The Importance of Flaws
“He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”
– Winston Churchill
The first step in executing on the public persona you envision for yourself is to check it for viability. Is this character believable?
We previously mentioned that strong public personas:
• Are clear, compelling, and easily digestible
• Depict a character trope that is not yet common, but the world would love to see
But to be believable, strong public personas must also contain flaws. The single biggest mistake individuals make when crafting a public persona is attempting to craft a “flawless persona” that displays all virtues and no obvious vices. It is difficult to emphasize just how disastrous these “flawless personas” are to the way people perceive you.
When someone is asked by someone else (or asks themselves), “What is wrong with X person?” they will always come up with an answer. When you attempt to create a “flawless persona,” that answer will be random (because nobody is going to believe you are perfect). By creating an “intentionally flawed persona,” you can choose what people determine is wrong with you. In addition to making your public persona believable, a chosen flaw yields immense advantages.
Imagine two individuals: Kenneth and Ichiro. Kenneth chose to make a “flawless” public persona and only highlight virtues, whereas Ichiro choses to display his arrogance as a clear and public vice.
Whenever someone asks what is wrong with Ichiro, people always say he is arrogant. When people ask what is wrong with Kenneth, they make up an answer. If we ask ten people what is wrong with Kenneth and Ichiro, we will be told up to ten different things that are wrong with Kenneth, whereas we will only hear about one thing that is wrong with Ichiro (his arrogance).
If the people who know Kenneth ask each other the same question, one may say, “Well, I think Kenneth is corrupt” and the other may say, “Yeah, well I think Kenneth is hiding something about himself.” Now, each of these two people have more ideas about what is wrong about Kenneth: that he is both corrupt and a liar, whereas they only think one thing is wrong with Ichiro. As the example with Kenneth and Ichiro demonstrates, the negative effects of “flawless personas” scale with the scale of the arena in which an individual is playing.
The issue is extremely apparent in political races. Strong and obvious flaws combined with a powerful character grant a politician and his or her supporters a remarkable ability to shrug off attacks. Any jab opponents make about this politician’s chosen public flaws enable a supporter to say “Well, sure, I already knew that.” Claims of vices unrelated to this politician’s public vices are easy to shrug off. “That’s ridiculous,” supporters say. “I know what’s wrong with him and that’s not it.”
You can see this dynamic play out amongst candidates like Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. Attacks against Donald Trump claiming he wasn’t good at business gained almost no hold in the media—despite ample evidence suggesting the attacks held weight. This is because such claims ran contrary to Trump’s easy-to-digest persona, which proudly features a collection of obvious flaws. When people are told Trump is bad at business they think, “I already know what is wrong with Trump and that isn’t it.”
We would go so far as to say most presidential elections can be predicted by looking for the candidate with the less vague flaws. A candidate with vague flaws will almost always lose to a candidate with pronounced character driving flaws.
Think carefully about the flaws you will choose to exhibit in public.
There are two types of flaws we recommend considering:
• Flaws that you can’t seem to shake no matter what you do. There may be some issues you have that would be impractically difficult to suppress or impossible to overcome. Consider unashamedly wearing these flaws on your sleeve. Winston Churchill offers a spectacular example of this. As, Tyrion Lannister, the vice-happy dwarf from Game of Thrones who at one point quipped, “Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.”
• Flaws that “seem” terrible but that don’t disqualify you from achieving your goals. Bill Clinton’s serial philandering may seem extremely negative to his opponents, however, in reality, nobody really cares (except his wife) and while some may view the behavior as immoral, it does not suggest Clinton is a dangerous or incompetent president and might even telegraph to many that he is a classic, dominant “alpha male” an element people like in leaders (obviously, the concept of an alpha male has long been challenged as a scientific concept but it still exists as a trope in our society). We would go so far as to say the only thing about his philandering that rubbed the public the wrong way was that it wasn’t with attractive enough women, which is the exception proving the rule (it was not within Bill Clinton’s public character to be the type of person who slept with women who weren’t classically attractive and therefore people took genuine exception to it).
A Note on Attractiveness and Moral Outrage: As every one-star review for this book mentions the above point, it warrants elaboration (this was true at the time this section was added; now a few negative reviews argue the book is boring, which we can’t argue against). We do not claim that the public’s distinctly negative reaction to Bill Clinton’s philandering is a good thing—it’s just a fact. Humans react with more moral repulsion on average to people acting outside of the stereotypes they’ve attached to them. The affair that ultimately inspired the House of Representatives to issue Articles of Impeachment against Bill Clinton did not involve a woman who looked like the “type” of person with whom the public expected a president to cheat, which exacerbated the media’s resulting moral outrage.
The public’s reaction to Bill Clinton’s affair stands in stark contrast to the lack of moral outrage associated with the affairs between John F Kennedy / Marilyn Monroe and Trump / Stormy Daniels (the second of which happened after this book was released, somewhat proving the point—the public was more concerned about the affair’s coverup than the affair itself, while the inverse was true in Bill Clinton’s case).
This dynamic is also at play in rape-related court cases, in which, sadly, it has been found that attractive rapists get shorter sentences and people who rape less attractive individuals are seen as more personally culpable. This reality is horrifying and morally wrong, but such doesn’t change the fact that it’s reality. Humans judge the morality of actions based on the perceived attractiveness of the victims, and humans punish people extra for behaving “out of character.”
(Should you be willing to cast a vote in favor of accepting inconvenient truths over uncomfortable realities, please drop us a review on Amazon. Now back to the book.)
When choosing a flaw in this category, make sure it is a genuine, maligned flaw yielding real social costs (but doesn’t affect your specific goals). You will almost certainly be tempted to choose a flaw that doesn’t really have a social cost (e.g., being clumsy). Harmless flaws have zero purchase in people’s mental models and are the same as having a “flawless personality.”