by Megan Hustad
2
Dodging the
Great Failure Army
* * *
Orison Swett Marden on the Strange Power
of Finding Something Nice to Say
… to all who believe that there is a better life
than dollar-chasing, and that everybody ought
to be happier than the happiest now are.
— from the dedication to Everybody Ahead
THE BRITISH AUTHOR Toby Young once described how his American colleagues—he worked briefly for Vanity Fair in the late 1990s—would refer to anyone who called the office twice a day as a “stalker.” Meaning it was very uncool to call the magazine twice, as it suggested you were too emotionally needy. Vanity Fair is not the only workplace that encourages such sly dismissals; in fact, they’re increasingly common. As an editor friend said of the atmosphere around his office’s conference room table, if you happened upon any piece of damaging gossip, or heard any disappointing news, the correct reaction was somewhere between a blank nod and a grin—not exactly pleased, more a look of serene acceptance. Just enough to communicate that you expected something like that to happen. “It’s not that nothing surprises you, exactly,” is how he described the correct look. “It’s that nothing bad surprises you.”
Exactly the way it should be, I thought, when I found myself amongst colleagues who, like me, knew that a little slapdash bitchery was a good way to make it through a trying workday There were several junior staffers in our office—many of us twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-five years old. And if every last cubicle wasn’t inhabited by someone very clever, there were plenty of us who had mastered snark. The ones you knew from the get-go would be able to keep up were the mumbling young men in thick black-framed glasses. But even some of the women in pink J. Crew twinsets—they too were usually able to articulate what, precisely, was wrong with Gwyneth Paltrow. We were addicted to Gawker.com and other snark-infested websites. A typical Tuesday in this office would begin with a gripe about the gross inefficiencies of public transportation, and by 11:30 at least one person would have questioned, in a subtle, multilayered way, the integrity of the CFO’s family life. In the evening, over drinks, we could speak even more freely—and phrases like “black stirrup pants” could take on enormous meaning. One midlevel publicist who was not terrifically popular with us junior employees wore black stirrup pants—last in style when Janet Jackson was promoting Control—to the office about once a week. A male coworker made a little speech about these pants one night, and the ways in which black stirrups stood for all this woman’s habits—her voice, her hair, her peerless ability to condescend to us. From then on all he had to do was drop the words black stirrup pants into a conversation—any conversation—to make us all convulse in giggles. It felt like a needed release.
If your job is less than gratifying intellectually, of course you also try to exercise critical muscles wherever you can. It’s small compensation for the fact that you’re low on the totem pole. And in some sense it seems like the only means of deflecting the power some people have over you. (Our superiors might have been able to tell us what to do, but they sure couldn’t tell us what to think.)
But how well does this knack for new and inventive put-downs correlate with getting ahead? More exactly, how does zeroing in on humanity’s weak spots help you climb, socially or professionally?9 I found an answer in How to Get What You Want, a little red book published in 1917 that I discovered quite by accident. That is to say, I didn’t discover it through meticulous research so much as by opening my mailbox one day. Someone had sent it to me, unsolicited. (This is significant. Remember it.)
How to Get What You Want was operating on an entirely different frequency than we were on. It was written by Orison Swett Marden, a man who clearly appreciated titles that got right to the point. He’s now as good as lost to history, but at one point in time, he could count on his name being recognized across the United States and a few places beyond. He was an inexhaustible writer and publisher and his entire career was devoted to a very simple proposition: Criticism was for losers. Criticism that was crisply and originally phrased was no better. Too many bright young things, he claimed, believed that being hypercritical was a path to distinction. (No one in a competitive economic environment wanted to be seen as a dupe, after all.) But this was entirely mistaken, he suspected. Making negative assessments—didn’t matter much what you were talking about—could do harm, and in unexpected ways.
Why and how this was so remained mysterious. Beginning in the 1890s, it took Marden fifty-four books, a handful of pamphlets, thirty years, and two incarnations of a magazine he called Success to explain how it all worked.9^ His audience was the average person who didn’t necessarily aspire to be any kind of tycoon, but who could clearly see that the pace of work and life was ramping up. Companies were getting bigger. Sue-cess assured people they weren’t going to be left behind by these changes. So the initial step to engaging Marden’s philosophy was simply looking around the room. Marden had noticed that some personalities had a dampening effect, and he had trouble even being around them. “Their presence depresses. One feels cold perspiration while in their company,” he wrote in a 1907 tract called The Optimistic Life. “Everything about them is chilly and forbidding. They dry up thought. One cannot think to be natural when with them. Their sarcasm, irony, detractions, and pessimism repel, and one shrinks from them.” He coined a term for these sarcastic types: “mental paupers.” In another book he called them “calamity howlers.” But Marden’s preferred coinage, judging from how often he used it, was “The Great Failure Army.” He imagined it’d be difficult, but he was determined that the ranks of the Great Failure Army be kept to a minimum.
The best way to do this, Marden claimed, was to alter a culture’s prevailing thought patterns. The gist of the idea belonged to a very loosely affiliated group known as the New Thought movement, and though Marden was one of New Thought’s loudest advocates, he was by no means its only disciple. All New Thoughters agreed that criticism was for losers, but they went one further: Training yourself to dwell on kind, positive, and hopeful words should be central to your life strategy. In fact, it might be all the strategy you need. New Thought practitioners believed that happy dispositions had the potential to transform lives and careers because everything under the sun obeyed the Law of Attraction. To understand how the Law of Attraction worked, you had to first come to grips with the notion that the air itself was teeming with possibilities—possibilities that could be conjured into hard fact and material existence if only you thought the right thoughts. There was a giant, universal Mind, and you could tap into it with your own mind—small m—to draw down the results you wanted.10 Which was not to say that you didn’t have to work for the things you wanted. But basically, the universe was generous and held enough wealth for everyone. The Law of Attraction got results—you didn’t even have to be aware of how the law operated for it to be working in your life. If you spent your days thinking about poverty, you’d continue to just scrape by. If you focused on joy and money, then joy and money is what you’d get. And if you didn’t “scatter the flowers of kindness,” as Marden put it, everywhere you went, then you could never expect sweetness and sunshine to radiate in your direction either. For New Thought devotees this was a natural, ironclad law of the universe, as nonnegotiable as gravity.
Avoiding conscription into the Great Failure Army was first and foremost a matter of letting all thoughts of how irritating humanity could be end with you. (“We blame everything but the right thing. The trouble is in ourselves,” Marden quipped.) Instead of rehashing how people disappointed you, you needed to think generously, and then take the time to say, out loud, those nice things you were thinking. Once you accepted the premise of the Law of Attraction, it made no sense to fixate on somebody’s shortcomings. In fact, it was wholly counterproductive. Snark would come right back at you, like a karmic boomerang.
In other words, most everything my colleagues and
I were doing was very risky. Rather than communicating our rare wit, we were, in fact, flirting with being seen as precisely as lame as Ihe lame-asses we saw all around us. But even if someone had told us this at the time—and no one did—there were several immediate and substantive obstacles to putting this mystical, wide-eyed hoo-hah into practice. For one, Marden’s prescription for relentless cheerfulness sounded simply like putting blinders on. Two, this was not how we had learned to demonstrate intelligence. Our ability to locate wrongdoing, failure, and the loose threads in any argument—and then yank on those loose threads until the whole thing unraveled—was highly prized. Three, there was a glaring logistical concern: What to make of the fact that the office’s higher-ups seemed to have reached their cozy positions and inflated salaries by displaying their critical chops? Our bosses—and this is true in most industries—were perpetually saying yea or nay to projects, making (what looked like) snap judgments, and one would naturally assume that the path to power was to demonstrate that we were capable of same. Four, there was “the lingering suspicion that everyone above you was just ridiculously untalented,” as Samantha, a graphic designer, remarked to me. Perhaps the people in those coveted spots got there because, well, someone even higher up wasn’t really paying attention, and promotions came about through nepotism, or logic-defying happenstance, or some other injustice. When we considered the organization chart, and then our to-do list, the thought of throwing metaphorical rose petals in the direction of anyone more enviably placed struck us as insane. That was sucking-up—and it was unheard of.
Once I discovered Orison Swett Marden, I asked around to see if my office had been exceptional in this regard. It hadn’t. Dave, who worked in the relatively staid field of compliance, had a boss who, at the end of Monday morning meetings, meetings that began at 7:30 sharp, would put down his latte, smack the nearest available surface, clear his throat, and try to rally the troops. “Let’s go kick some fucking ass, Daver he’d say, always emphasizing Dave. As Dave told this story, his voice trailed off and he stared out the window, shaking his head at the memory. Not only had he worked for a man he didn’t admire and knew to be untalented, all conversation amongst the firm’s employees dwelled on this idiocy. As for sucking-up? “It would come across as too transparent, too blatantly calculated,” said Adam, a copywriter at a branding agency. He could not recall a single instance in which anyone at the office had engaged in what Marden termed “the silent power of love.” The prevailing wisdom was that it was always better to risk sounding a little snotty —and opinionated—than approving and thereby unknowing. Adam was able to come up with several terms for someone who might—ass-kisser, apple-polisher, bootlicker, brownnoser, glad-hander, and toady—but to him it sounded like something left over from the days of Leave It to Beaver; both quaint and oddly stylized by today’s standards.
Of course, our approach had its antecedents, too. In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald encapsulates 1920s-style snark by having one character brag about how he’d write reviews calling the latest serious, big-idea book “a welcome addition to our light summer reading.” Or Dorothy Parker, who is reputed to have shot off lines like “If you can’t think of anything nice to say, come sit next to me” at dinner parties. Snark is not only nothing new, it has a time-honored, predictable style. It’s both vaguely nihilistic and excellent at suggesting that the object, person, or topic under discussion is not only not that good, but doesn’t even deserve to be taken seriously. And all our joking aside, at our office we liked things that demanded they be taken seriously. So in addition to pointing out wardrobe mistakes, we were also skilled at calling out all the things we did not want to see any more of on our desks, down the hall, in the world: anything that could be described as half-baked, sloppy, uninspired, or cliched.
But if we’d been more alert, we would have noticed something happening. What began as a way to demonstrate our high standards in front of colleagues became an end in itself. Which is exactly what Marden predicted: The contents of your head take on a mind of their own. (So to speak.) I myself came to realize—after about a year and a half—that I’d sent enough poison darts flying through the air that some of my superiors were reflexively starting to limit my opportunities. Imagine, if you would, the following scenes:
Boss emerges from her office, is about to put a manuscript box on your desk, then when the box is inches from impact with your inbox, she suddenly halts, pauses, and brings it back to her chest. “Nah. You won’t like this,” she says.
Or this one: Standing at the microwave, a colleague asks, “So what do you like?”
Marden was very worried about how “smart boys” would fare in the office. Because they were actually better equipped to pinpoint cracks in the china, they might get a little carried away. They’d do well in academic settings, but because they were so irritable, “squeamish,” and so “scornful of men’s dullness,” they’d eventually “drop back into nothingness [while] their plodding schoolmates rise slowly but surely.”
That being so smart can lead to a certain impatience, a kind of squeamishness, around more average intellects is something some masters of snark readily confess to. “Everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve been generally liked. I get along with people,” said Gabriel, an aspiring screenwriter in Los Angeles who paid his dues in the William Morris mailroom and various small production companies. “Except at Paramount, where I acted like I was smarter than everyone else. I was smarter. Much smarter. And I had a real hard time pretending that, uh, we were all equally… gifted.” This attitude was common, he’d found, amongst people paid to give their impressions of other people’s creations, but who weren’t required to cough up any product themselves—he cited Hollywood “development” staffers in particular.11 It wasn’t that they were miserable people eager to rain on others’ parades, and in fact, many felt that every time they dismissed a pitch as “legless” they were scoring a point for good taste—or even stemming the dumbing-down of America. But Gabriel had also found that this stance of his wasn’t sustainable for long.
Marden might say it wasn’t sustainable because it sent vibrations of impatience into the air that would ricochet off the atmosphere and return to earth to make Gabriel himself appear uninspired. Then there was the fact that saying no to projects—be they movies, books, deals—didn’t help the bottom line. Marden believed the universe made its preference for people who said “yes” known by giving these intrepid characters more money. So if you were a young American in 1904, a little threatened by looming socioeconomic changes, you could find some solace in these words, from Marden’s chapter on the “Cheering-Up Business”: “The love of cheerfulness can be cultivated like any other faculty, and in practical life it will be worth more to you than a college education without it.” And also: “The pessimist repels trade and new business. The cheerful man, on the other hand, attracts it. There is a great drawing power in optimism.” (There’s the Law of Attraction again.) And as he restates it later: “The habit of feeling kindly towards everybody, of carrying about a helpful manner, an expression of love, of kindness, in one’s very face, and a desire to help and cheer, is worth a fortune to a young man or young woman trying to get on.”
By “worth a fortune,” Marden meant “worth a fortune.” In the late 1920s, the industrialist and New Thought disciple Roger Babson was no less convinced. “What is the biggest thing in the world?” he asked. “Some may suggest The World War.’ Another may suggest the ‘United States Steel Corporation’… But my answer to the question is different, as I believe that the biggest thing in the world is the law of action and reaction, namely, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Still, this fervent belief in the power that would be unleashed if only you fully appreciated the interconnected psychic nature of all input and output raised an interesting question: Why so many poor people still kicking around, hanging out on street corners? The answer they came up with was that living by the Law of Attraction was demanding, and thinking lovin
gly required a considerable amount of sheer will.
What were you supposed to do if you couldn’t muster the energy to try it? Besides taking a long hard look in the mirror—and realizing how flawed a specimen you yourself were—Marden suggested a few more pragmatic techniques. Like checking your facial expressions. (He cited approvingly one man who had “one corner of his mouth always curved up as though he had received some good news and was just dying to tell you about it.”) He also suggested you squelch the urge to put labels on people—that is, any label beyond a rudimentary, judgment-free here’s my boss, who tells me to kick ass. (Because one of the epitaphs in Marden’s Cemetery of Failure read “He was too sensitive,” and another, “He clung to his prejudices.”) The important thing was not to “pinch your own supply” of universal goodwill by fussing about other people’s habits.
Third, Marden wanted everyone to find and study people with a knack for warding off pessimism and nastiness—people like Benjamin Disraeli.12 A popular novelist and prime minister under Queen Victoria, Disraeli demonstrated the truth of the Law of Attraction to an unusual degree, Marden felt; he was widely considered an unparalleled expert in laying it on thick. One of his oft-quoted quips was “Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.”13 When the queen published Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, a vanity book of no particular literary importance, Disraeli would consistently use the phrase uwe authors, ma’am” when talking to her (he himself had published some fifteen novels by this time). “You have heard me called a flatterer,” Disraeli is reported to have remarked to Matthew Arnold, “and it is true. Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”
Marden didn’t advocate scattering kindness flowers only in the path of high-placed people—your garden-variety brownnosing. He wanted you to be an equal opportunity flatterer, and send those kind and encouraging words both up and down the societal ladder. Marden left the matter of what to say largely open but singled these people out for particular attention: “a newsboy, a waiter in a restaurant or a hotel, a conductor on a car, an elevator boy, a toiler in your home or your office, a poor unfortunate man or woman in a wretched home, or on a seat in the park.”
