Personal Appearance

I have told this story many times before, but it is so good.

I played tennis as a kid, on the team in high school. On any high school tennis team, they have what is called a ladder. At the beginning of the season, the coach ranks all the players from 1 to 25. The top 9 kids play varsity. If you want to play varsity, you have to beat the guy in front of you, all the way up to the 9 spot. Then you can play varsity. That is how it has worked since the beginning of time.

Some context here. My sophomore year of high school, I had very long hair. I looked a bit like Michael Hutchence, without the Aussie accent, bedroom eyes, and sultry baritone. It was long and curly and flopped around when I played tennis. But at the beginning of tennis season in the spring of 1990, I was surprised when I saw that I was ranked 24 out of 25 on the ladder.

Now keep in mind, I actually did play varsity the previous season, as a freshman. There was no way I was the second-worst player on the team. I protested to the coach. Coach, there’s no fucking way I’m ranked 24 on this ladder. “Well,” he said, “I guess you are going to have to play your way up the ladder.”

This was going to take some doing. I mean, there were 14 guys ahead of me. 14 matches that I would have to schedule outside of practice time. “I’ll show him,” I thought. So I beat the 23rd guy. And I beat the 22nd guy. And after about a month of this, I finally beat the 9th-ranked player on the team. So I went to the coach and said, “Coach, put me in. I beat the number 9 guy on the team.”

So the way the team was structured was that the top 5 players on the team played singles, and then there were two doubles teams for the 6-9 spots. So when I asked the coach to put me in, he said, “Well, I don’t want to break up the doubles teams, so if you want to play, you will have to beat one of the singles players.”

Fuck. So I beat the number 8 guy, the number 7 guy, the number 6 guy, and finally, the number 5 guy. That last match wasn’t easy—the number 5 player was a new kid from Texas named Todd who had a wicked topspin forehand. I probably didn’t deserve to beat him, but I managed to throw him off his game and he started duffing the ball into the net. He threw his racquet multiple times.

So I go to the Coach. “Coach. I beat Todd. Put me in.”

He looked at me and said: “No.”

So I had a resentment against this coach for years. Decades. I mean, what coach wouldn’t want to play his best players, to give the team the best chance of winning? At the time, I wasn’t very introspective about it. I quit the team and went onto get a varsity letter in men’s volleyball. But over the years, I thought about it and thought about it. And it occurred to me that I looked like INXS and the rest of the team looked the cool kids from Pretty In Pink. Socioeconomics played a role. I was a poor kid from the mill town and I was going up against the offspring of doctors and lawyers. I didn’t look like a tennis player. But then again, neither did Andre Agassi, and he was pretty good.

If you want to be a tennis player, you should probably look like a tennis player (unless you are really, really good).

Also:

If you want to be an investment banker, you should probably look like an investment banker (unless you are really, really good).

Also:

If you want to be a rock star, you can’t dress like Michael Bolton in Office Space.

This is how life works. .01% of people are absolute fucking geniuses and the rest of us have to play by the rules. I was not that good in tennis, so if I wanted to play, I would have to look like Chad and Brad. You have to look the part.

There is a uniform for just about every occupation. As a chef, you’re practically expected to have sleeves of tattoos. As a cop, you’re expected to have a high-and-tight haircut. As a model, you have to be 5’10” and skinny (thought that is changing, I suppose). If you’re a blue-collar worker, you wear Carhartts. You wouldn’t show up to a construction site looking like an investment banker, and you wouldn’t show up to a banking interview looking like a construction worker.

But here’s the thing—at Lehman, I was that .01%. I was the absolute fucking genius. I interpreted the dress code very liberally, wore cheap suits with patches on the ass, $20 ties, and I generally didn’t give a fuck. And nobody bothered me, because I was really, really good at my job. I was able to get away with it, but most people couldn’t. The rules didn’t apply to me. Now, that wasn’t my thought process at the time—I wasn’t trying to be a rebel, I just thought the suits were fucking stupid, and I certainly wasn’t going to spend $1500 on one. If I were less good at my job, someone probably would have sat me down and told me to get my shit together and look like everyone else. But nobody did.

Years ago, like, back in the late 1990s, the Wall Street Journal did a profile on a strategist that used to wear Hawaiian shirts every day, while the rest of the firm was wearing suits. The guy was that good. There was one of those pointillistic pictures of him in the newspaper wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I thought that was pretty cool. It’s also indicative of a firm that has a good culture, instead of trying to cram a dress code down everyone’s throats and make people look like a bunch of automatons. Anyway, the days of suits are over on Wall Street, but the dress code persists. It’s business casual, but it’s a very specific kind of business casual, with fancy shirts and fancy pants and fancy watches. People still look like robots, but more laid-back robots.

These days I work very hard at looking like I don’t give a fuck, even though I really do give a great deal of fucks. My wardrobe is carefully curated. If I’m meeting potential subscribers, or I have a speaking gig, I think about the clothes I wear and what impression I want to make. I can tell you that in academics people truly do not give a fuck. Because they are still in possession of the incredibly naïve belief that it is the insides that count, not the outsides.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The outsides are often a physical manifestation of the insides. Someone who has high self-esteem, confidence, and a can-do attitude doesn’t dress like a hobo. Someone who is a loser doesn’t dress like a winner. A behavioral economist might call this signaling. Whenever we get dressed in the morning, we want other people to believe a story about ourselves. What is that story? Maybe you want someone to believe that you are rich and successful. Maybe you want someone to believe that you are smart. Maybe you want someone to believe that you are creative. We all do this. Except, of course, the academics, who want to remain their authentic selves, but when we look at those authentic selves, we don’t like what we see. Note: academics who do care about their appearance end up in administration.

I don’t know why we would want to look like anything other than our best. I don’t go outside to take out the trash unless I’m dressed to the nines. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, yada yada. Cliché, but true.

As for the tennis coach, he’s going to smoke a turd in hell for that one.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music Recommendation: Khen – Yellow. Khen (from Israel, otherwise known as Hen Falah), is one of my favorite producers of all time. This is his new track on Anjunadeep. It’s great, but mostly I’m including it because it’s named after my cat Yellow.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to whoever you like.