by Megan Hustad
Mind you, this same person was pretty conversant in stereotypes about certain occupations—most of us are. Wall Street Guy. Lawyer. Academic. Construction Worker. Graduate Student in English. Night Manager at Wendy’s. Blogger. Express fashion stores even based a clothing line and marketing push on the idea that the “Editor” holds enduring fascination for mall-goers everywhere. (Full disclosure: I have three pairs of these pants.) At the same time, the contempt with which a roomful of creative types will speak of Bankers is something to behold; it is roundly assumed, though none of the assembled has ever had a conversation with anyone in the financial sector that lasted longer than two minutes, that Bankers are Assholes. The only thing that can reasonably be concluded from all this back and forth is that people are reluctant to be defined by their job when they feel their work doesn’t represent their passions and capabilities—but are happy to define others by their job whenever it makes the world easier to understand.
5
to dominate the steel industry and become the second richest man in the world (second to John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil). By the time Carnegie died, in 1919, he’d given most of his fortune away to various philanthropic causes. It was a stranger, more romantic story than anything in The Arabian Nights, swooned the editor of his autobiography.
6
I realize now that he had probably been waiting for me to leave—because he couldn’t very well discreetly check the nameplate on my cubicle as long as I was still parked there.
7
Alexander, for his part, was so worried about the effect wrong expectations might have on new office boys that he called them the Endangered Classes. Swarms of them in the city, he fretted, many miles away from their homes and families—anything could happen to them.
8
Packages are a recurring motif. Horatio Alger’s young heroes were perpetually scrambling to return lost packages to gentlemen who had dropped them in the street, while his antiheroes—rich boys, snobs, and cigarette-smoking delinquents—always tried to avoid the carrying of packages.
9
The question, I’ll be honest, didn’t occur to me until the stage described in chapter 7.
t Among Marden’s other titles: Cheerfulness as a Life Power (1899); Prosperity: How to Attract It (1922); Everybody Ahead (1916); Pushing to the Front (1897); Self-Discovery: or, Why Remain a Dwarf (1922); Do It to a Finish (1909); Talks with Great Workers (1901); Every Man a King: or, Might in Mind-mastery (1906); The Victorious Attitude (1916); Architects of Fate (1895); and my favorite, judged on title alone, You Can, but Will You? (1920).
10
If you’re even passingly acquainted with Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006), the Law of Attraction should sound familiar. Here are two things you need to know about The Secret in relation to Marden. (Incidentally, Byrne makes no mention of Marden or New Thought in either her book or the DVD. Instead she pretends the “secret” was handed down by the sexier likes of Newton, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Einstein.) First, in contrast to the tone of Byrne’s production, Marden never claimed marshaling the Law of Attraction was easy. He paints it more as a strenuous spiritual and ethical struggle. Second, Marden wasn’t really interested in consumer goods, and didn’t promise his readers an unlimited flow of products the way The Secret does. As for “unlimited freedom”—another phrase from the DVD—his early twentieth-century audience would have found the concept too strange to contemplate.
11
trashing the ideas of their peers. Every time someone dared to offer an idea, everyone around the table would leap in with reasons why it was nothing short of idiotic. Senior executives didn’t try to stop the verbal fray. Sometimes they even nodded approvingly as smart-sounding faultfinders critiqued ideas to death.” The smart talk, claimed authors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, was something managers should worry about because it got in the way of solving problems—people all too easily substituted clever discourse for action.
12
At various times Marden also suggested Thomas Edison, Charles M. Schwab, the apostle Paul, the Buddha, John Wanamaker (the department-store magnate), and Jane Addams.
13
Many American success-lit authors have had crushes on British prime ministers. Disraeli comes up often in the early works—but was unceremoniously dumped in favor of Winston Churchill after World War II.
14
Unless you’re a certified masochist.
t New Thought spurred a lot of independent publishing. Bush’s Spunk: How to Lick Fear was one of many self-published pamphlets sold primarily by mail order.
15
But not the pope, notably. Catholics were still a little suspect in her world.
16
The Posts had stepped onto American shores as early as the mid-1700s, so it was considered an ideal match.
17
Edith Wharton, Post’s favorite novelist, wrote almost exclusively about this phenomenon. Ms. Undine Spragg, the relentless social climber at the center of The Custom of the Country; newly arrived in New York, frets constantly because she knows she’s surrounded by people who regard her and her family as “Invaders.” In this light, entry into society was partly a matter of overcoming the fear that you weren’t really wanted: “They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated?”
18
It occurred to me later that she had essentially attempted something like those thirty-second TV spots, where the new guy suggests something radical like changing the long-distance calling plan, or using FedEx, or Burger King for lunch, and everyone is just blown away by his vision. This does not happen in real life.
19
The title—almost too ironic to be true. The Hazards of Good Breeding.
20
The central story line of the play concerns an injured female trapeze artist who gets carried into the home of a small-town pastor. Trapeze artist and pastor then fall in love and get married, thereby completely scandalizing his congregation. Polly was made into a feature film in 1917, and produced again in 1932 as a vehicle for Clark Gable and Marion Davies, mistress of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, aka Citizen Kane.
21
As recently as 1934, John Dillinger was public enemy number one. The juxtaposition of his name with Lincoln’s seems quaint now, but probably struck a more jarring note to Depression-era ears.
22
Anecdotal evidence suggests that guys, particularly guys who read Thomas Pyn-chon, do this type of thing more often.
23
The book was actually written for use in a correspondence course. How effectively one might learn public speaking in the privacy of one’s own home, I’m not sure.
24
for proper wallpaper and curtain materials. To give a radio talk that will sound genuinely informal, spontaneous, and relaxed, the speaker may have to design his script with painstaking care, testing one phrase after another, in order to follow the content, language, rhythm, and pace of everyday talk. Similarly, a Vogue model, by her clothing, stance, and facial expression, is able expressively to portray a cultivated understanding of the book she poses in her hand; but those who trouble to express themselves so appropriately will have very little time left over for reading.”
25
His aesthetic isn’t impressive either. The Napoleon Hill Foundation website displays his books photographed alongside stacks of shiny gold coins.
26
It’s a dramatic scene, and its premise—that the novice only gets a moment to decide his fate—appears in a lot of make-it-or-break-it tales. In the movie Wall Street, Bud Fox is given five minutes to impress Gordon Gekko. In Mean Girls, Cady Heron has only seconds to choose which cafeteria table she’s going to sit at. The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart was expected to answer unexpected marriage proposals from wealthy but otherwise unappealing men while they stood and impatiently waited for her answer.
<
br /> 27
This affecting doorstep scene may have struck a chord with Hill because he himself had done something similar. Hill’s first mentor was former Virginia attorney general Rufus Ayres, a big man and an “active promoter” of the state’s coal interests. (What that meant is not entirely clear, and probably for good reason.) In 1901, at age nineteen, Hill sat down and wrote a letter to Ayres that began: “I have just completed a business college course and am well qualified to serve as your secretary, a position I am very anxious to have.” He was quick to add that he was pretty green and inexperienced. “I know that at the beginning working for you will be of more value to me than it will be to you. Because of this I am willing to pay for the privilege of working with you.” Instead, he got both job and salary.
28
This sounds, to me, suspiciously like “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” A little bit pinko, in other words, so you can imagine how hard Hill spun it.
29
Those familiar with 1980s business books will realize he’s talking about “synergy”—before that word was invented to make it even easier to ridicule the whole idea.
30
From “Where Hip-Hop Lives: Hot 97’s Turf Wars,” by Ben McGrath, The New Yorker; July 10 and 17, 2006.
31
The budding social scientist might object that his study had fatal design flaws. It’s possible, after all, that people who stayed at the office a little later were habitually more generous, or else more gullible, than those who skipped out earlier.
32
ever associated with “safety,” Brooks Brothers could reasonably lay claim to “ambitious,” Limbach concluded.
33
The truth of this statement is confirmed every time you hear about the suited-up Wall Streeter who conforms for five years, then cashes in his chips, takes a year off to travel, and then breaks out the flannel shirts and grows a beard while he fills out applications for a master’s program in landscape architecture. I’ve met at least two of them in person, and everyone hates them. (Not really—what they’re experiencing is envy.)
34
The British Labour Party minister Michael Young, who first coined the term meritocracy in 1958, warned that this might happen. He wrote a book, The Rise of the Meritocracy- that surveyed, Aldous Huxley-style, a hypothetical England after decades of pure meritocracy as government policy. It was a bleak portrait. In the days of dimwitted crown princes and blatant prejudice based on sex, creed, or skin color, or back when many believed God himself preordained status, those at the bottom of the ladder had factors beyond their control to blame. But if, in both theory and practice, all those in power were there because they were the best, what did that imply for those below? That they deserved their poverty and powerlessness because they were just not that bright? Young claimed he intended The Rise of the Meritocracy as both argument and counterargument. Perfectly realized, it was always going to be tinged with sadness: the upper classes wouldn’t feel obligated to help out the lower classes, and while those at the top would be brilliant (a good thing), once they mated with each other and passed on the smart genes to their kids, membership in the elite would become hereditary again. In short, the downside to meritocracy is that those born on third base think they hit a triple, and everyone else is subject to self-loathing.
35
The effect on married male colleagues and their families, that is. The 1960 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette addressed this issue head-on, as secretaries traditionally accompanied their bosses on business trips (someone had to take dictation, after all). It was a setup ripe for exploitation and other shenanigans, and Post gave a rather cryptic warning to the secretaries: “Certain jobs—particularly those of responsibility leading to the heights of success—carry with them the paradoxical responsibility of upholding a moral code of unassailable integrity while smashing to bits many of the long-established rules of propriety.” The onus was on them to set firm parameters (and to request a room on a separate floor of the hotel). Other onlookers got even hotter under the collar. In 1959, Esquire published a pulp paperback called Sex Vice and Business and stocked it with dozens of lurid stories about easy women, prostitutes, and other “favors” routinely enjoyed by the middle-class dad on a sales trip.
36
Girls, young women, women in midlife, and old women are all “girls” in the Helen Gurley Brown universe.
37
While she doesn’t spend much time teasing out philosophies (the ladies, perhaps, being more pragmatic about these things), Gurley Brown traces a direct line from being selfish to being marginalized. She saw a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship between the two.
38
An influential Harvard Business Review article would go over these very same themes in 1969. “Pygmalion in Management” posited that unskilled bosses had a devastating effect on the careers of entry-level employees. “Rarely do new graduates work closely with experienced middle managers or upper-level executives,” wrote the author J. Sterling Livingston. “Normally they are bossed by first-line managers who tend to be the least experienced and least effective in the organization,” a recipe that amounted to “the worst possible circumstances” for the young upstarts.
39
John T. Molloy’s Dress for Success a notable exception.
40
I’ll leave aside all the other ways Werner Erhard is a troubling figure. But that’s worth looking into, if you’ve got the time and the inclination.
41
Wop = an anti-Italian slur. It was short for “without papers,” as many Italian immigrants were suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.
42
Nowadays, US Weekly features such as “Stars! They’re Just like Us!” help celebrities do this. It invariably catches them pumping gas or leaving Starbucks.
43
My sister—a do-gooder in the nonprofit sector—came up with a term for this: “the stupid chills.” She got the stupid chills whenever the liability a person thought they were exposing wasn’t the one they were actually exposing, and it wasn’t a pleasant sensation. (Like goose bumps, only tinged with despair.) Anyone can get the stupid chills watching Jerry Springer, or following any scene where the person at the center of attention is somehow not in on the joke. I guess you could define the stupid chills as a form of empathetic embarrassment.
44
driven by desires deep under the skin. He anticipated the Richard Branson template, in other words.
45
Not least, I think, because it’s amusing to imagine moving in circles where a degree from Cornell is seen as a potential drawback.
46
The University of Michigan, I should add, is not a stupid school,‘t Witness also David Sedaris’s entire career.
47
Case in point: Hugh MacNaghton opened his book on Emile “every day in every way, I’m getting better and better” Coue by writing: “It is always difficult to know how best to begin. No sooner had I written these words than I realized that I could hardly have made a more disastrous start; to talk of difficulty (ask M. Coue) is to court failure, but my blunder is so instructive an example of what we should avoid that I will let it stand.”
48
When the “report” became the key signifier for lost autonomy I don’t know, but hopefully some young academic is writing a paper on it somewhere.
49
“I did retail for a day,” Heidi Montag from the television show The Hills once remarked. “It was really incredibly boring. You just sit there for hours and hours. I’m very proactive.” Covey did a lot to knead the word proactive into the American vocabulary, but he can’t fairly be blamed for how it gets misused in this way. Proactive never meant “in favor of activity.”
50
Just as you should never ask a favor right after delivering a compliment, you probably shouldn’t defend yourself and shill for whatever you’re trying to sell at the same time
. Unless you’re extremely rhetorically gifted, it will always sound delusional.
51
Covey doesn’t pay much attention to body language, but by fidgety I mean literally, a fidgetiness you can observe: they rub their eyes, wring their hands, or to reassure themselves, touch their neck, their tie, or the back of the chair before sitting down. Watch Ricky Gervais’s characterization of David Brent in the BBC version of The Office, and you will see this tie-stroking gesture about once every three minutes.
52
Not surprisingly, Trump arrived at a novel formulation to allow himself to claim humble beginnings anyhow. He stresses that Fred was a real estate developer in Brooklyn and Queens, unfashionable outer boroughs, and that he, the son, had to hustle like mad to get accepted as a player in Manhattan, just across the river. (“… family money didn’t get my first Manhattan projects built. I had to raise tens of millions from investors for those jobs.”)
53
“The Omarosa Experiment,” by Keith Hollihan. From The Morning News, an online magazine.
54
There may, in fact, be no better practical argument for volunteering a lot, as Helen Gurley Brown suggested you do, than the leverage it provides you at this moment.
55
Episode five: Trump and Steinbrenner also exchange I love you’s in Stein-brenner’s Yankee Stadium office.
56
A few pages later, Trump tells us that he put Cardinal O’Connor down as a reference on his application for a Nevada gaming license, so he could buy another Las Vegas casino. Which, depending on your views of the Catholic Church, is either genius or genius.
t Interestingly enough, if you time this gambit right, it might boost your boss’s opinion of your abilities as well as those of your younger colleagues. Or at least help him see you as hovering slightly above and apart from the undifferentiated lump of underlings. This was one of Edward E. Jones’s Ingratiation insights: Implicit in a compliment is that you put yourself in a position to judge.
