had gotten up early and come to a prostitute.
The prostitutes had to make it their business to be students of men. They said that after most men passed their virile twenties, they went to bed mainly to satisfy their egos, and because a lot of women don?t understand it that way, they damage and wreck a man?s ego. No matter how little virility a man has to offer, prostitutes make him feel for a time that he is the greatest man in the world. That?s why these prostitutes had that morning rush of business. More wives could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men…?

I mean, I’d had so much experience. I had talked to too many prostitutes and mistresses. They knew more about a whole lot of husbands than the wives of those husbands did. The wives always filled their husband’s ears so full of wife complaints that it wasn?t the wives, it was the prostitutes and mistresses who heard the husbands? innermost problems and secrets. They thought of him, and comforted him, and that included listening to him, and so he would tell them everything.

On Pimps vs. Husbands:

Most men, the prostitutes felt, were too easy to push around. Every day these prostitutes heard their customers complaining that they never heard anything but griping from women who were being taken care of and given everything. The prostitutes said that most men needed to know what the pimps knew. A woman should occasionally be babied enough to show her the man had affection, but beyond that she should be treated firmly. These tough women said that it worked with them. All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.?

On Black Men And White Women:

From time to time, Sophia [his white girlfriend] would come over to see me from Boston. Even among Harlem Negroes, her looks gave me status. They were just like the Negroes everywhere else. That was why the white prostitutes made so much money. It didn’t make any difference if you were in Lansing, Boston, or New York, what the white racist said, and still says, was right in those days! All you had to do was put a white girl anywhere close to the average black man, and he would respond. The black woman also made the white man’s eyes light up but he was slick enough to hide it.

On Numbers Runners:

West Indian Archie had finished time in Sing Sing not long before I came to Harlem. But my boss’ wife had hired him not just because she knew him from the old days. West Indian Archie had the kind of photographic memory that put him among the elite of numbers runners. He never wrote down your number; even in the case of combination plays, he would just nod. He was able to file all the numbers in his head, and write them down for the banker only when he turned in his money. This made him the ideal runner because cops could never catch him with any betting slips.

I’ve often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used. But they were black.

On Jews vs. Blacks:

‘Red, I’m a Jew and you’re black,’ [Hymie] would say. ‘These Gentiles don’t like either one of us. If the Jew wasn’t smarter than the Gentile, he’d get treated worse than your people.’

On “Brand Chumps” (vodka anyone?):

‘Another fellow and I would drive out to Long Island where a big bootleg whisky outfit operated. We’d take with us cartons of empty bonded whisky bottles that were saved illegally by bars we supplied. We would buy five-gallon containers of bootleg, funnel it into the bottles, then deliver, according to Hymie’s instructions, this or that many crates back to the bars.

Many people claiming they drank only such-and-such a brand couldn?t tell their only brand apart from pure week-old Long Island bootleg. Most ordinary whisky drinkers are ‘brand’ chumps like this.

More on Women:

I never in my life have seen a black man that loved white women as sincerely as Shorty did. Since I had known him, he had several. He had never been able to keep a white woman any length of time, though, because he was too good to them, and, as I have said, any women, white or black, seems to get bored with that.

On Mastery:

In every organization, someone must be the boss. If it?s even just one person, you?ve got to be the boss of yourself.

On Prison:

Any person who claims to have a deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars, caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.

After he gets out, his mind tries to erase the experience, but he can’t. I’ve talked with numerous former convicts. It has been very interesting to me to find that all of our minds have blotted away many details of years in prison. But in every case, he will tell you that he can?t forget those bars.

On Sin and Redemption:

I have since learned, helping me to understand what then began to happen within me, that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much. Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth. The Bible again: the one people whom Jesus would not help were the Pharisees; they didn’t feel they needed any help.

The very enormity of my previous life’s guilt prepared me to accept the truth.

On Self-doubt:

[Elijah Muhammed] wrote, ‘If you once believed in the truth, and now you are beginning to doubt the truth, you didn’t believe the truth in the first place. What could make you doubt the truth other than your own weak self?

On Persuasion:

One day, I remember, a dirty glass of water was on a counter and Mr. Muhammed put a clean glass of water beside it. ‘You want to know how to spread my teachings?’ he said, and he pointed to the glasses of water. ‘Don’t condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water,’ he said, ‘just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won’t have to say that yours is better.’

On the Importance of Dependability:

I would rather have a mule I can depend upon than a race horse that I can’t depend upon.

On White Liberals:

The Deep South white press generally blacked me out. But they front-paged what I felt about Northern white and black Freedom Riders going South to ‘demonstrate.’ I called it ‘ridiculous’; their own Northern ghettoes, right at home, had enough rats and roaches to kill to keep all of the Freedom Riders busy. I said that ultra-liberal New York had more integration problems than Mississippi. If the Northern Freedom Riders wanted more to do, they could work on the roots of such ghetto evils as the little children out in the streets at midnight, with apartment keys on strings around their necks to let themselves in, and their mothers and fathers drunk, drug addicts, thieves, prostitutes. Or the Northern Freedom Riders could light some fires under the Northern city halls, unions, and major industries to give more jobs to Negroes to remove so many of them from the relief and welfare rolls, which created laziness, and which deteriorated the ghettoes into steadily worse places for humans to live. It was all, it is all, the absolute truth; but what did I want to say it for? Snakes couldn’t have turned on me faster than the liberal.
Yes, I will pull off that liberal’s halo that he spends much time cultivating! The North’s liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.

On Muslim Violence:

I knew that no one would kill you quicker than a Muslim if he felt that?s what Allah wanted him to do.

On Northern Blacks vs. Southern Blacks:

There is this to consider: always, the black people have advanced further when they have seen they had to rise up against a system that they clearly saw was outright against them. Under the steady lullabys sung by foxy liberals, the Northern Negro became a beggar. But the Southern Negro, facing the honestly snarling white man, rose up to battle that white man for his freedom?long before it happened in the North.

On Punctuality:

I have less patience with someone who doesn’t wear a watch than with anyone else, for this type is not time-conscious. In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.

On Fear of Failure:

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so ‘safe,’ and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.

On Regrets About Separatist Views:

Well, I’ve come to regret that incident [where he rebuked the offers of a white college girl to assist the Negro cause, a scene shown in Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie]. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then – like all Muslims – I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man’s entitled to make a fool of himself if he’s ready to pay the cost. It cost me twelve years

Also, concerning the white girl he insulted:

I regret that I told her she could do ‘nothing.’ I wish now that I knew her name, or where I could telephone her, and tell her what I tell white people now when they present themselves as being sincere, and ask me, one way or another, the same thing that she asked.

To learn more about the incident with the little blonde co-ed, click here.

Recommended Reading:

This one is long, but if I may toot my own horn, it’s so damn good and important that I suggest you take the time and read it all.

This is the final part of a 3-part series. Part 1 is here. And here’s part 2.

This series has been all about compliance, or getting people to do the shit you want. Earlier I discussed the first two parts of the three part formula: believable authority and Earn-Reward Method. Now for the third and most powerful element: intermittent rewards. Intermittent reward strategy is just some crazy ass shit. It’s probably the second most powerful motivator out there next to avoidance of death. And out of the three elements of compliance, it’s also the most manipulative.

You see, the first two steps in gaining compliance, which were believable authority and Earn-Reward method, can get great results on their own. But when you add in intermittent rewards, the compliance gets taken to higher, more extreme levels. It can escalate the compliance to obsessive, even self-destructive levels.

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.