by Megan Hustad
A noble goal, to be sure, but it still begs the question of how it advances one’s career, in any practical sense, to be friendly to homeless ladies. Well, the Law of Attraction was difficult to marshal but it didn’t really discriminate; good or bad, high or low, it could be used to procure just about anything. (One New Thought practitioner went around Greenwich Village telling women she could get them diamond necklaces—“Anything you want!”—if they only thought about diamond necklaces in the right way. Marden himself might say that the sudden appearance of How to Get What You Want in my mailbox showed that the universal Mind was aware of my needs.) The Law of Attraction could also bring about personal transformation. While Marden was busy scribbling, a Frenchman named Emile Coue made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic by touting something he called autosuggestion, a New Thought practice that revolved around repeating the phrase “Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better” every night, twenty times, before bed. But as Hugh MacNaghton, the author of a book on Coue, wanted to know, how could repeating a false statement over and over again possibly help you? What if you weren’t, in fact, getting any better? When he got the chance to observe Coue in person, however, he felt forced to concede that perhaps success lay in the doing. Sure it sounded childlike; you had to admit that if you were at all intelligent. But masters of autosuggestion seemed to glide through the streets with the greatest of ease. And since it was obvious that talking about pain, incompetence, and grossness rarely prevented those things, perhaps it was also true that being highly critical of others did you more harm than it did them. And so it might also be true that a little positive feedback, on whomever it was bestowed, could lift you up in the eyes of the whole world. Or at least in the eyes of your boss.
I know at least one strict, if inadvertent, follower of the Mar-den philosophy. I once worked with an editor who was incessantly proclaiming, “Oh, I’m so happy!” She kept her office door open nearly all the time, and she talked loudly, and you could hear this phrase trilling down the hallway. Sometimes it made phone conversations for people in nearby cubicles challenging. When the art director presented her with cover designs that she liked: “Oh, I’m so happy!” When a literary agent finally got her on the line: “Oh, I’m so happy you called!” When anything went particularly well: “Oh, I’m so happy!” When she asked a fellow editor to read a manuscript to get his support for Thursday’s editorial meeting, and he returned with a glowing report: “Oh, I’m so happy you liked it!” I thought she was an idiot. That her delivery was usually breathless and excited, like a cheerleader after a handstand routine, didn’t help.
It was only later that I recognized her particular brilliance.
If making someone happy is a pleasurable activity (and it generally is), and we can see that some people are relatively easy to please while others are impossible to please, the natural human impulse is to lean toward the easy-to-please.14 So is it possible that by making her joy so very obvious, she was nudging people toward choosing her as the person they wanted to please most?
“Oh, I’m so happy” is, of course, also an indirect form of flattery. (Saying you’re happy with something the art director has produced is pretty close to saying you’re happy with the art director, period.) It can change someone’s opinion of you as well. Edward E. Jones, a sociologist who spent a lot of time studying this dynamic—he called his book Ingratiation—claimed that the effectiveness of pleasantries and compliments “seems to derive from the premise that people find it hard not to like those who think highly of them.” If we perceive that someone likes or respects us, we’re likely to shift our opinion of that person— if it’s negative to begin with, or just neutral—closer to a match. Cheerleading, in other words, is a diplomatic masterstroke.
Taking Marden’s ideas to their logical conclusion suggests you may not even have to be within earshot for it to work. Actual sucking-up isn’t strictly necessary—simply zapping generous assessments into the ether could have much the same effect. Which is why Marden and all other New Thought preachers were constantly encouraging young workers to carry on like they had just won the lottery. Or as the author David Bush succinctly put it in his 1924 pamphlet: “Smile, you rascal, smile. Think pleasant.
That Marden spent so much time touting kindness suggests he must have actually believed this. He rambled on far too long and passionately to be dismissed as an opportunistic hack (several of his fifty-four books run on to five hundred pages).
In 1895, Houghton Mifflin published Marden’s Pushing to the Front. It went through twelve printings in twelve months, and soon it had been translated into twenty-five languages. One million copies were sold in Japan alone. “Didn’t you know it was that book which gave us the courage to resist the Russian encroachments?” a Japanese visitor reportedly told his American host. “Among ourselves we often call it the Japanese Bible.” In 1926, the critic H. L. Mencken grumbled about having seen Marden’s books propped up on newsstands as far away as Spain, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
“You know, at the end of the day, snark is a problem because there’s a certain amount of self-referentialism to it,” concluded Gabriel, the screenwriter. “You could be at lunch, talking about what an anorexic headcase your last boss was, or how the production company you last worked for had a ridiculous reporting structure that stifled initiative, blah, blah, blah, and… there’s always the risk that your conversation partner will be sitting there, taking small sips from her water glass, and thinking, well, maybe so, or maybe the problem was you.” Gabriel said he’d eventually discovered it was wiser in many situations to keep the sullen wanderings of his mind to himself—even amongst people who slapped their cell phones shut like they’d just walked off the set of Entourage.
This again is not easy. “It’s much more difficult to write an arresting piece ‘In Praise of’ something,” remarked a former colleague who pens reviews from time to time. “It’s easier to be interesting when you’re taking something down. The real challenge is to swoon and still sound sharp.” As Dale Carnegie would later point out in How to Win Friends and Influence Peopley Disraeli was such a successful flatterer because wherever he went, he could count on being one of the smartest men in the room. But it seems he dodged the Great Failure Army by meditating on something other than, say, Queen Victoria’s resemblance to a stalker.
It’s a lesson worth remembering whenever you’re tempted to let bitchy typecasting punctuate your workday. Why risk the undertow when your ultimate goal is to raise others’ opinion of you? Should you decide to explore Marden’s “Cheering-Up Business” instead, you might want to bear these other things in mind as well:
Don’t be “nice.” Express gratitude and say nice things, sure, but don’t strive to be “nice.” Marden doesn’t use the word himself. He writes about being generous, optimistic, fun-loving, warm, encouraging, healthy, and joyous, but nice doesn’t make the list. There’s a tepid and watered-down quality to “nice,” and it seems to me that most everyone who uses it to describe somebody else isn’t really talking contours of character, but rather surface gestures and keeping up appearances.
Not being “nice” also means an end to “Thanks!”—or worse, “Thx!”—e-mails. “Thx!” is “nice,” and therefore a big waste of time. (E-mails need to be opened, read, and deleted, after all—altogether too much effort for “Thx!”) It’s better to add something distinctive and personal that makes the thank-you message both more memorable and more gratifying for the recipient.
Don’t affix labels to people you don’t get along with. Fixating on a so-called difficult person just long enough to imagine a label on her forehead—complainer, dictator, douchebag—is a strategic blunder. Some books suggest carving humanity up into types is useful when you’re trying to cope and communicate with said difficult person, and that once you understand and can categorize his MO, you can work on altering his objectionable behavior. (See “Interlude.”) To that I’d say: Good luck trying to manage another adult’s behavior. Trying t
o improve your boss—or anyone who outranks you, for that matter—is rarely an enriching exercise.
All this said, if you must scratch the itch, reserve your arrows for those who are well paid, pampered, and take themselves a little too seriously. Spare the office receptionist. (So Gwyneth Paltrow is probably fair game, come to think of it.)
Do be careful whom you compliment. Scattering compliments willy-nilly is tricky for people lower on the group’s totem pole—because tossing one up to those ranked higher suggests that you imagine yourself in a position to judge their performance. And while you might think you’re capable of judging their performance, they might not. (This is why it sounds bizarre to say, “You did a terrific job today” to your boss.) Flattery, Jones said, was always difficult to take at face value, and the wrong context for your comment could reduce the credibility of your statement to zero. Timing was also important. If you gave a compliment to someone seconds before asking for a favor, you rendered that compliment null and void. If you gave the exact same compliment to two or more different people, especially two people stationed just down the hall from each other, then you also sounded less than reliable. If you were really sophisticated and smart, you would flatter someone behind their back, and on occasions that didn’t call for you to be saying anything sweet. (And then trust that it would get back around to the intended audience. It usually does.)
Complimenting attributes besides the obvious is another time-honored technique. In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald had one of his ingenues say this to one of her suitors: “Please don’t fall in love with my mouth—hair, eyes, shoulders, slippers—but not my mouth. Everybody falls in love with my mouth.” Even more effective is complimenting someone on a quality you know her to be proud of, but also a little unsure as to whether anyone else can see or appreciate it. This is what Disraeli supposedly did—ad nauseum—with Her Majesty. Assuaging people’s selfdoubt is a sure way to endear yourself to them.
Do be sure you’re being asked to display your devastating wit and intelligence before you whip it out. John, a creative director, described how once, midmeeting, a colleague popped up to grab something back at his desk, and as he was headed out, was asked if he could, by the way, please bring back a stapler while he was at it. This prompted a pause at the door and a monologue about “errand boys” and how Lyndon B. Johnson might have handled a similar situation. Which only led John, his senior colleague, to think, if not actually say out loud: “Now is not the time for you to perform. Now is the time for you to fetch a stapler.”
Don’t worry about sounding phony. Which is not to say that you should lie, only that you shouldn’t stop yourself from saying something affirming just because you think your motives might fall under suspicion. All the above warnings about complimenting aside, studies show that confident, high-ranked individuals appreciate and will gladly take all the praise they can get—even if they know they’re being buttered up. Their ability to “see through it” doesn’t affect their enjoyment of it.
Ingratiation also floated the suggestion that as “a person tends to bring his private feelings in line with his public actions,” speaking affirmative words, even if they sounded phony at first, might actually prompt a transformation in how you perceived your job.
Do criticize artfully. Sometimes you’re asked to give an opinion on an idea or project that—can’t be helped, no matter how hard you try—plainly disgusts or bores you. Conveying that disgust without offending (unnecessarily) or making yourself look bad is a challenge. It’s an art that thrives on repeated practice, however. Marden often referred to saying affirmative words as a habit—something that got easier, and came more naturally, over time.
Meanwhile, try something in the vaguely constructive vein of “I liked_. I would have liked it even more if she had done more of_toward the middle.” You remain upbeat, and still show off your analytical skills. If you have to reject a proposal, try any variation of “Thanks, but it’s not quite right
Tor me/now’s not the ideal time/it’s not quite what I’m looking tor at the moment. But best of luck with it.”
Do, if you’re going to deploy snark, be so very skilled at it that you’ll be able to dine out on your pithy commentary for a long time. Some people have been able to translate their knack at sarcastic asides into lucrative careers writing blogs, op-ed columns, and books. If you think you might be equally gifted, maybe ask around to determine whether you really are. No need for me to pile on with the names of those who’ve tried and failed to make snark, backstab-bing, or publishing nasty tell-alls pay the bills, but they’re greater in number than those who succeeded. (Marden, of course, would say that even their flush of early success will be short-lived.)
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In 1914 another New Thought author added that he believed most wealthy Americans had not been reincarnated that many times, and that this explained a lot about the economy. Americans were predominantly young souls, and so had “not had the opportunity to create very much negative energy with their Intellect”; thus they excelled at manipulating the Law of Attraction to their advantage.
As for Orison Swett Marden, he simply felt that the average person—young soul or old—wasn’t inclined to get much work done wallowing in an atmosphere of cynicism. (From The Optimistic Life, again: “Nobody does good work when discouraged. There is no spontaneity in it, no resourcefulness, no inventiveness, no originality, no enthusiasm. It is mechanical, lifeless… Give! give!! give!!! It is the only way to keep from drying up, from becoming like a sucked orange,—juiceless, insipid.”)
The point of dwelling on the good parts, in other words, was that it led to gains in productivity. Seen in this light, the Law of Attraction, far from a load of pseudoscientific hoo-hah, is pure pragmatism.
3
Party Tips for the
Nouveau Riche
* * *
Etiquette and the Importance
of Asking Questions
People, particularly Americans, like to know Why
and What and How. They want to know the rules
of the game, whether they observe them or not.
—FRANK CROWNINSHIELD, on Emily Post’s brilliant career
EMILY POST CARED less about which fork you shoved in your mouth and when than she did what came out of your mouth. On that point, the godmother of etiquette was a fanatic. She was obsessed with dinner-party conversation, and what she witnessed during the 1910s and 1920s was that people needed a brush-up course. All those rubes from mid-western backwaters who had taken Andrew Carnegie’s example to heart, who’d made a killing in railroads, lumber, oil, or all of the above, and who then moved to glittering East Coast cities and bought their wives and daughters long, lacy dresses, wishing, hoping, and otherwise straining hard to break into “society”—they would sit at the table with their lobster bisque and dinner rolls, and chatter their blundering way through the meal. Post felt that their poor conversational skills were squandering their best chances. But she had a real soft spot for them, even though most of her fellow blue bloods would sooner they had stayed down on the farm. Her 692-page Etiquette: In Society, In Business, In Politics, and at Home was a smash-hit—the number one nonfiction bestseller of 1922—largely because it sought to make life easier for the yahoo nouveaux riches.
American new money has always been subject to very unflattering stereotypes, which is peculiar, really, given how this country was founded by people who had no time for inherited privilege.* In movies, on television, in novels, people who’ve recently come into money are depicted as clumsy, cloying braggarts, always bumping into sofas and up against the establishment. They buy too many trinkets, and barge into rooms and situations without knowing exactly what’s going on. There’s a line in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—the Truman Capote novella, not the movie—where aspiring socialite from the sticks Holly Go-lightly (she’s from somewhere in small-town Texas) says something like “Anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid.” By which she means,
basically, that a new arrival shouldn’t let on that she’s been standing outside, peering through the window and waiting to get in, because God forbid someone think she hasn’t been an insider the whole time. Unfortunately this strategy doesn’t work out so well for her, and she ends up leaving New York, possessionless and on the run from the law in Argentina with a shifty (and married) father of seven.
Golightly’s blaze-ahead approach doesn’t work well for aspiring professionals either. The director of a major fashion magazine’s online division recently told me this story: One day he stepped into the elevator at Four Times Square, a fabled office ‘ Witness The Beverly Hillbillies. George Jefferson (of The Jeffersons), and The Anna Nicole Show.
tower in midtown Manhattan. Already inside were three young women. He imagined they were just out of college, perhaps interns or assistants—he hadn’t yet met them. Nor did they take much notice of him, because they were deeply absorbed in the glossy magazine they were sharing among them. “That’s the one I want. I want her job,” the tallest one said, pointing at the masthead. The other two agreed it sounded great, though a few other job titles were mentioned as pleasant alternatives. Beauty editor, for instance. A few hair flips later, the elevator dinged and they walked out. At no point did it occur to them that (a) the man who had gotten in on the third floor might be an industry bigwig; (b) the woman whose job they’d selected was a good friend of his; or (c) they might have gained in their quest for professional advancement by, say, acknowledging his presence.
