Outlining your Public Persona
The following steps will have utility to any individual, even those that prefer to go unnoticed:
- Identify what, specifically, you want to achieve in life to maximize your objective function. For example, you may decide you want to be a successful businessperson, an editor at a major newspaper, a famous preacher, or a senior engineer at a major tech firm.
- Make a list of individuals who have achieved these roles in the past. For example, a young woman who decides she wants to be a successful businesswoman might identify the top 100 most powerful women in business (removing all the women that had gained their power through paths not available to her like celebrity fame, inheritance, or marriage).
- Carefully analyze these individuals. Read profiles on them, review their educational and job histories on LinkedIn or Wikipedia, watch their interviews and speeches, and listen to recordings of their voices. Look for similarities in the way they dress, speak, move, and ascend to their current roles.
This process will reveal common features of individuals who are successful in your field. Focus on the features that differentiate these individuals from societal norms, as any features that are societal norms are likely unimportant and only apparent because they would appear in any subsection of the population. What you must specifically attempt to identify is which traits, mannerisms, and outfits are common among this group of people successful in your desired field but uncommon among the general population.
Making the Change
Unless you have taken the above steps in the past or have very low ambitions for your future, you will likely realize that your current public identity is far from optimal for achieving your goals in life. The normal response for a human brain being told it needs to put significant effort into something is to scramble for an excuse that will allow it to maintain inaction and the status quo.
You may be thinking “I need to wait a while before making a major change in my personality, wardrobe, and speech patterns.” This is nothing but a tawdry justification for inaction and is not true. Will some people ask you: “Why the change?” Probably. Will some people tease you? Maybe. Will the change be a hassle? Yes. But these issues are not important when contrasted with the potential benefits.
There will be no convenient time to rework your character. If you do not start now, you may never transition into the type of person you need to be to achieve your goals in life (or at the very least, you will add unnecessary difficulty to achieving your goals).
Moreover, making a concerted change to your public image has benefits that extend beyond how other people perceive you. Specifically, your new outfit and public personality act as a constant signal to yourself that you have made a conscious decision to change and improve. Wardrobe and appearance changes hold unique utility as they are monetarily and socially costly to adopt, which makes them a “costly threshold.” If you are unwilling to step over that threshold, it is unlikely any of the changes you have decided to make to yourself through the course of reading this guide will stick.