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The Hype Handbook — Chapter-12: Fetishize Work, Master Effortless Doing
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G HYPE STRATEGY #12 FETISHIZE WORK, MASTER EFFORTLESS DOING Through actionless action they can make the whole world do as they will and yet not be wearied. —CHUANG TZU ary Vaynerchuk produces a ton of material in the form of videos, articles, books, and podcasts dedicated to the subject of how important it is to constantly hustle. According to this flood of media, he regularly stays up until three in the morning, sending and responding to emails to cement connections. He spends every spare minute he has on social media—in between meetings, in cars, during commercials, and in the bathroom. And when he’s not doing all that, he’s creating content and running his company. Furthermore, those who are not doing this—well, that’s totally their right—but they should never expect anything but a life tethered to a cubicle and mired in mediocrity. Vaynerchuk first made his name, and fortune, with a project called Wine Library TV. Wine Library TV features him reviewing various wines in his signature Jersey bro style, presenting his recommendations with humor and panache. Breaking from the
standard practice of talking about wines in terms of notes of blackberry meets coffee meets smokiness, Gary would compare them to flavors like Skittles and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. By his own admission, he toiled to create content for Wine Library TV for more than a year before anyone paid attention. Once he gained his first real fans, it was still a slow climb. Eventually, through relentless hard work and hustle (of course), he built a massive following for his online show—which funneled directly into sales for his online wine shop Wine Library. According to the official version of the story, Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library and Wine Library TV were responsible for turning his immigrant father’s tiny liquor store into a $60 million business. What he underplays in this telling is that the liquor store already had revenues of $3 million a year. Naturally, this leads into the question of how he was able to work on Wine Library TV for a year without anyone noticing while not worrying about where the money was coming from. Well, it certainly didn’t hurt that he had his father’s (not so tiny) business to rely on. Vaynerchuk’s recipe for success through around-the-clock social media self-promotion runs into problems if you don’t start out with a financial cushion. It also won’t work quite as well if you’re the one who has to make the wine instead of just selling it. So while hard work is certainly important, it is far from the only (or even the most essential) factor in what makes some people do better than others in business. It was this observation that inspired me to challenge Vaynerchuk in print, and the move certainly boosted my visibility. In the years since, however, Vaynerchuk hasn’t backed off from his message. He has kept his theme simple and repeats it relentlessly. As he summed it up during one interview on Mashable, “If I’m more successful than you, there’s one reason for it—it’s because I outworked you.” Gary Vaynerchuk is no dummy. He’s not the kind of person who wastes time or marketing dollars. Vaynerchuk doesn’t berate his
viewers, readers, and listeners for not working hard enough out of pure goodwill. He does it because it’s good for business. If there is one lesson you should take from this book, it’s to stop paying so much attention to the advice that hype artists give and start modeling what they actually do. Nowhere is this truer than on the subject of work. THE TOM SAWYER EFFECT In Age of Propaganda, social psychologists Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson dedicate a lot of time to dissecting the practices of the Unification Church and its founder, Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Since 1954, the “Moonie” movement has amassed 1 million to 2 million followers. By some measures, it is considered the largest cult in the world. What is the secret of the Unification Church’s success? The answer is manifold, but its founder’s and followers’ relationship to work definitely plays a part. Pratkanis and Aronson observed that members of the church work, on average, 67 hours a week on behalf of the group. Most of this time is spent raising money and recruiting new members. And they do it all for free. This is not an unusual feature of rapid-growth movements of all kinds. The leader of the nineteenth-century millenarian free love Oneida commune pushed his followers to perform huge amounts of manual labor in order to build “heaven on earth.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints requires young members to dedicate two years of their lives to missions made up of 16-hour training days and six-day weeks in the field. Amway relentlessly encourages people to recruit, recruit, recruit and sell, sell, sell by “asking new members to decide on their ‘Dream’—a new Cadillac, a summer cottage, a new ranch, or whatever they would like to get by selling Amway products.”
Those of you who paid attention in junior high school English class might recognize the following story from the Mark Twain classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom’s aunt told him to paint a fence white on a beautiful summer day while the rest of his friends were goofing off and enjoying the outdoors. He really didn’t feel like it. So instead of hunkering down and working hard, ol’ Tom started whistling and singing so that everyone could hear him. Soon enough, every kid in the town was whitewashing that fence. Every kid but Tom Sawyer, that is. The scene ends with Tom kicking back in the shade with his back against a tree, eating an apple, while a whole gang of kids did his job for him, thinking all the while they were doing something fun. Promoting the idea of fulfillment, success, or salvation through toil is the cheapest and most efficient way for a hype artist to get others to spread their message for them. By reframing hustle on behalf of your cause or your product as something that will make their lives better—perhaps now but preferably in the future—you will create an army of evangelist worker bees. When you get yourself into a situation in which two contradictory beliefs appear equally real, your mind will tell itself all kinds of stories to iron out the discrepancies. This psychological conflict is called cognitive dissonance, and it drives the way we see and interpret reality, regardless of the facts. If you are convinced to buy into the idea that working relentlessly on behalf of a certain vision—whether for a cause or for your own advancement—and then you come across evidence suggesting it may not get you there, your brain has a hard time reconciling such a waste of time and energy. To accommodate this discomfort, most people double down. They subconsciously tell themselves to work even harder. This is one of the reasons why, by fetishizing hard work, hype artists bind their followers to them ever more tightly. George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was a spiritual leader who garnered a large and influential following in the early twentieth century. He was a masterful mythmaker, establishing himself as a magus who, in the
words of follower and fellow guru Peter Damien Ouspensky, “knew everything and could do everything.” Gurdjieff was a master of theater, leading acolytes upon their arrival to his compound through, in the words of biographer Peter Washington, “dark passages into dimly lit rooms adorned with carpets and shawls, the ceilings draped like tents in the eastern fashion, orientalia scattered round the walls . . . icons and ivory statues of Moses, Mahomet, Buddha and Christ. . . . Opposite the final door, staring straight at the visitor with penetrating but not unfriendly eyes, a silent middle aged man sat cross-legged on an ottoman smoking a water pipe.” Once Gurdjieff had attracted followers, he knew the real money was to be made in keeping them in his fold for as long as possible. In between vague lectures on spiritual practice, the guru would make it clear that true enlightenment would not come from whatever foolish notions they had brought with them to the compound. Instead, it would come from breaking themselves down and stripping everything about themselves away until they were left with their essential selves. To this end, Gurdjieff assigned them menial tasks. Some of the tasks had the convenient benefit of helping beautify the home and grounds where he lived and the participants resided (for a steep fee paid to the guru, of course). Others were entirely useless. At the peak of his fame and influence, it would not be unusual to see movie stars bent over in rows on his property digging holes to nowhere. It was also not uncommon for these same movie stars to return to Gurdjieff’s spiritual retreats over and over again. Like Tom Sawyer promoting the pleasures of painting a fence in the hot sun, Gurdjieff reframed backbreaking work as a spirit- cleansing endeavor. After spending hours and days toiling to achieve enlightenment, it would have been tough for any of the participants to admit to themselves that Gurdjieff was scamming them. So they told themselves what they were doing was
meaningful. And they kept forking over their dollars for the privilege of doing more of it. Despite whatever flaws they may have possessed, Moon and Gurdjieff were natural marketers. They understood that the more they got followers to hustle, the stronger the followers’ attachment to them would become. In the world of marketing and advertising agencies, there’s an old maxim you hear a lot, which says you should always “underpromise and overdeliver.” In other words, you should charge for a certain amount of work and then do a lot more work than that. As a result, your clients will be happy and hire you again and again. This advice betrays a scant understanding of human psychology. Making a display of excessive hard work on behalf of someone else does not make them see you as indispensable. Quite the opposite. Clients may keep you around for working tirelessly on their behalf, but only if you up the effort—and the results you deliver—month over month and year after year. Remember, people are very adaptable when change happens gradually (see Hype Strategy #4). The harder you work and the more you do for clients, the more they will expect you to do for them going forward. This isn’t ingratitude; it’s human nature. Compare this relationship with the one Strategic Coach—one of the first-ever business coaching companies—has with its clients. Today Strategic Coach is a multimillion-dollar organization with locations in Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles, and London. The program is not cheap—I spent close to $30,000 to take part to learn how to make the shift from copywriting practice to marketing agency, and I still use a lot of what the company taught me. When you sign up for the program, you attend an eight-hour workshop four times a year. You sit in the workshop with about 20 or 30 fellow entrepreneurs, and one instructor delivers the same information to everyone in the group at the same time. While you’re certainly allowed to ask questions, the instructor keeps the
schedule moving along at a gently militaristic clip, ensuring no segment extends past one of the designated breaks or the closing bell. As for the tools, techniques, and tips we took away, these all awaited us at our desks when we arrived, on professionally printed, standardized forms, collected in uniform binders embossed with the Strategic Coach logo. Any customization that occurred within the pages of these binders came from our own minds and pens. At designated times throughout the day, our instructor asked us to fill in the blanks on various exercises to build the specifics of our strategic plan or map of our goals or whatever was relevant at the time. Then we were told to use those self-customized tools to go out into the world and improve our businesses. While there were a few group calls between sessions and a handful of one-on-one advisory calls with a junior-level member of the organization, the bulk of what we got for our money was those quarterly workshops. When we would reconvene after three months, our instructor would always ask us how we did in applying the tools to our businesses. Since there was no way I was going to spend that kind of money and not use what I learned, I was more rigorous than most in using the tools we came away with. But even I wasn’t perfect. Most of my classmates, especially those with more mature businesses, used the tools to a far less extent. This made sense. Implementing the tools took a lot of time and a lot of work. However, no one ever said to the instructor, “You know, I’m paying you guys a lot of money, and you’re standing there asking me if I worked hard enough using the prefabricated tools you gave me three months ago.” Instead, a look of shame would spread over their faces. They would apologize. They would talk about how in the first few weeks after they left the workshop, they were fired up to implement what they had learned. But then somehow they had slipped. They had gotten caught up with the day-to-day grind of their businesses.
They had let themselves slack off. They promised to do better next time. The instructor would allow an indulgent smile. Then she would say, “Go easy on yourself. The goal is progress, not perfection.” The relief on the faces of the client-students was palpable. They had confessed falling short of the toil required for salvation and had been forgiven. The dynamic established by Strategic Coach was that you paid the organization handsomely to be told of all the work you need to do with the systems and materials given to you in order to be successful. If you don’t do the work, it’s on you. If you can find ways to put your clients and customers to work implementing your ideas rather than always doing the implementing for them, they will keep coming back for more. On the other hand, if you do all the work for them, they will blame you when it inevitably goes wrong to any degree (and, often, even when it goes right). ACHIEVING THE INTERNAL STATE YOU NEED TO SUCCEED The question remains: Do hype artists practice what they preach? Of course, many hype artists work hard on behalf of their own businesses, careers, projects, and causes. At the same time, they tend not to rush around desperate to fill every spare minute with activity. Hype artists’ relationship to the work they do on their own behalf is far different from what they preach in public. In the early pages of this book, I explained that one of the main reasons I decided to write the book was to put the tools of hype into the hands of the “good guys.” While we’ve looked at many examples of people and organizations that have used these strategies to advance worthwhile ideas, causes, and businesses,
there is no avoiding the reality that there are more “bad guys” who have mastered hype than there are those using these strategies to make the world a better place. Why is this? If they were to ever be subjected to a formal psychological evaluation, many of the scummiest of the scumbags we’ve profiled in these pages would most likely be classified under the broad diagnostic category called antisocial personality disorder (APD), which includes narcissism, psychopathy, and sociopathy. People with APD are simply more detached than the rest of us. As cognitive scientist Kathleen Taylor describes it, “In a brain imaging study of APD and non-APD male volunteers . . . participants were given a social stressor (being asked to prepare and deliver a speech in four minutes) while researchers measured basic stress responses, such as heart rate, and the size of the prefrontal cortex. APD participants had significantly smaller prefrontal cortices and were significantly less stressed: on average, their heart rate was more than eight beats a minute slower than their non-APD peers.’” So while their lack of empathy often wreaks havoc on their personal relationships, not to mention tearing apart the social fabric, the kinds of people who become propagandists and con artists and cult leaders tend to have the internal makeup that allows them to coolly make the moves needed to gain particular results. They can maintain the distance necessary to take deliberate action based on the world as it really is, rather than constantly reacting based on the emotions most of us have about how we wish the world could be. No matter how hard the rest of us work, or how meticulously we plan, we constantly allow our emotions to sabotage our best efforts. We blurt out exactly the wrong thing at an important meeting. We send an angry email in a fit of pique. We spend months planning a marketing campaign and then fire off a tweet on a whim that derails the whole thing. We tense up and freak out. We
back down when we should stand up and stand up when we should back down. If any of this sounds familiar, don’t be too hard on yourself. It just means you’re a regular, nonsociopathic human being. Despite our capacity for reason, most of us spend the majority of our waking hours trying to tamp down the seething emotions that afflict us at all times. We might tell ourselves we have logical reasons for doing what we do. Deep down, however, we know most of our actions are designed to make ourselves feel better, despite whether the actions in questions help us get what we want in the long run. To combat this tendency, you must identify ways to cultivate and maintain the state of equilibrium that doesn’t come built into your regular-human internal software. Let’s return for a moment to the particular breed of hype artist known as the “pickup artist.” If you’re troubled by the thought of hordes of young men poring over a book to learn how to manipulate women, there is a consolation. The majority of guys who bought the book by Neil Strauss (aka Style) on the subject were unable to replicate its author’s results. This is because most of them imitated Style’s specific tactics in an attempt to brainwash women into coming home with them. What these failed pickup artists had trouble understanding is that the most successful seducers never try to get anyone to do what they don’t want to do. Instead, they create an atmosphere that gives people a sensation of excitement and comfort, which allows them to decide for themselves whether they want to embark on a new adventure. And to do this, mastery over one’s own emotional state is essential. Even if you have been happily married for 40 years, there is a lot you can learn from these self-made lotharios about moving others to action. At one point in The Game, Strauss recounts a speech that his friend and mentor Mystery gives to a group of nervous young men
that he is coaching before they go to a club to try out the techniques they have just learned from him. “All your emotions are going to try to [mess] you up,” he says. “They are there to confuse you, so know right now that they cannot be trusted at all. You will feel shy sometimes, and self-conscious, and you must deal with it like you deal with a pebble in your shoe. It’s uncomfortable, but you ignore it. It’s not part of the equation.” Easier said than done, right? No matter what tactics, techniques, strategies, or psychological principles you learn, you will inevitably fail to execute them unless you master your emotions. You may know exactly what you should do in any given situation, but your anxiety, fear, desire, desperation, or preconceived notions will inevitably control what you actually do. Luckily, there is a way around this. THE ART OF SELF-REGULATION In Chinese philosophy, there is a concept called “wu-wei,” which translates approximately into “actionless action” or “effortless doing.” Taoists, in particular, view this as the optimal state from which to lead, achieve, and influence. Masters of wu-wei let everyone else rush around, work beyond their capacity, and expend themselves emotionally. Then they swoop in and get their way before anyone realizes what has happened. The ability to self-regulate is a prerequisite for being effective at persuasion, influence, marketing, and sales. It is this self-regulation that gives us regular decent folks a shot at approximating the strategic cool that the antisocial hype artists naturally possess. If you were to follow every strategy in this book, you would get everything you ever wanted. But you won’t be able to—at least, not right away. Getting your emotions under control is the missing
piece of the hype equation. It is also its most difficult piece. But if you are able to become a master of self-regulation, every word you speak, sentence you write, and action you take will have incredible influence and impact. Each of us will have a somewhat different practice for achieving this state, depending on our inclinations and our temperaments. That said, there are a few practices that will take almost everyone closer to the optimal state for the benevolent hype artist. THE CRAFT OF SELF-REGULATION Emotions are physical. They have as much to do with your heart rate and cortisol levels as with your personality and upbringing. As such, much of what you need to do to regulate your emotions will be physical. It may seem basic, but first and foremost, movement is key. And when I say movement, what I mean is vigorous exercise. The way we live now is more sedentary than at any other time in human history or prehistory. We are evolved to live in small bands of roving hunter-gatherers who walked miles and miles every day. This state of constantly being on the move lasted many millennia longer than the state of remaining in one place that came about as a result of the development of agriculture and the birth of cities. Even over most of the last 5,000 to 8,000 years since farming became a way of life, almost everyone spent the bulk of every day engaged in some sort of physical labor. As we encounter various challenges, we build up the stress hormone cortisol in our bloodstreams. The natural human way of dealing with the unpleasantness this buildup causes is to discharge it through physical exertion. However, with most of us engaged in office work—and spending most of our leisure time in front of screens—this discharge does not happen. As a result, we
experience much of the discomfort of stress and conflict as much more intense—much more real—than it actually is. We make decisions from that frame, many of them decidedly nonstrategic. Give yourself an advantage in this area. Find a form of physical activity that you can stand and that makes you sweat, and engage in it most days. Before I started doing this, I figured the difference would be subtle. It was not. It was incredibly dramatic. In recent years, meditation (in the West, at least) has gone from the realm of bearded, patchouli-scented hippies to a practice embraced by Silicon Valley, Fortune 500 corporations, and neuroscientists alike. There’s a good reason for this: It works. Spending time focused on your breathing and doing so regularly allows you to detach from your emotions to some degree. The more you meditate, the more you realize the feelings welling up inside you in response to certain stimuli are simply sensations. You begin to understand how unnecessary it is to immediately react to each and every one of them. This is an incredibly helpful skill for any hype artist to have. What you put into your body matters. This is different for each person, but there are some commonalities. Excess in any form never helps. Huge amounts of caffeine, sugar, and trans fats affect the mood and raise anxiety levels. I know for me, when I discovered green tea and began to substitute four of my five daily cups of coffee with it, my agitation decreased, and I was better able to keep from blurting out the first thing that came to my mind in any given situation. I eventually learned green tea contains a substance called L-theanine that is absent from coffee, which calms the nervous system and promotes relaxation (it is offered in pill form as well). Some people with more deeply entrenched blocks may need to find a good therapist. Experiment on yourself: Try mindfulness meditation. Vigorous exercise. Clean eating. Or any of the other practices that humans
have been using for eons to combat our own bombastic, impulsive natures. Find out what works for you. But do something. We often think of our self-regulation practices as secondary— something that comes after all the work and learning is done. However, if you want your work and learning to have a real-world effect—to get you the results you want—you must put in the time to regulate the powerful sensations that originate in the physical body and physical brain. Often, when it comes to engaging in the kinds of activities that allow us to calm our internal states and gain critical distance— whether meditation, exercise, or sleep—we try to figure out how to cram them into our already overloaded schedules. Yet if we want to successfully influence people, we need to consider these activities first. If you have regularly sabotaged your attempts to become influential by failing to control yourself, don’t worry too much about it. Most people in the world are just like you. The true test is whether you will recognize this about yourself and take the steps necessary to change it. Putting It into Practice • Find a way to sell your expertise without actually doing the work for your customers. This might be a video course or a speaking series or a seminar. • Find a form of physical activity that you can stand and that makes you sweat, and engage in it most days. • Implement a meditative practice. This could be traditional Eastern-style meditation, but plenty of other traditions have practices that might be more suitable to you. Whatever specific method you choose, this will help you reduce the power your emotions have over you.
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