The Underappreciated Virtues of Arrogance

If you don’t think you’re awesome, no one else will

Full disclosure: that title is total link bait.

And now that you’re here, I have to say it worked beautifully.

The real story is one of my experiences over the past few years being a generally demure and shrugging type learning to use more confident language when interacting with people.

Also, it’s a story of how to work with clients so that your clients love you and especially in a world where you can do entire jobs for people across the world without ever hearing their voice, your email writing style defines a proportionately huge part of how they see you.

HOW TO COMMUNICATE SO PEOPLE HEAR YOU

Think about people who other people love. George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven (also, Pitt in that one). Go watch McConaughey in Lincoln Lawyer or True Detective. Robert California, the Office character.

They don’t have to be movie stars, but those are the ones we all recognize and I can most easily reference. Maybe you have a father or uncle or friend who always seems to know what to say, always has a measured presence.

Whenever you write an email, read it with their voice.

Does it sound like them?

Because a lot of my first draft emails don’t. They concede power all over the place and use sloppy self degrading language like “I know you’re busy” and “if it’s not too much bother for you” instead of just being forward and saying what you need to say. Be efficient, don’t waste your time with this email.

It’s not an ego thing. There are people who claw their way to feeling important with this method (Trump springs to mind) and it’s still effective (Trump’s political success springs to mind) but ultimately maybe done for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t have to be self gratifying at all.

What you’re trying to do is establish your seat at the table.

And let’s be honest, you’re allowed a seat at any table.

If you don’t think you do, you never will be.

There’s an arrogance there, right? But in the end, it’s a very effective one. You just want to be respected and heard, so go and be those things.

And it’s not a privilege thing. If anything it’s anti-privilege: this is the advice I’d give the minorities and those who struggle to butt into the old white dude club (which is a club no one wants to be in, but if we took it back then it would just be a table like the one we all sit at now together.)

In effect, this is the language of powerful people.

And you know how they got to be powerful? By speaking this language and butting themselves into places like that. There’s rich kids with no power and poor kids brimming with it. It’s armour you put on yourself.

HOW TO COMMUNICATE SO PEOPLE LOVE YOUR IDEAS

This is the part I was actually wanting to write about.

When I was a young designer, my emails to clients would sound something like this:

“So I went with the orange because I think it’s a good colour here (but maybe the yellow is better?) and people will probably go for it. I’ve included some renders that are alright, but I could sort of make them better after.”

Let’s dissect that a bit.

a) it reads like I don’t know what I’m doing. Is orange or yellow better? I’m the one who is supposed to decide. So decide! That’s literally what they’re paying you to do.

b) just at a language level ‘probably’ and ‘maybe’ are really washy words. It’s hard to trust designers who are so seemingly unsure / willing to flip flop.

c) my work, the renders, aren’t spoken of very highly. I should be proud to display my efforts and if I’m not proud of them, I should work harder to make them up to my standards before emailing the client with them.

That c) is my biggest growth in the past few years. I was and still am critical of myself inside of the emails I send to the people who are supposed to be critical of me — guess how the work is going to be seen if we’re both communicating apathy towards it?

Instead, I’m now revising those drafts with language like “here’s the renders, I think you’re really going to like what I did with version five” which already reads so much cleaner. I’m excited to share, I’m proud of my work, I think she’s going to like what I’ve done (which shows I’m listening and understanding their position and needs). This sets the mood. If I’m excited, they’re more likely to be excited / more likely to love the work.

Even for the same output of work, you can control how it’s received.

And ultimately being received well leads to getting paid, getting more work, getting more referrals from them for other jobs and so on.

This is probably a lot of that infamous Steve Jobs reality distortion field effect too. Go listen to any of the keynote presentations and notice how utterly in love Steve is with the iPod or iPhone or Mac. It’s contagious, that’s an underlying part of our empathy system. We love to love things other people love. This is the prime engine of social network sharing.

Speaking of, you can totally use the same methodology for social networks: I’ve always posted things with really self degrading commentary about how quick and little the art is and in turn that art is probably seen as rough and insignificant. In turn, the crowd reaction to it probably isn’t as positive as if I had really hyped it up for exactly what it is.

All that to say: people pick up on how you present yourself and your work. Take a moment to read over how you’re being seen.

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT

This is 100% the trick to confidence.

If you feel like you don’t deserve to be at the table, everyone at the table will smell it on you. There’s a certain amount of delusion and overreaching that is required to fully convince yourself that you do deserve to be there.

In all irony, there will always be a handful of people at that table who themselves aren’t confident and probably looking at you, knowing that you can smell them out.

And then, just like that, you’re one of the people they’re trying to impress instead of the other way around.

When I was 16 I was on the hiring board of a small web design firm, we were looking for a new graphic artist who would work beside me.

This experience changed everything I knew at the time about age and seniority and power. I was on that side of the table and people much older than me where nervous to answer my questions about them.

I’ve always been anti-age in the sense that I’ve always just sort of done whatever I wanted regardless of what was considered normal for my stature. Honestly, the reason I had that web design job was because I went for it and applied when my other friends thought it was beyond them. It might have been, skill-wise, but they were 100% going to not get a job they didn’t even apply for. Fortune favours the bold.

And eventually you just are at the table that you were previously so nervous about. You realize that each step up isn’t actually terrifying at all.

Remember when you were in grade school and all the older kids seemed so different and scary? And that first day of junior high was so nervous because you had to try and fit in with them, only to realize all of your peers were actually just the people who were also in your class the years previously?

Life doesn’t stop doing that.

The progression is up to you now, there’s no grades, but those peers and seemingly scary people will come and go and if you’re swimming upward, you’ll realize sometimes you have to let go of those people you were scared of because now they’re holding you down.

So go, swim upward.