The Rawness

I did a post a while back about what charisma is and what it isn’t. You can find it here.

The basic premise is that what separates charisma from mere charm is the ability to suck people into your reality. You need to have a frame and sense of who you are that is so strong that it drowns out everything else in the vicinity. You make your personal frame stronger than anyone else’s around you, but not with the aim of overpowering through hostility but rather to seduce people into buying into what you’re selling.

Another profile in charisma I wanted to add was Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this Esquire article, you can see his charisma in action. He illustrates the principle of drawing people into his reality to a tee:

I mean, okay, he?s rich, sure. And he?s famous, sure. And he’s married into the Kennedy clan by way of Maria Shriver, sure. And he can?t be elected president, because of the flaw in the Constitution barring the office to nonnatives, and therefore he doesn’t have to give a shit, sure. He?s still Arnold — and there?s no way that anyone could have predicted that being Arnold would translate into being the kind of governor and the kind of politician he’s been, especially since the thing everyone agrees on is that he’s always Arnold, all the time. His persona has always been this close to being absurd, and yet he’s been able to make use of it — the persona and its presumed proximity to absurdity, both — as a governor just as well as he was able to make use of it as a bodybuilder and as a movie star. Indeed, most people thought that he was using the governorship in order to rise above his persona, when in fact he was using his persona to rise above the governorship. He hasn’t had to be less of himself — less, well, Arnold — in response to the realities of politics, though that’s what some people like to think; he hasn’t had to be more, either. He’s simply had to prove that this person and persona he created long ago was a more expansive notion than anyone thought possible, except himself. It’s an amazing American story in general, and an amazing immigrant story in particular, especially now, as he faces another crisis and is called upon not to reinvent himself, but rather to be himself yet again.

He had gotten away with it his entire life, you see — he’d gotten away with the imposition of his will. What he had in excess was one of the things the world had historically found unpalatable — the Teutonic will — and his genius had been to cast that will as a comic invention, and therefore an American one. He never had to hide his will or his ambition; he simply had to make his will and ambition an essential part of being Arnold, and then turn being Arnold into the performance of his lifetime.

You’ve heard of free will, of course. Well, with Arnold, there was freed will, and he used it, in the words of his chief of staff, “to visualize success in a way that doesn’t visualize obstacles.” Hell, when he came to the United States in ‘68, he didn’t speak any English, and visualization was what he had, a talent for seeing the next thing. He visualized success in bodybuilding and then attained it by bending his body and then the entire sport to his will. And then he saw the next thing: “I heard that Charles Bronson was making a million dollars a movie,” he told me. “That was a very big deal to an immigrant — a million dollars a movie. So I went to see a Charles Bronson movie. And I said, I can do that. And people said, No you can’t — have you ever heard yourself? And I said, I can do that. And then I made a million dollars a movie, so the next thing became keeping the million. And that’s how I got into business.”

And that’s pretty much how he became the governor of California as well. “I knew the time would come, and when the [Gray Davis] recall happened, it was handed to me. It was like God said, Hey, you want to circumvent the Republican primaries, because you’re not conservative enough for them? Here’s the recall. I was absolutely convinced that I would become governor, no matter what. And so I jumped in there. And I had the will to do it. When I campaigned in 2003, people said, You don’t have the experience. I said, There’s a storehouse of experience up in Sacramento and look at the shape the state is in. So it couldn’t be experience that makes the state in good shape. What it needs is the will. The will to go and make tough decisions and the right decisions. I have the will, is what I told the people. And that’s exactly what I have. I have the will.”

Notice how criticism or words of discouragement, even if logical and sensible, simply have no effect on his self-image and how he presents himself. His success is definitely not luck.

Bonus Quote: George Clooney from Playboy in 2000:

“Actors go into auditions thinking, ‘Oh God, they’re going to hate me. I started to come in selling confidence, not even selling my acting skills. The best actor never gets the job…Never.

Good quote, but I think it’s important to note that although it’s not necessary to actually be the best, you want to have some talent. As I said in part 1, if confidence alone was enough to be charismatic and suck people into your reality, the awful American Idol contestants from the early weeks would be superstars.

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.