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Law 6 – Court Attention At All Costs
Everything is judged by its appearance; what it unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all costs. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colourful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.
Part 1: Surround Your Name With The Sensational And Scandalous
Draw attention to yourself by creating an unforgettable, even controversial image. Do anything to make yourself seem larger than life and shine more brightly than those around you. Make no distinction between kinds of attention – notoriety of any sort will bring you power. Better to be slandered and attacked than ignored.
The Wasp And The Prince
“A wasp named Pin Tail was long in quest of some deed that would make him forever famous. So one day he entered the king’s palace and stung the little prince, who was in bed. The prince awoke with loud cries. The king and his courtiers rushed in to see what had happened. The prince was yelling as the wasp stung him again and again. The courtiers tried to catch the wasp, and each in turn was stung. The whole royal household rushed in, the news soon spread, and people flocked to the palace. The city was in an uproar, all business suspended. Said the wasp to itself, before it expired from its efforts, ‘A name without fame is like fire without flame. There is nothing like attracting notice at any cost.’” (Indian Fable)
Observance Of The Law
PT Barnum, America’s premier 19th century showman, started his career as an assistant to the owner of a circus, Aaron Turner. In 1836 the circus stopped in Annapolis, Maryland, for a series of performances, and on the morning of the opening day Barnum took a stroll through town, wearing a new black suit. People started to follow him, and someone accused him of being the Reverend Ephraim K Avery, a man infamous in America for being acquitted of a murder charge but who most people believed to be guilty. The angry mob tore at Barnum’s suit and was ready to lynch him, but after Barnum’s desperate appeals the crowd agreed to accompany him back to the circus where he could verify his identity.
Once there Turner revealed this was all a practical joke – he had started the rumour that Barnum was Avery, and the crowd dispersed. Barnum was furious with his boss and demanded to know why he had done this, to which he replied “My dear Barnum, it was all for our good. Remember, all we need to ensure success is notoriety.” During the rest of the day the joke was the talk of the town, and that night and every night the circus stayed in Annapolis it was packed to the rafters. Barnum had learned a valuable lesson he would never forget.
Barnum’s first big venture on his own was the American Museum – a collection of curiosities, located in New York. One day a beggar approached Barnum on the street, but instead of giving him money Barnum decided to employ him, and took him back to the museum. Once there, he gave the man five bricks and told him to make a slow circuit of several blocks, and at certain points he was to lay one of the bricks down on the pavement, always keeping one brick in his hand. On his journey around the blocks he was to keep replacing each brick on the pavement with the one in his hand, remaining serious at all times and answering no questions, and once back at the museum he was to enter, walk around inside, then leave through the back door and make the same bricklaying circuit again.
On the man’s first walk through the streets, several hundred people watched him as he completed his mysterious circuit, and by his fourth circuit people had swarmed around him, debating amongst themselves what he was doing. Every time he entered the museum he was followed by a crowd of people, most of whom paid the admission price to keep watching him inside, and many of these became distracted by the museum’s exhibitions and stopped following the man and took a tour of the museum instead.
By the end of the day the brick man had drawn over 1,000 people into the museum, and a few days later the police ordered him to stop his bricklaying stunt as the crowds had grown so big they were blocking the traffic. The bricklaying stopped, but many thousands of people had entered Barnum’s museum, and word of mouth ensured many more thousands would do so in the coming months.
One of the first oddities Barnum toured around the country was Joice Heth, a woman he claimed was 161 years old and had once been George Washington’s nurse. After several months the crowds began to dwindle so Barnum sent an anonymous letter to the papers, claiming that Heth was an elaborate fraud and was in fact made up of “whalebone, rubber, and countless springs”, and those who had not bothered to see her before became curious and paid to see her, while a good number of those who had already seen her paid again for another look to see if the accusation was true.
In 1842 Barnum purchased the carcass of what was supposedly a mermaid. The creature had the head of a monkey and the body of a fish, perfectly joined together, and Barnum placed numerous newspaper adverts saying it was captured in the Fiji Islands, the only place on earth these creatures existed. He then took it to a museum for experts to look at, and a huge national debate erupted as to whether it was real or not, but in any case thousands flocked and paid to see it to judge for themselves.
A few years later Barnum toured Europe with General Tom Thumb, a five year old dwarf who Barnum claimed was an 11 year old English boy, and whom he had trained to perform many remarkable acts. During this tour Barnum’s name attracted so much attention that Queen Victoria, the definition of sobriety, requested a private audience with him and his dwarf at Buckingham Palace and his fame soared to unimaginable heights.
Interpretation
Barnum understood the fundamental truth about attracting attention: Once people’s eyes are on you, you have a special legitimacy. For Barnum, creating interest meant creating a crowd, and as he later wrote, “Every crowd has a silver lining.” Crowds also tend to act in conjunction, if one person stops to watch a beggarman laying bricks down in the street, more will do the same, and with a gentle push they will enter your museum or watch your show.
To create a crowd you have to do something different and odd, and any kind of curiosity will do as crowds are magnetically attracted by the unusual and inexplicable. Once you have their attention never let it go, if it veers towards someone else it does so at your expense, and Barnum would ruthlessly suck attention away from his competitors as he knew what a valuable commodity it is.
At the beginning of your rise to the top, spend all your energy on attracting attention. Most importantly, the quality of the attention is irrelevant, as no matter how badly his shows were reviewed or how savage were the attacks on his hoaxes, Barnum would never complain. If a critic gave him a particularly bad review, he would invite them to the show and give them the best seat in the house, and he even went as far as writing anonymous attacks on his own shows just to keep his name in the papers.
From Barnum’s viewpoint attention, whether negative or positive, was the main ingredient of success. The worst fate in the world is for a man who yearns for fame, glory, and power, is to be ignored.
“If the courtier happens to engage in arms in some public spectacle such as jousting......he will ensure that the horse he has is beautifully caparisoned, that he himself is suitable attired, with appropriate mottoes and ingenious devices to attract the eyes of the onlookers in his direction as surely as the lodestone attracts iron.” (Baldassare Castiglione, 1478-1529)
Keys To Power
Burning more brightly than those around you is a skill that no-one is born with. You have to learn to attract attention, and at the start of your career you must attach your name and reputation to a quality, an image, that sets you apart from other people. This image can be something like a characteristic style of dress, or a personality quirk that amuses people and gets talked about. Once the image is established, you have an appearance, a place in the sky for your star.
It is a common mistake to imagine that this peculiar appearance of yours should not be controversial, that to be attacked is somehow bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. To avoid being a flash in the pan, and having your notoriety eclipsed by someone else, you must not discriminate between different types of attention; in the end, every kind will work in your favour. Barnum welcomed personal attacks and felt no need to defend himself, and he deliberately courted the image of being a humbug.
The court of Louis 14th contained many talented writers, artists, and great beauties, but no-one was more talked about than Duc de Lauzun. The duke was short, and prone to the most insolent of behaviour, but Louis was so amused by his eccentricities that he could not bear him to be away from court. It was simple – the strangeness of the duke’s character attracted attention, and once people were enthralled by him they wanted him around at any cost.
Society craves larger than life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity. Never be afraid of the qualities that set you apart from others and draw attention to you, court controversy, even scandal. It is better to be attacked and slandered than ignored, all professionals are ruled by this law and all professionals have a bit of showman in them.
Thomas Edison knew that to raise money he had to remain in the public eye at all cost. Almost as important as his inventions was how he presented them to the public and courted attention, so he would design visually dazzling experiments to draw people in. He would talk of future inventions that seemed fanatical at the time, such as robots and machines that could read your thoughts, and even though he had no intention of wasting any of his time on such inventions because he talked about them people talked about him.
He did everything he could to make sure that he received more attention than Nikola Tesla, who was arguably more brilliant than Edison but much less well known. In 1915 it was rumoured that Edison and Tesla would be joint recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics, but the prize was given to a couple of English physicists instead. Later on it was discovered that Edison had been approached by the prize committee but had turned them down, refusing to share the prize with Tesla, as at that point his fame was greater than Tesla’s and he felt that sharing the prize with him would deflect attention from him onto Tesla.
If you find yourself in a lowly position that offers you little opportunity to draw attention to yourself and effective trick is to attack the most visible, most famous, most powerful person you can find. In the 16th century a young Roman servant boy called Pietro Aretino wanted to get people’s attention as a writer of poetry, so he published a satirical poem about the pope and his love for his pet elephant. The attack put him in the public eye immediately, but you have to remember that once you have the public’s attention you have to use this tactic sparingly to stop it wearing thin.
Once in the limelight you must constantly renew it by adapting and varying your method of courting attention. If you don’t, the public will grow tired, will take you for granted, and will move onto a newer star. Pablo Picasso never allowed himself to fade into the background; if his name became too attached to a particular style, he would deliberately upset the public with a new series of paintings that went against all expectations. Better to create something ugly and disturbing, he believed, than to let viewers grow too familiar with his work. Understand: People feel superior to the person whose actions they can predict. If you show them who is in control by playing against their expectations, you both gain their respect and tighten your hold on their fleeting attention.
Image: The Limelight
The actor who steps into this brilliant light attains a heightened presence. All eyes are on him. There is room only for one actor at a time in the limelight’s narrow beam; do whatever it takes to make yourself its focus. Make your gestures so large, amusing, and scandalous, that the light stays on you while the other actors are left in the shadows.
Authority
Be ostentatious and be seen.....What is not seen is as though it did not exist....It was light that first caused all creation to shine forth. Display fills up many blanks, covers up deficiencies, and gives everything a second life, especially when it is backed by genuine merit. (Baltasar Gracian, 1601-1658)
Part 2 – Create An Air Of Mystery
In a world growing increasingly banal and familiar, what seems enigmatic instantly draws attention. Never make it too clear what you are doing or about to do. Do not show all your cards. An air of mystery heightens your presence; it also creates anticipation – everyone will be watching you to see what happens next. Use mystery to beguile, seduce, even frighten.
Observance Of The Law
In 1905 rumours began to spread throughout Paris of a young Oriental girl who danced in a private home, wrapped in veils that she gradually discarded. A local journalist who had seen her dancing reported that “a woman from the Far East had come to Europe laden with perfume and jewels, to introduce some richness of the Oriental colour and life into the satiated society of European cities.” Soon everyone knew the dancer’s name: Mata Hari.
Early on in that year small and select audiences would gather in a salon filled with Indian statues and other relics while an orchestra played music inspired by Hindu and Javanese melodies. Hari would then appear and dance in a style that no-one in France had ever seen before, and she told the audience that her dances told stories from Indian mythology and Javanese folktales. Soon the cream of Paris were competing for invitations to the salon, where it was rumoured that Hari was actually performing sacred dances in the nude.
The public wanted to know more about her, and she told journalists that she was Dutch in origin but had grown up on the island of Java. She would also talk of the times she had spent in India, learning the sacred Hindi dances there, and although by the summer of 1905 few Parisians had seen her dance, her name was on everyone’s lips.
As she gave more interviews the story of her origins kept changing: She had grown up in India, her grandmother was the daughter of a Javanese princess, she had lived on the island of Sumatra, and although no-one knew anything certain about her journalists didn’t mind the sudden changed in her biography. They compared her to an Indian goddess, a creature from the pages of Baudelaire – whatever their imagination wanted to see in this mysterious woman from the East.
In August 1905 Hari performed for the first time in public, and such were the crowds a riot broke out. She had now become a cult figure, spawning many imitations, and soon her fame spread beyond Paris to places such as Berlin and Milan. Over the next few years she performed throughout Europe, mixed with the highest social circles, and earned an income unlike any other woman of that era.
Near the end of World War 2 however she was executed as a German spy, and only during her trial did the truth come out: Mata Hari was not from Java or India, had not grown up in the Orient, and didn’t have a drop of Eastern blood in her body. Her real name was Margaretha Zelle, and she came from the northern Dutch province of Friesland.
Interpretation
When Zelle arrived in Paris in 1904 she had 1 franc in her pocket, and was one of thousands of beautiful young girls who flocked to Paris every year hoping for work as artist’s models, nightclub dancers, or vaudeville performers. After a few years they would be replaced by younger girls, and would often end up on the streets or return to where they’d come from.
Zelle had higher ambitions. She had no dance experience and had never performed in the theatre, but as a young girl she had travelled with her family and witnessed local dances in Java and Sumatra. She understood that what was important wasn’t the dance or act itself, but her ability to create an air of mystery around herself. There was nothing you could be sure of about her as she was always changing her stories and this air of mystery left the public wanting to know more about her and her next move.
Mata Hari was no more beautiful than any of the other girls in Paris, and she wasn’t even a particularly good dancer, but what separated her from the mass and attracted and held the public’s attention and made her famous and wealthy was her mystery. Because mystery invites constant interpretation people never tire of it, and as the mysterious cannot be grasped, it cannot be seized and consumed and therefore creates power.
Keys To Power
In the past the world was filled with the terrifying and unknowable, such as diseases, disasters, and despots. What we could not understand we re-imagined as myths and spirits, but over the centuries, as science has progressed, we have shed light on the dark and mysterious and grown comfortable with it. Yet this progress has a price – in a world that is ever more banal, that has had its mystery and myth squeezed out of it, we secretly crave enigmas, people, or things that cannot be instantly interpreted, seized, and consumed.
That is the power of the mysterious: It invites layers of interpretation, excites our imagination, and seduces us into believing that it conceals something marvellous. The world has become so familiar and its inhabitants so predictable that what wraps itself in mystery will almost always draw the limelight to it and make us watch it.
Do not imagine that to create an air of mystery you have to be grand and awe-inspiring. Mystery that is woven into your day-to-day demeanour and is subtle has that much more power to fascinate and attract attention. Remember: Most people are upfront, can be read like an open book, take little care to control their words or image, and are hopelessly predictable. By simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways, you will emanate an aura of mystery. The people around you will then magnify that aura by constantly trying to interpret you.
An air of mystery can make the mediocre appear intelligent and profound. It made Mata Hari, a woman of average appearance and intelligence, appear like a goddess, and her dancing divinely inspired. An air of mystery about an artist makes his or her artwork more intriguing, and it is all very easy to do – say little about your work, tease and titillate with vague and ambiguous comments, and then stand back as people try to make sense of it all.
Mysterious people put others in a kind of inferior position – that of trying to figure them out. To degrees that they can control, they also elicit the fear surrounding anything uncertain or unknown. All great leaders know that an aura of mystery draws attention to them and creates an intimidating presence.
Mao Tse-tung, for example, cleverly cultivated an enigmatic image; he had no worries about seeming inconsistent or contradicting himselfas his words and actions meant that he always had the upper hand. No-one ever felt that they understood him, and he therefore seemed larger than life, which meant that the public paid constant attention to him and were ever anxious to witness his next move.
If your social position prevents you from completely wrapping your action in mystery, you must at least learn to make yourself less obvious. Every now and then you need to act in a way that does not mesh with other people’s perceptions of you, and this way you keep people on the defensive, eliciting a kind of attention that makes you powerful. Done correctly, the creation of enigma can also draw the kind of attention that strikes terror into your enemy.
During the 2nd Punic War, from 219-202BC, the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, who was known for his great cleverness and tactical awareness, was wreaking havoc in his march on Rome. Under his leadership Carthage’s army, though smaller than that of the Romans, had constantly outmanoeuvred it. On one occasion however Hannibal’s scouts made a terrible error, leading his troops into a marshy terrain with the sea at their back.
The Roman army blocked the mountain passes that led inland, and its general, Fabius, was ecstatic – he had Hannibal trapped! Posting his best sentries on the passes, he worked on a plan to completely destroy Hannibal and his army, but in the middle of the night the sentries saw a mysterious sight – a huge procession of lights was heading up the mountain! Thousands and thousands of light came towards the Roman army, which meant that Hannibal’s army had grown a hundredfold.
The sentries were baffled – had reinforcements come in from the sea? Had Hannibal had more troops hidden away in the area somewhere? As they watched the light get closer, fires broke out all over the mountainside, and a horrible noise came up at them from below, like the blowing of millions of horns. Confused and scared, the sentries fled, and the next day Hannibal and his army were nowhere to be seen.
So what had actually happened? What Hannibal did was to have bundles of twigs attached to the horns of the thousands of oxen that travelled with his troops carrying supplies, and these were then set alight, giving the impression to the sentries that a vast army was heading up the mountain to them. When the flames burned down to the oxen’s skin they stampeded all over the place, bellowing like mad and setting fire to the scrubland on the mountainside.
The key to this trick’s success was not the torches, the fires, or the noise of the oxen, but the fact that Hannibal had created a puzzle that captivated the sentries and terrified them. From their posts at the top of the mountain the sentries had no way of knowing what was going on and fled in panic, if they had known what was really happening they wouldn’t have been scared and would have stayed at their posts.
If you find yourself trapped, cornered, and on the defensive in some situation, try a simple experiment: Do something that cannot be easily explained or interpreted. Choose a simple action, but carry it out in a way that unsettles your opponent, a way with many possible interpretations, making your intentions obscure. There will seem to be no method to your madness, no single explanation, and if you do this right you will inspire fear and confusion like the sentries on the mountaintop.
Image: The Dance Of The Veils
The veils envelop the dancer. What they reveal causes excitement. What they conceal heightens interest. The essence of mystery.
Authority
If you do not declare yourself immediately, you arouse expectation.....Mix a little mystery with everything, and the very mystery stirs up veneration. And when you explain, be not too explicit....In this manner you imitate the Divine way when you cause men to wonder and watch. (Baltasar Gracian, 1601-1658)
Reversal
In the beginning of your rise to the top, you must attract attention at all cost, but as you rise higher you must constantly adapt and never wear the public out with the same tactic. An air of mystery works wonders for those who need to develop an aura of power and get themselves noticed, but it must seem measured and under control. Do not let your air of mystery be slowly transformed into a reputation for deceit, the mystery you create must seem a game, playful and unthreatening. recognize when it goes too far, and pull back.
There are times when the need for attention must be deferred, and when scandal and notoriety are the last things you want to create. The attention you attract must never offend or challenge the reputation of those above you, as you will seem paltry and desperate by comparison. There is an art of knowing when to draw notice and when to withdraw. Lola Montez was one of the great practitioners of the art of attracting attention. She managed to rise from a middle-class Irish background to being the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria, but in her later years she lost her sense of proportion.
In London in 1850 there was to be a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring the greatest actor of the time, Charles John Kean. Everyone of consequence in British society at the time was going to be there, and it was rumoured that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were to attend. The custom of the time demanded that everyone be seated before the queen arrived, and when she got to the theatre everyone rose and applauded her. Everyone then sat down, and the lights were dimmed, but then all eyes turned to a box opposite the queen’s to see a woman appearing and taking her seat later than the queen.
It was Lola Montez, and people looked on in amazement as she took off her cloak to reveal a low-necked gown. The queen however completely ignored Montez, and the rest of the audience then followed suit, and after that evening no-one in fashionable society dared to be seen with her. All her powers were reversed, people would flee on the sight of her, and her future in England was over.
Never appear overly greedy for attention, for it signals insecurity, and insecurity drives power away. Understand that there are times when it is not in your interest to be the centre of attention, for example when in the presence of a king or queen bow and retreat to the shadows – never compete.
My Opinion
I myself am not an attention seeker and won’t try and court attention at all costs. In my opinion if you do this you will attract positive attention but mixed in with that will be a load of negative attention as well, which will damage your reputation and image, so I don’t believe it’s a good thing to court attention at all costs.
I’ve come across a number of people over the years who simply have to be the centre of attention all the time, and all these people come across as desperate and insecure and, most of all, annoying. Wherever you turn they are there, whether you want them there or not, and in the end people simply tell them where to go and they get offended and go off and sulk.
They have to have everyone hear their opinion on absolutely every topic imaginable, and it doesn’t take them long to annoy and offend most people around them and instead of having the attention they crave they just get ignored by everyone, achieving the exact opposite of what they set out to do.
Everything is judged by its appearance; what it unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all costs. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colourful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.
Part 1: Surround Your Name With The Sensational And Scandalous
Draw attention to yourself by creating an unforgettable, even controversial image. Do anything to make yourself seem larger than life and shine more brightly than those around you. Make no distinction between kinds of attention – notoriety of any sort will bring you power. Better to be slandered and attacked than ignored.
The Wasp And The Prince
“A wasp named Pin Tail was long in quest of some deed that would make him forever famous. So one day he entered the king’s palace and stung the little prince, who was in bed. The prince awoke with loud cries. The king and his courtiers rushed in to see what had happened. The prince was yelling as the wasp stung him again and again. The courtiers tried to catch the wasp, and each in turn was stung. The whole royal household rushed in, the news soon spread, and people flocked to the palace. The city was in an uproar, all business suspended. Said the wasp to itself, before it expired from its efforts, ‘A name without fame is like fire without flame. There is nothing like attracting notice at any cost.’” (Indian Fable)
Observance Of The Law
PT Barnum, America’s premier 19th century showman, started his career as an assistant to the owner of a circus, Aaron Turner. In 1836 the circus stopped in Annapolis, Maryland, for a series of performances, and on the morning of the opening day Barnum took a stroll through town, wearing a new black suit. People started to follow him, and someone accused him of being the Reverend Ephraim K Avery, a man infamous in America for being acquitted of a murder charge but who most people believed to be guilty. The angry mob tore at Barnum’s suit and was ready to lynch him, but after Barnum’s desperate appeals the crowd agreed to accompany him back to the circus where he could verify his identity.
Once there Turner revealed this was all a practical joke – he had started the rumour that Barnum was Avery, and the crowd dispersed. Barnum was furious with his boss and demanded to know why he had done this, to which he replied “My dear Barnum, it was all for our good. Remember, all we need to ensure success is notoriety.” During the rest of the day the joke was the talk of the town, and that night and every night the circus stayed in Annapolis it was packed to the rafters. Barnum had learned a valuable lesson he would never forget.
Barnum’s first big venture on his own was the American Museum – a collection of curiosities, located in New York. One day a beggar approached Barnum on the street, but instead of giving him money Barnum decided to employ him, and took him back to the museum. Once there, he gave the man five bricks and told him to make a slow circuit of several blocks, and at certain points he was to lay one of the bricks down on the pavement, always keeping one brick in his hand. On his journey around the blocks he was to keep replacing each brick on the pavement with the one in his hand, remaining serious at all times and answering no questions, and once back at the museum he was to enter, walk around inside, then leave through the back door and make the same bricklaying circuit again.
On the man’s first walk through the streets, several hundred people watched him as he completed his mysterious circuit, and by his fourth circuit people had swarmed around him, debating amongst themselves what he was doing. Every time he entered the museum he was followed by a crowd of people, most of whom paid the admission price to keep watching him inside, and many of these became distracted by the museum’s exhibitions and stopped following the man and took a tour of the museum instead.
By the end of the day the brick man had drawn over 1,000 people into the museum, and a few days later the police ordered him to stop his bricklaying stunt as the crowds had grown so big they were blocking the traffic. The bricklaying stopped, but many thousands of people had entered Barnum’s museum, and word of mouth ensured many more thousands would do so in the coming months.
One of the first oddities Barnum toured around the country was Joice Heth, a woman he claimed was 161 years old and had once been George Washington’s nurse. After several months the crowds began to dwindle so Barnum sent an anonymous letter to the papers, claiming that Heth was an elaborate fraud and was in fact made up of “whalebone, rubber, and countless springs”, and those who had not bothered to see her before became curious and paid to see her, while a good number of those who had already seen her paid again for another look to see if the accusation was true.
In 1842 Barnum purchased the carcass of what was supposedly a mermaid. The creature had the head of a monkey and the body of a fish, perfectly joined together, and Barnum placed numerous newspaper adverts saying it was captured in the Fiji Islands, the only place on earth these creatures existed. He then took it to a museum for experts to look at, and a huge national debate erupted as to whether it was real or not, but in any case thousands flocked and paid to see it to judge for themselves.
A few years later Barnum toured Europe with General Tom Thumb, a five year old dwarf who Barnum claimed was an 11 year old English boy, and whom he had trained to perform many remarkable acts. During this tour Barnum’s name attracted so much attention that Queen Victoria, the definition of sobriety, requested a private audience with him and his dwarf at Buckingham Palace and his fame soared to unimaginable heights.
Interpretation
Barnum understood the fundamental truth about attracting attention: Once people’s eyes are on you, you have a special legitimacy. For Barnum, creating interest meant creating a crowd, and as he later wrote, “Every crowd has a silver lining.” Crowds also tend to act in conjunction, if one person stops to watch a beggarman laying bricks down in the street, more will do the same, and with a gentle push they will enter your museum or watch your show.
To create a crowd you have to do something different and odd, and any kind of curiosity will do as crowds are magnetically attracted by the unusual and inexplicable. Once you have their attention never let it go, if it veers towards someone else it does so at your expense, and Barnum would ruthlessly suck attention away from his competitors as he knew what a valuable commodity it is.
At the beginning of your rise to the top, spend all your energy on attracting attention. Most importantly, the quality of the attention is irrelevant, as no matter how badly his shows were reviewed or how savage were the attacks on his hoaxes, Barnum would never complain. If a critic gave him a particularly bad review, he would invite them to the show and give them the best seat in the house, and he even went as far as writing anonymous attacks on his own shows just to keep his name in the papers.
From Barnum’s viewpoint attention, whether negative or positive, was the main ingredient of success. The worst fate in the world is for a man who yearns for fame, glory, and power, is to be ignored.
“If the courtier happens to engage in arms in some public spectacle such as jousting......he will ensure that the horse he has is beautifully caparisoned, that he himself is suitable attired, with appropriate mottoes and ingenious devices to attract the eyes of the onlookers in his direction as surely as the lodestone attracts iron.” (Baldassare Castiglione, 1478-1529)
Keys To Power
Burning more brightly than those around you is a skill that no-one is born with. You have to learn to attract attention, and at the start of your career you must attach your name and reputation to a quality, an image, that sets you apart from other people. This image can be something like a characteristic style of dress, or a personality quirk that amuses people and gets talked about. Once the image is established, you have an appearance, a place in the sky for your star.
It is a common mistake to imagine that this peculiar appearance of yours should not be controversial, that to be attacked is somehow bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. To avoid being a flash in the pan, and having your notoriety eclipsed by someone else, you must not discriminate between different types of attention; in the end, every kind will work in your favour. Barnum welcomed personal attacks and felt no need to defend himself, and he deliberately courted the image of being a humbug.
The court of Louis 14th contained many talented writers, artists, and great beauties, but no-one was more talked about than Duc de Lauzun. The duke was short, and prone to the most insolent of behaviour, but Louis was so amused by his eccentricities that he could not bear him to be away from court. It was simple – the strangeness of the duke’s character attracted attention, and once people were enthralled by him they wanted him around at any cost.
Society craves larger than life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity. Never be afraid of the qualities that set you apart from others and draw attention to you, court controversy, even scandal. It is better to be attacked and slandered than ignored, all professionals are ruled by this law and all professionals have a bit of showman in them.
Thomas Edison knew that to raise money he had to remain in the public eye at all cost. Almost as important as his inventions was how he presented them to the public and courted attention, so he would design visually dazzling experiments to draw people in. He would talk of future inventions that seemed fanatical at the time, such as robots and machines that could read your thoughts, and even though he had no intention of wasting any of his time on such inventions because he talked about them people talked about him.
He did everything he could to make sure that he received more attention than Nikola Tesla, who was arguably more brilliant than Edison but much less well known. In 1915 it was rumoured that Edison and Tesla would be joint recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics, but the prize was given to a couple of English physicists instead. Later on it was discovered that Edison had been approached by the prize committee but had turned them down, refusing to share the prize with Tesla, as at that point his fame was greater than Tesla’s and he felt that sharing the prize with him would deflect attention from him onto Tesla.
If you find yourself in a lowly position that offers you little opportunity to draw attention to yourself and effective trick is to attack the most visible, most famous, most powerful person you can find. In the 16th century a young Roman servant boy called Pietro Aretino wanted to get people’s attention as a writer of poetry, so he published a satirical poem about the pope and his love for his pet elephant. The attack put him in the public eye immediately, but you have to remember that once you have the public’s attention you have to use this tactic sparingly to stop it wearing thin.
Once in the limelight you must constantly renew it by adapting and varying your method of courting attention. If you don’t, the public will grow tired, will take you for granted, and will move onto a newer star. Pablo Picasso never allowed himself to fade into the background; if his name became too attached to a particular style, he would deliberately upset the public with a new series of paintings that went against all expectations. Better to create something ugly and disturbing, he believed, than to let viewers grow too familiar with his work. Understand: People feel superior to the person whose actions they can predict. If you show them who is in control by playing against their expectations, you both gain their respect and tighten your hold on their fleeting attention.
Image: The Limelight
The actor who steps into this brilliant light attains a heightened presence. All eyes are on him. There is room only for one actor at a time in the limelight’s narrow beam; do whatever it takes to make yourself its focus. Make your gestures so large, amusing, and scandalous, that the light stays on you while the other actors are left in the shadows.
Authority
Be ostentatious and be seen.....What is not seen is as though it did not exist....It was light that first caused all creation to shine forth. Display fills up many blanks, covers up deficiencies, and gives everything a second life, especially when it is backed by genuine merit. (Baltasar Gracian, 1601-1658)
Part 2 – Create An Air Of Mystery
In a world growing increasingly banal and familiar, what seems enigmatic instantly draws attention. Never make it too clear what you are doing or about to do. Do not show all your cards. An air of mystery heightens your presence; it also creates anticipation – everyone will be watching you to see what happens next. Use mystery to beguile, seduce, even frighten.
Observance Of The Law
In 1905 rumours began to spread throughout Paris of a young Oriental girl who danced in a private home, wrapped in veils that she gradually discarded. A local journalist who had seen her dancing reported that “a woman from the Far East had come to Europe laden with perfume and jewels, to introduce some richness of the Oriental colour and life into the satiated society of European cities.” Soon everyone knew the dancer’s name: Mata Hari.
Early on in that year small and select audiences would gather in a salon filled with Indian statues and other relics while an orchestra played music inspired by Hindu and Javanese melodies. Hari would then appear and dance in a style that no-one in France had ever seen before, and she told the audience that her dances told stories from Indian mythology and Javanese folktales. Soon the cream of Paris were competing for invitations to the salon, where it was rumoured that Hari was actually performing sacred dances in the nude.
The public wanted to know more about her, and she told journalists that she was Dutch in origin but had grown up on the island of Java. She would also talk of the times she had spent in India, learning the sacred Hindi dances there, and although by the summer of 1905 few Parisians had seen her dance, her name was on everyone’s lips.
As she gave more interviews the story of her origins kept changing: She had grown up in India, her grandmother was the daughter of a Javanese princess, she had lived on the island of Sumatra, and although no-one knew anything certain about her journalists didn’t mind the sudden changed in her biography. They compared her to an Indian goddess, a creature from the pages of Baudelaire – whatever their imagination wanted to see in this mysterious woman from the East.
In August 1905 Hari performed for the first time in public, and such were the crowds a riot broke out. She had now become a cult figure, spawning many imitations, and soon her fame spread beyond Paris to places such as Berlin and Milan. Over the next few years she performed throughout Europe, mixed with the highest social circles, and earned an income unlike any other woman of that era.
Near the end of World War 2 however she was executed as a German spy, and only during her trial did the truth come out: Mata Hari was not from Java or India, had not grown up in the Orient, and didn’t have a drop of Eastern blood in her body. Her real name was Margaretha Zelle, and she came from the northern Dutch province of Friesland.
Interpretation
When Zelle arrived in Paris in 1904 she had 1 franc in her pocket, and was one of thousands of beautiful young girls who flocked to Paris every year hoping for work as artist’s models, nightclub dancers, or vaudeville performers. After a few years they would be replaced by younger girls, and would often end up on the streets or return to where they’d come from.
Zelle had higher ambitions. She had no dance experience and had never performed in the theatre, but as a young girl she had travelled with her family and witnessed local dances in Java and Sumatra. She understood that what was important wasn’t the dance or act itself, but her ability to create an air of mystery around herself. There was nothing you could be sure of about her as she was always changing her stories and this air of mystery left the public wanting to know more about her and her next move.
Mata Hari was no more beautiful than any of the other girls in Paris, and she wasn’t even a particularly good dancer, but what separated her from the mass and attracted and held the public’s attention and made her famous and wealthy was her mystery. Because mystery invites constant interpretation people never tire of it, and as the mysterious cannot be grasped, it cannot be seized and consumed and therefore creates power.
Keys To Power
In the past the world was filled with the terrifying and unknowable, such as diseases, disasters, and despots. What we could not understand we re-imagined as myths and spirits, but over the centuries, as science has progressed, we have shed light on the dark and mysterious and grown comfortable with it. Yet this progress has a price – in a world that is ever more banal, that has had its mystery and myth squeezed out of it, we secretly crave enigmas, people, or things that cannot be instantly interpreted, seized, and consumed.
That is the power of the mysterious: It invites layers of interpretation, excites our imagination, and seduces us into believing that it conceals something marvellous. The world has become so familiar and its inhabitants so predictable that what wraps itself in mystery will almost always draw the limelight to it and make us watch it.
Do not imagine that to create an air of mystery you have to be grand and awe-inspiring. Mystery that is woven into your day-to-day demeanour and is subtle has that much more power to fascinate and attract attention. Remember: Most people are upfront, can be read like an open book, take little care to control their words or image, and are hopelessly predictable. By simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways, you will emanate an aura of mystery. The people around you will then magnify that aura by constantly trying to interpret you.
An air of mystery can make the mediocre appear intelligent and profound. It made Mata Hari, a woman of average appearance and intelligence, appear like a goddess, and her dancing divinely inspired. An air of mystery about an artist makes his or her artwork more intriguing, and it is all very easy to do – say little about your work, tease and titillate with vague and ambiguous comments, and then stand back as people try to make sense of it all.
Mysterious people put others in a kind of inferior position – that of trying to figure them out. To degrees that they can control, they also elicit the fear surrounding anything uncertain or unknown. All great leaders know that an aura of mystery draws attention to them and creates an intimidating presence.
Mao Tse-tung, for example, cleverly cultivated an enigmatic image; he had no worries about seeming inconsistent or contradicting himselfas his words and actions meant that he always had the upper hand. No-one ever felt that they understood him, and he therefore seemed larger than life, which meant that the public paid constant attention to him and were ever anxious to witness his next move.
If your social position prevents you from completely wrapping your action in mystery, you must at least learn to make yourself less obvious. Every now and then you need to act in a way that does not mesh with other people’s perceptions of you, and this way you keep people on the defensive, eliciting a kind of attention that makes you powerful. Done correctly, the creation of enigma can also draw the kind of attention that strikes terror into your enemy.
During the 2nd Punic War, from 219-202BC, the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, who was known for his great cleverness and tactical awareness, was wreaking havoc in his march on Rome. Under his leadership Carthage’s army, though smaller than that of the Romans, had constantly outmanoeuvred it. On one occasion however Hannibal’s scouts made a terrible error, leading his troops into a marshy terrain with the sea at their back.
The Roman army blocked the mountain passes that led inland, and its general, Fabius, was ecstatic – he had Hannibal trapped! Posting his best sentries on the passes, he worked on a plan to completely destroy Hannibal and his army, but in the middle of the night the sentries saw a mysterious sight – a huge procession of lights was heading up the mountain! Thousands and thousands of light came towards the Roman army, which meant that Hannibal’s army had grown a hundredfold.
The sentries were baffled – had reinforcements come in from the sea? Had Hannibal had more troops hidden away in the area somewhere? As they watched the light get closer, fires broke out all over the mountainside, and a horrible noise came up at them from below, like the blowing of millions of horns. Confused and scared, the sentries fled, and the next day Hannibal and his army were nowhere to be seen.
So what had actually happened? What Hannibal did was to have bundles of twigs attached to the horns of the thousands of oxen that travelled with his troops carrying supplies, and these were then set alight, giving the impression to the sentries that a vast army was heading up the mountain to them. When the flames burned down to the oxen’s skin they stampeded all over the place, bellowing like mad and setting fire to the scrubland on the mountainside.
The key to this trick’s success was not the torches, the fires, or the noise of the oxen, but the fact that Hannibal had created a puzzle that captivated the sentries and terrified them. From their posts at the top of the mountain the sentries had no way of knowing what was going on and fled in panic, if they had known what was really happening they wouldn’t have been scared and would have stayed at their posts.
If you find yourself trapped, cornered, and on the defensive in some situation, try a simple experiment: Do something that cannot be easily explained or interpreted. Choose a simple action, but carry it out in a way that unsettles your opponent, a way with many possible interpretations, making your intentions obscure. There will seem to be no method to your madness, no single explanation, and if you do this right you will inspire fear and confusion like the sentries on the mountaintop.
Image: The Dance Of The Veils
The veils envelop the dancer. What they reveal causes excitement. What they conceal heightens interest. The essence of mystery.
Authority
If you do not declare yourself immediately, you arouse expectation.....Mix a little mystery with everything, and the very mystery stirs up veneration. And when you explain, be not too explicit....In this manner you imitate the Divine way when you cause men to wonder and watch. (Baltasar Gracian, 1601-1658)
Reversal
In the beginning of your rise to the top, you must attract attention at all cost, but as you rise higher you must constantly adapt and never wear the public out with the same tactic. An air of mystery works wonders for those who need to develop an aura of power and get themselves noticed, but it must seem measured and under control. Do not let your air of mystery be slowly transformed into a reputation for deceit, the mystery you create must seem a game, playful and unthreatening. recognize when it goes too far, and pull back.
There are times when the need for attention must be deferred, and when scandal and notoriety are the last things you want to create. The attention you attract must never offend or challenge the reputation of those above you, as you will seem paltry and desperate by comparison. There is an art of knowing when to draw notice and when to withdraw. Lola Montez was one of the great practitioners of the art of attracting attention. She managed to rise from a middle-class Irish background to being the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria, but in her later years she lost her sense of proportion.
In London in 1850 there was to be a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring the greatest actor of the time, Charles John Kean. Everyone of consequence in British society at the time was going to be there, and it was rumoured that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were to attend. The custom of the time demanded that everyone be seated before the queen arrived, and when she got to the theatre everyone rose and applauded her. Everyone then sat down, and the lights were dimmed, but then all eyes turned to a box opposite the queen’s to see a woman appearing and taking her seat later than the queen.
It was Lola Montez, and people looked on in amazement as she took off her cloak to reveal a low-necked gown. The queen however completely ignored Montez, and the rest of the audience then followed suit, and after that evening no-one in fashionable society dared to be seen with her. All her powers were reversed, people would flee on the sight of her, and her future in England was over.
Never appear overly greedy for attention, for it signals insecurity, and insecurity drives power away. Understand that there are times when it is not in your interest to be the centre of attention, for example when in the presence of a king or queen bow and retreat to the shadows – never compete.
My Opinion
I myself am not an attention seeker and won’t try and court attention at all costs. In my opinion if you do this you will attract positive attention but mixed in with that will be a load of negative attention as well, which will damage your reputation and image, so I don’t believe it’s a good thing to court attention at all costs.
I’ve come across a number of people over the years who simply have to be the centre of attention all the time, and all these people come across as desperate and insecure and, most of all, annoying. Wherever you turn they are there, whether you want them there or not, and in the end people simply tell them where to go and they get offended and go off and sulk.
They have to have everyone hear their opinion on absolutely every topic imaginable, and it doesn’t take them long to annoy and offend most people around them and instead of having the attention they crave they just get ignored by everyone, achieving the exact opposite of what they set out to do.
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Law 6 – Court Attention At All Costs
Everything is judged by its appearance; what it unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all costs. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colourful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.
Part 1: Surround Your Name With The Sensational And Scandalous
Draw attention to yourself by creating an unforgettable, even controversial image. Do anything to make yourself seem larger than life and shine more brightly than those around you. Make no distinction between kinds of attention – notoriety of any sort will bring you power. Better to be slandered and attacked than ignored.
The Wasp And The Prince
“A wasp named Pin Tail was long in quest of some deed that would make him forever famous. So one day he entered the king’s palace and stung the little prince, who was in bed. The prince awoke with loud cries. The king and his courtiers rushed in to see what had happened. The prince was yelling as the wasp stung him again and again. The courtiers tried to catch the wasp, and each in turn was stung. The whole royal household rushed in, the news soon spread, and people flocked to the palace. The city was in an uproar, all business suspended. Said the wasp to itself, before it expired from its efforts, ‘A name without fame is like fire without flame. There is nothing like attracting notice at any cost.’” (Indian Fable)
Observance Of The Law
PT Barnum, America’s premier 19th century showman, started his career as an assistant to the owner of a circus, Aaron Turner. In 1836 the circus stopped in Annapolis, Maryland, for a series of performances, and on the morning of the opening day Barnum took a stroll through town, wearing a new black suit. People started to follow him, and someone accused him of being the Reverend Ephraim K Avery, a man infamous in America for being acquitted of a murder charge but who most people believed to be guilty. The angry mob tore at Barnum’s suit and was ready to lynch him, but after Barnum’s desperate appeals the crowd agreed to accompany him back to the circus where he could verify his identity.
Once there Turner revealed this was all a practical joke – he had started the rumour that Barnum was Avery, and the crowd dispersed. Barnum was furious with his boss and demanded to know why he had done this, to which he replied “My dear Barnum, it was all for our good. Remember, all we need to ensure success is notoriety.” During the rest of the day the joke was the talk of the town, and that night and every night the circus stayed in Annapolis it was packed to the rafters. Barnum had learned a valuable lesson he would never forget.
Barnum’s first big venture on his own was the American Museum – a collection of curiosities, located in New York. One day a beggar approached Barnum on the street, but instead of giving him money Barnum decided to employ him, and took him back to the museum. Once there, he gave the man five bricks and told him to make a slow circuit of several blocks, and at certain points he was to lay one of the bricks down on the pavement, always keeping one brick in his hand. On his journey around the blocks he was to keep replacing each brick on the pavement with the one in his hand, remaining serious at all times and answering no questions, and once back at the museum he was to enter, walk around inside, then leave through the back door and make the same bricklaying circuit again.
On the man’s first walk through the streets, several hundred people watched him as he completed his mysterious circuit, and by his fourth circuit people had swarmed around him, debating amongst themselves what he was doing. Every time he entered the museum he was followed by a crowd of people, most of whom paid the admission price to keep watching him inside, and many of these became distracted by the museum’s exhibitions and stopped following the man and took a tour of the museum instead.
By the end of the day the brick man had drawn over 1,000 people into the museum, and a few days later the police ordered him to stop his bricklaying stunt as the crowds had grown so big they were blocking the traffic. The bricklaying stopped, but many thousands of people had entered Barnum’s museum, and word of mouth ensured many more thousands would do so in the coming months.
One of the first oddities Barnum toured around the country was Joice Heth, a woman he claimed was 161 years old and had once been George Washington’s nurse. After several months the crowds began to dwindle so Barnum sent an anonymous letter to the papers, claiming that Heth was an elaborate fraud and was in fact made up of “whalebone, rubber, and countless springs”, and those who had not bothered to see her before became curious and paid to see her, while a good number of those who had already seen her paid again for another look to see if the accusation was true.
In 1842 Barnum purchased the carcass of what was supposedly a mermaid. The creature had the head of a monkey and the body of a fish, perfectly joined together, and Barnum placed numerous newspaper adverts saying it was captured in the Fiji Islands, the only place on earth these creatures existed. He then took it to a museum for experts to look at, and a huge national debate erupted as to whether it was real or not, but in any case thousands flocked and paid to see it to judge for themselves.
A few years later Barnum toured Europe with General Tom Thumb, a five year old dwarf who Barnum claimed was an 11 year old English boy, and whom he had trained to perform many remarkable acts. During this tour Barnum’s name attracted so much attention that Queen Victoria, the definition of sobriety, requested a private audience with him and his dwarf at Buckingham Palace and his fame soared to unimaginable heights.
Interpretation
Barnum understood the fundamental truth about attracting attention: Once people’s eyes are on you, you have a special legitimacy. For Barnum, creating interest meant creating a crowd, and as he later wrote, “Every crowd has a silver lining.” Crowds also tend to act in conjunction, if one person stops to watch a beggarman laying bricks down in the street, more will do the same, and with a gentle push they will enter your museum or watch your show.
To create a crowd you have to do something different and odd, and any kind of curiosity will do as crowds are magnetically attracted by the unusual and inexplicable. Once you have their attention never let it go, if it veers towards someone else it does so at your expense, and Barnum would ruthlessly suck attention away from his competitors as he knew what a valuable commodity it is.
At the beginning of your rise to the top, spend all your energy on attracting attention. Most importantly, the quality of the attention is irrelevant, as no matter how badly his shows were reviewed or how savage were the attacks on his hoaxes, Barnum would never complain. If a critic gave him a particularly bad review, he would invite them to the show and give them the best seat in the house, and he even went as far as writing anonymous attacks on his own shows just to keep his name in the papers.
From Barnum’s viewpoint attention, whether negative or positive, was the main ingredient of success. The worst fate in the world is for a man who yearns for fame, glory, and power, is to be ignored.
“If the courtier happens to engage in arms in some public spectacle such as jousting......he will ensure that the horse he has is beautifully caparisoned, that he himself is suitable attired, with appropriate mottoes and ingenious devices to attract the eyes of the onlookers in his direction as surely as the lodestone attracts iron.” (Baldassare Castiglione, 1478-1529)
Keys To Power
Burning more brightly than those around you is a skill that no-one is born with. You have to learn to attract attention, and at the start of your career you must attach your name and reputation to a quality, an image, that sets you apart from other people. This image can be something like a characteristic style of dress, or a personality quirk that amuses people and gets talked about. Once the image is established, you have an appearance, a place in the sky for your star.
It is a common mistake to imagine that this peculiar appearance of yours should not be controversial, that to be attacked is somehow bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. To avoid being a flash in the pan, and having your notoriety eclipsed by someone else, you must not discriminate between different types of attention; in the end, every kind will work in your favour. Barnum welcomed personal attacks and felt no need to defend himself, and he deliberately courted the image of being a humbug.
The court of Louis 14th contained many talented writers, artists, and great beauties, but no-one was more talked about than Duc de Lauzun. The duke was short, and prone to the most insolent of behaviour, but Louis was so amused by his eccentricities that he could not bear him to be away from court. It was simple – the strangeness of the duke’s character attracted attention, and once people were enthralled by him they wanted him around at any cost.
Society craves larger than life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity. Never be afraid of the qualities that set you apart from others and draw attention to you, court controversy, even scandal. It is better to be attacked and slandered than ignored, all professionals are ruled by this law and all professionals have a bit of showman in them.
Thomas Edison knew that to raise money he had to remain in the public eye at all cost. Almost as important as his inventions was how he presented them to the public and courted attention, so he would design visually dazzling experiments to draw people in. He would talk of future inventions that seemed fanatical at the time, such as robots and machines that could read your thoughts, and even though he had no intention of wasting any of his time on such inventions because he talked about them people talked about him.
He did everything he could to make sure that he received more attention than Nikola Tesla, who was arguably more brilliant than Edison but much less well known. In 1915 it was rumoured that Edison and Tesla would be joint recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics, but the prize was given to a couple of English physicists instead. Later on it was discovered that Edison had been approached by the prize committee but had turned them down, refusing to share the prize with Tesla, as at that point his fame was greater than Tesla’s and he felt that sharing the prize with him would deflect attention from him onto Tesla.
If you find yourself in a lowly position that offers you little opportunity to draw attention to yourself and effective trick is to attack the most visible, most famous, most powerful person you can find. In the 16th century a young Roman servant boy called Pietro Aretino wanted to get people’s attention as a writer of poetry, so he published a satirical poem about the pope and his love for his pet elephant. The attack put him in the public eye immediately, but you have to remember that once you have the public’s attention you have to use this tactic sparingly to stop it wearing thin.
Once in the limelight you must constantly renew it by adapting and varying your method of courting attention. If you don’t, the public will grow tired, will take you for granted, and will move onto a newer star. Pablo Picasso never allowed himself to fade into the background; if his name became too attached to a particular style, he would deliberately upset the public with a new series of paintings that went against all expectations. Better to create something ugly and disturbing, he believed, than to let viewers grow too familiar with his work. Understand: People feel superior to the person whose actions they can predict. If you show them who is in control by playing against their expectations, you both gain their respect and tighten your hold on their fleeting attention.
Image: The Limelight
The actor who steps into this brilliant light attains a heightened presence. All eyes are on him. There is room only for one actor at a time in the limelight’s narrow beam; do whatever it takes to make yourself its focus. Make your gestures so large, amusing, and scandalous, that the light stays on you while the other actors are left in the shadows.
Authority
Be ostentatious and be seen.....What is not seen is as though it did not exist....It was light that first caused all creation to shine forth. Display fills up many blanks, covers up deficiencies, and gives everything a second life, especially when it is backed by genuine merit. (Baltasar Gracian, 1601-1658)
Part 2 – Create An Air Of Mystery
In a world growing increasingly banal and familiar, what seems enigmatic instantly draws attention. Never make it too clear what you are doing or about to do. Do not show all your cards. An air of mystery heightens your presence; it also creates anticipation – everyone will be watching you to see what happens next. Use mystery to beguile, seduce, even frighten.
Observance Of The Law
In 1905 rumours began to spread throughout Paris of a young Oriental girl who danced in a private home, wrapped in veils that she gradually discarded. A local journalist who had seen her dancing reported that “a woman from the Far East had come to Europe laden with perfume and jewels, to introduce some richness of the Oriental colour and life into the satiated society of European cities.” Soon everyone knew the dancer’s name: Mata Hari.
Early on in that year small and select audiences would gather in a salon filled with Indian statues and other relics while an orchestra played music inspired by Hindu and Javanese melodies. Hari would then appear and dance in a style that no-one in France had ever seen before, and she told the audience that her dances told stories from Indian mythology and Javanese folktales. Soon the cream of Paris were competing for invitations to the salon, where it was rumoured that Hari was actually performing sacred dances in the nude.
The public wanted to know more about her, and she told journalists that she was Dutch in origin but had grown up on the island of Java. She would also talk of the times she had spent in India, learning the sacred Hindi dances there, and although by the summer of 1905 few Parisians had seen her dance, her name was on everyone’s lips.
As she gave more interviews the story of her origins kept changing: She had grown up in India, her grandmother was the daughter of a Javanese princess, she had lived on the island of Sumatra, and although no-one knew anything certain about her journalists didn’t mind the sudden changed in her biography. They compared her to an Indian goddess, a creature from the pages of Baudelaire – whatever their imagination wanted to see in this mysterious woman from the East.
In August 1905 Hari performed for the first time in public, and such were the crowds a riot broke out. She had now become a cult figure, spawning many imitations, and soon her fame spread beyond Paris to places such as Berlin and Milan. Over the next few years she performed throughout Europe, mixed with the highest social circles, and earned an income unlike any other woman of that era.
Near the end of World War 2 however she was executed as a German spy, and only during her trial did the truth come out: Mata Hari was not from Java or India, had not grown up in the Orient, and didn’t have a drop of Eastern blood in her body. Her real name was Margaretha Zelle, and she came from the northern Dutch province of Friesland.
Interpretation
When Zelle arrived in Paris in 1904 she had 1 franc in her pocket, and was one of thousands of beautiful young girls who flocked to Paris every year hoping for work as artist’s models, nightclub dancers, or vaudeville performers. After a few years they would be replaced by younger girls, and would often end up on the streets or return to where they’d come from.
Zelle had higher ambitions. She had no dance experience and had never performed in the theatre, but as a young girl she had travelled with her family and witnessed local dances in Java and Sumatra. She understood that what was important wasn’t the dance or act itself, but her ability to create an air of mystery around herself. There was nothing you could be sure of about her as she was always changing her stories and this air of mystery left the public wanting to know more about her and her next move.
Mata Hari was no more beautiful than any of the other girls in Paris, and she wasn’t even a particularly good dancer, but what separated her from the mass and attracted and held the public’s attention and made her famous and wealthy was her mystery. Because mystery invites constant interpretation people never tire of it, and as the mysterious cannot be grasped, it cannot be seized and consumed and therefore creates power.
Keys To Power
In the past the world was filled with the terrifying and unknowable, such as diseases, disasters, and despots. What we could not understand we re-imagined as myths and spirits, but over the centuries, as science has progressed, we have shed light on the dark and mysterious and grown comfortable with it. Yet this progress has a price – in a world that is ever more banal, that has had its mystery and myth squeezed out of it, we secretly crave enigmas, people, or things that cannot be instantly interpreted, seized, and consumed.
That is the power of the mysterious: It invites layers of interpretation, excites our imagination, and seduces us into believing that it conceals something marvellous. The world has become so familiar and its inhabitants so predictable that what wraps itself in mystery will almost always draw the limelight to it and make us watch it.
Do not imagine that to create an air of mystery you have to be grand and awe-inspiring. Mystery that is woven into your day-to-day demeanour and is subtle has that much more power to fascinate and attract attention. Remember: Most people are upfront, can be read like an open book, take little care to control their words or image, and are hopelessly predictable. By simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways, you will emanate an aura of mystery. The people around you will then magnify that aura by constantly trying to interpret you.
An air of mystery can make the mediocre appear intelligent and profound. It made Mata Hari, a woman of average appearance and intelligence, appear like a goddess, and her dancing divinely inspired. An air of mystery about an artist makes his or her artwork more intriguing, and it is all very easy to do – say little about your work, tease and titillate with vague and ambiguous comments, and then stand back as people try to make sense of it all.
Mysterious people put others in a kind of inferior position – that of trying to figure them out. To degrees that they can control, they also elicit the fear surrounding anything uncertain or unknown. All great leaders know that an aura of mystery draws attention to them and creates an intimidating presence.
Mao Tse-tung, for example, cleverly cultivated an enigmatic image; he had no worries about seeming inconsistent or contradicting himselfas his words and actions meant that he always had the upper hand. No-one ever felt that they understood him, and he therefore seemed larger than life, which meant that the public paid constant attention to him and were ever anxious to witness his next move.
If your social position prevents you from completely wrapping your action in mystery, you must at least learn to make yourself less obvious. Every now and then you need to act in a way that does not mesh with other people’s perceptions of you, and this way you keep people on the defensive, eliciting a kind of attention that makes you powerful. Done correctly, the creation of enigma can also draw the kind of attention that strikes terror into your enemy.
During the 2nd Punic War, from 219-202BC, the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, who was known for his great cleverness and tactical awareness, was wreaking havoc in his march on Rome. Under his leadership Carthage’s army, though smaller than that of the Romans, had constantly outmanoeuvred it. On one occasion however Hannibal’s scouts made a terrible error, leading his troops into a marshy terrain with the sea at their back.
The Roman army blocked the mountain passes that led inland, and its general, Fabius, was ecstatic – he had Hannibal trapped! Posting his best sentries on the passes, he worked on a plan to completely destroy Hannibal and his army, but in the middle of the night the sentries saw a mysterious sight – a huge procession of lights was heading up the mountain! Thousands and thousands of light came towards the Roman army, which meant that Hannibal’s army had grown a hundredfold.
The sentries were baffled – had reinforcements come in from the sea? Had Hannibal had more troops hidden away in the area somewhere? As they watched the light get closer, fires broke out all over the mountainside, and a horrible noise came up at them from below, like the blowing of millions of horns. Confused and scared, the sentries fled, and the next day Hannibal and his army were nowhere to be seen.
So what had actually happened? What Hannibal did was to have bundles of twigs attached to the horns of the thousands of oxen that travelled with his troops carrying supplies, and these were then set alight, giving the impression to the sentries that a vast army was heading up the mountain to them. When the flames burned down to the oxen’s skin they stampeded all over the place, bellowing like mad and setting fire to the scrubland on the mountainside.
The key to this trick’s success was not the torches, the fires, or the noise of the oxen, but the fact that Hannibal had created a puzzle that captivated the sentries and terrified them. From their posts at the top of the mountain the sentries had no way of knowing what was going on and fled in panic, if they had known what was really happening they wouldn’t have been scared and would have stayed at their posts.
If you find yourself trapped, cornered, and on the defensive in some situation, try a simple experiment: Do something that cannot be easily explained or interpreted. Choose a simple action, but carry it out in a way that unsettles your opponent, a way with many possible interpretations, making your intentions obscure. There will seem to be no method to your madness, no single explanation, and if you do this right you will inspire fear and confusion like the sentries on the mountaintop.
Image: The Dance Of The Veils
The veils envelop the dancer. What they reveal causes excitement. What they conceal heightens interest. The essence of mystery.
Authority
If you do not declare yourself immediately, you arouse expectation.....Mix a little mystery with everything, and the very mystery stirs up veneration. And when you explain, be not too explicit....In this manner you imitate the Divine way when you cause men to wonder and watch. (Baltasar Gracian, 1601-1658)
Reversal
In the beginning of your rise to the top, you must attract attention at all cost, but as you rise higher you must constantly adapt and never wear the public out with the same tactic. An air of mystery works wonders for those who need to develop an aura of power and get themselves noticed, but it must seem measured and under control. Do not let your air of mystery be slowly transformed into a reputation for deceit, the mystery you create must seem a game, playful and unthreatening. recognize when it goes too far, and pull back.
There are times when the need for attention must be deferred, and when scandal and notoriety are the last things you want to create. The attention you attract must never offend or challenge the reputation of those above you, as you will seem paltry and desperate by comparison. There is an art of knowing when to draw notice and when to withdraw. Lola Montez was one of the great practitioners of the art of attracting attention. She managed to rise from a middle-class Irish background to being the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria, but in her later years she lost her sense of proportion.
In London in 1850 there was to be a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring the greatest actor of the time, Charles John Kean. Everyone of consequence in British society at the time was going to be there, and it was rumoured that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were to attend. The custom of the time demanded that everyone be seated before the queen arrived, and when she got to the theatre everyone rose and applauded her. Everyone then sat down, and the lights were dimmed, but then all eyes turned to a box opposite the queen’s to see a woman appearing and taking her seat later than the queen.
It was Lola Montez, and people looked on in amazement as she took off her cloak to reveal a low-necked gown. The queen however completely ignored Montez, and the rest of the audience then followed suit, and after that evening no-one in fashionable society dared to be seen with her. All her powers were reversed, people would flee on the sight of her, and her future in England was over.
Never appear overly greedy for attention, for it signals insecurity, and insecurity drives power away. Understand that there are times when it is not in your interest to be the centre of attention, for example when in the presence of a king or queen bow and retreat to the shadows – never compete.
My Opinion
I myself am not an attention seeker and won’t try and court attention at all costs. In my opinion if you do this you will attract positive attention but mixed in with that will be a load of negative attention as well, which will damage your reputation and image, so I don’t believe it’s a good thing to court attention at all costs.
I’ve come across a number of people over the years who simply have to be the centre of attention all the time, and all these people come across as desperate and insecure and, most of all, annoying. Wherever you turn they are there, whether you want them there or not, and in the end people simply tell them where to go and they get offended and go off and sulk.
They have to have everyone hear their opinion on absolutely every topic imaginable, and it doesn’t take them long to annoy and offend most people around them and instead of having the attention they crave they just get ignored by everyone, achieving the exact opposite of what they set out to do.
Everything is judged by its appearance; what it unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all costs. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colourful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.
Part 1: Surround Your Name With The Sensational And Scandalous
Draw attention to yourself by creating an unforgettable, even controversial image. Do anything to make yourself seem larger than life and shine more brightly than those around you. Make no distinction between kinds of attention – notoriety of any sort will bring you power. Better to be slandered and attacked than ignored.
The Wasp And The Prince
“A wasp named Pin Tail was long in quest of some deed that would make him forever famous. So one day he entered the king’s palace and stung the little prince, who was in bed. The prince awoke with loud cries. The king and his courtiers rushed in to see what had happened. The prince was yelling as the wasp stung him again and again. The courtiers tried to catch the wasp, and each in turn was stung. The whole royal household rushed in, the news soon spread, and people flocked to the palace. The city was in an uproar, all business suspended. Said the wasp to itself, before it expired from its efforts, ‘A name without fame is like fire without flame. There is nothing like attracting notice at any cost.’” (Indian Fable)
Observance Of The Law
PT Barnum, America’s premier 19th century showman, started his career as an assistant to the owner of a circus, Aaron Turner. In 1836 the circus stopped in Annapolis, Maryland, for a series of performances, and on the morning of the opening day Barnum took a stroll through town, wearing a new black suit. People started to follow him, and someone accused him of being the Reverend Ephraim K Avery, a man infamous in America for being acquitted of a murder charge but who most people believed to be guilty. The angry mob tore at Barnum’s suit and was ready to lynch him, but after Barnum’s desperate appeals the crowd agreed to accompany him back to the circus where he could verify his identity.
Once there Turner revealed this was all a practical joke – he had started the rumour that Barnum was Avery, and the crowd dispersed. Barnum was furious with his boss and demanded to know why he had done this, to which he replied “My dear Barnum, it was all for our good. Remember, all we need to ensure success is notoriety.” During the rest of the day the joke was the talk of the town, and that night and every night the circus stayed in Annapolis it was packed to the rafters. Barnum had learned a valuable lesson he would never forget.
Barnum’s first big venture on his own was the American Museum – a collection of curiosities, located in New York. One day a beggar approached Barnum on the street, but instead of giving him money Barnum decided to employ him, and took him back to the museum. Once there, he gave the man five bricks and told him to make a slow circuit of several blocks, and at certain points he was to lay one of the bricks down on the pavement, always keeping one brick in his hand. On his journey around the blocks he was to keep replacing each brick on the pavement with the one in his hand, remaining serious at all times and answering no questions, and once back at the museum he was to enter, walk around inside, then leave through the back door and make the same bricklaying circuit again.
On the man’s first walk through the streets, several hundred people watched him as he completed his mysterious circuit, and by his fourth circuit people had swarmed around him, debating amongst themselves what he was doing. Every time he entered the museum he was followed by a crowd of people, most of whom paid the admission price to keep watching him inside, and many of these became distracted by the museum’s exhibitions and stopped following the man and took a tour of the museum instead.
By the end of the day the brick man had drawn over 1,000 people into the museum, and a few days later the police ordered him to stop his bricklaying stunt as the crowds had grown so big they were blocking the traffic. The bricklaying stopped, but many thousands of people had entered Barnum’s museum, and word of mouth ensured many more thousands would do so in the coming months.
One of the first oddities Barnum toured around the country was Joice Heth, a woman he claimed was 161 years old and had once been George Washington’s nurse. After several months the crowds began to dwindle so Barnum sent an anonymous letter to the papers, claiming that Heth was an elaborate fraud and was in fact made up of “whalebone, rubber, and countless springs”, and those who had not bothered to see her before became curious and paid to see her, while a good number of those who had already seen her paid again for another look to see if the accusation was true.
In 1842 Barnum purchased the carcass of what was supposedly a mermaid. The creature had the head of a monkey and the body of a fish, perfectly joined together, and Barnum placed numerous newspaper adverts saying it was captured in the Fiji Islands, the only place on earth these creatures existed. He then took it to a museum for experts to look at, and a huge national debate erupted as to whether it was real or not, but in any case thousands flocked and paid to see it to judge for themselves.
A few years later Barnum toured Europe with General Tom Thumb, a five year old dwarf who Barnum claimed was an 11 year old English boy, and whom he had trained to perform many remarkable acts. During this tour Barnum’s name attracted so much attention that Queen Victoria, the definition of sobriety, requested a private audience with him and his dwarf at Buckingham Palace and his fame soared to unimaginable heights.
Interpretation
Barnum understood the fundamental truth about attracting attention: Once people’s eyes are on you, you have a special legitimacy. For Barnum, creating interest meant creating a crowd, and as he later wrote, “Every crowd has a silver lining.” Crowds also tend to act in conjunction, if one person stops to watch a beggarman laying bricks down in the street, more will do the same, and with a gentle push they will enter your museum or watch your show.
To create a crowd you have to do something different and odd, and any kind of curiosity will do as crowds are magnetically attracted by the unusual and inexplicable. Once you have their attention never let it go, if it veers towards someone else it does so at your expense, and Barnum would ruthlessly suck attention away from his competitors as he knew what a valuable commodity it is.
At the beginning of your rise to the top, spend all your energy on attracting attention. Most importantly, the quality of the attention is irrelevant, as no matter how badly his shows were reviewed or how savage were the attacks on his hoaxes, Barnum would never complain. If a critic gave him a particularly bad review, he would invite them to the show and give them the best seat in the house, and he even went as far as writing anonymous attacks on his own shows just to keep his name in the papers.
From Barnum’s viewpoint attention, whether negative or positive, was the main ingredient of success. The worst fate in the world is for a man who yearns for fame, glory, and power, is to be ignored.
“If the courtier happens to engage in arms in some public spectacle such as jousting......he will ensure that the horse he has is beautifully caparisoned, that he himself is suitable attired, with appropriate mottoes and ingenious devices to attract the eyes of the onlookers in his direction as surely as the lodestone attracts iron.” (Baldassare Castiglione, 1478-1529)
Keys To Power
Burning more brightly than those around you is a skill that no-one is born with. You have to learn to attract attention, and at the start of your career you must attach your name and reputation to a quality, an image, that sets you apart from other people. This image can be something like a characteristic style of dress, or a personality quirk that amuses people and gets talked about. Once the image is established, you have an appearance, a place in the sky for your star.
It is a common mistake to imagine that this peculiar appearance of yours should not be controversial, that to be attacked is somehow bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. To avoid being a flash in the pan, and having your notoriety eclipsed by someone else, you must not discriminate between different types of attention; in the end, every kind will work in your favour. Barnum welcomed personal attacks and felt no need to defend himself, and he deliberately courted the image of being a humbug.
The court of Louis 14th contained many talented writers, artists, and great beauties, but no-one was more talked about than Duc de Lauzun. The duke was short, and prone to the most insolent of behaviour, but Louis was so amused by his eccentricities that he could not bear him to be away from court. It was simple – the strangeness of the duke’s character attracted attention, and once people were enthralled by him they wanted him around at any cost.
Society craves larger than life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity. Never be afraid of the qualities that set you apart from others and draw attention to you, court controversy, even scandal. It is better to be attacked and slandered than ignored, all professionals are ruled by this law and all professionals have a bit of showman in them.
Thomas Edison knew that to raise money he had to remain in the public eye at all cost. Almost as important as his inventions was how he presented them to the public and courted attention, so he would design visually dazzling experiments to draw people in. He would talk of future inventions that seemed fanatical at the time, such as robots and machines that could read your thoughts, and even though he had no intention of wasting any of his time on such inventions because he talked about them people talked about him.
He did everything he could to make sure that he received more attention than Nikola Tesla, who was arguably more brilliant than Edison but much less well known. In 1915 it was rumoured that Edison and Tesla would be joint recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics, but the prize was given to a couple of English physicists instead. Later on it was discovered that Edison had been approached by the prize committee but had turned them down, refusing to share the prize with Tesla, as at that point his fame was greater than Tesla’s and he felt that sharing the prize with him would deflect attention from him onto Tesla.
If you find yourself in a lowly position that offers you little opportunity to draw attention to yourself and effective trick is to attack the most visible, most famous, most powerful person you can find. In the 16th century a young Roman servant boy called Pietro Aretino wanted to get people’s attention as a writer of poetry, so he published a satirical poem about the pope and his love for his pet elephant. The attack put him in the public eye immediately, but you have to remember that once you have the public’s attention you have to use this tactic sparingly to stop it wearing thin.
Once in the limelight you must constantly renew it by adapting and varying your method of courting attention. If you don’t, the public will grow tired, will take you for granted, and will move onto a newer star. Pablo Picasso never allowed himself to fade into the background; if his name became too attached to a particular style, he would deliberately upset the public with a new series of paintings that went against all expectations. Better to create something ugly and disturbing, he believed, than to let viewers grow too familiar with his work. Understand: People feel superior to the person whose actions they can predict. If you show them who is in control by playing against their expectations, you both gain their respect and tighten your hold on their fleeting attention.
Image: The Limelight
The actor who steps into this brilliant light attains a heightened presence. All eyes are on him. There is room only for one actor at a time in the limelight’s narrow beam; do whatever it takes to make yourself its focus. Make your gestures so large, amusing, and scandalous, that the light stays on you while the other actors are left in the shadows.
Authority
Be ostentatious and be seen.....What is not seen is as though it did not exist....It was light that first caused all creation to shine forth. Display fills up many blanks, covers up deficiencies, and gives everything a second life, especially when it is backed by genuine merit. (Baltasar Gracian, 1601-1658)
Part 2 – Create An Air Of Mystery
In a world growing increasingly banal and familiar, what seems enigmatic instantly draws attention. Never make it too clear what you are doing or about to do. Do not show all your cards. An air of mystery heightens your presence; it also creates anticipation – everyone will be watching you to see what happens next. Use mystery to beguile, seduce, even frighten.
Observance Of The Law
In 1905 rumours began to spread throughout Paris of a young Oriental girl who danced in a private home, wrapped in veils that she gradually discarded. A local journalist who had seen her dancing reported that “a woman from the Far East had come to Europe laden with perfume and jewels, to introduce some richness of the Oriental colour and life into the satiated society of European cities.” Soon everyone knew the dancer’s name: Mata Hari.
Early on in that year small and select audiences would gather in a salon filled with Indian statues and other relics while an orchestra played music inspired by Hindu and Javanese melodies. Hari would then appear and dance in a style that no-one in France had ever seen before, and she told the audience that her dances told stories from Indian mythology and Javanese folktales. Soon the cream of Paris were competing for invitations to the salon, where it was rumoured that Hari was actually performing sacred dances in the nude.
The public wanted to know more about her, and she told journalists that she was Dutch in origin but had grown up on the island of Java. She would also talk of the times she had spent in India, learning the sacred Hindi dances there, and although by the summer of 1905 few Parisians had seen her dance, her name was on everyone’s lips.
As she gave more interviews the story of her origins kept changing: She had grown up in India, her grandmother was the daughter of a Javanese princess, she had lived on the island of Sumatra, and although no-one knew anything certain about her journalists didn’t mind the sudden changed in her biography. They compared her to an Indian goddess, a creature from the pages of Baudelaire – whatever their imagination wanted to see in this mysterious woman from the East.
In August 1905 Hari performed for the first time in public, and such were the crowds a riot broke out. She had now become a cult figure, spawning many imitations, and soon her fame spread beyond Paris to places such as Berlin and Milan. Over the next few years she performed throughout Europe, mixed with the highest social circles, and earned an income unlike any other woman of that era.
Near the end of World War 2 however she was executed as a German spy, and only during her trial did the truth come out: Mata Hari was not from Java or India, had not grown up in the Orient, and didn’t have a drop of Eastern blood in her body. Her real name was Margaretha Zelle, and she came from the northern Dutch province of Friesland.
Interpretation
When Zelle arrived in Paris in 1904 she had 1 franc in her pocket, and was one of thousands of beautiful young girls who flocked to Paris every year hoping for work as artist’s models, nightclub dancers, or vaudeville performers. After a few years they would be replaced by younger girls, and would often end up on the streets or return to where they’d come from.
Zelle had higher ambitions. She had no dance experience and had never performed in the theatre, but as a young girl she had travelled with her family and witnessed local dances in Java and Sumatra. She understood that what was important wasn’t the dance or act itself, but her ability to create an air of mystery around herself. There was nothing you could be sure of about her as she was always changing her stories and this air of mystery left the public wanting to know more about her and her next move.
Mata Hari was no more beautiful than any of the other girls in Paris, and she wasn’t even a particularly good dancer, but what separated her from the mass and attracted and held the public’s attention and made her famous and wealthy was her mystery. Because mystery invites constant interpretation people never tire of it, and as the mysterious cannot be grasped, it cannot be seized and consumed and therefore creates power.
Keys To Power
In the past the world was filled with the terrifying and unknowable, such as diseases, disasters, and despots. What we could not understand we re-imagined as myths and spirits, but over the centuries, as science has progressed, we have shed light on the dark and mysterious and grown comfortable with it. Yet this progress has a price – in a world that is ever more banal, that has had its mystery and myth squeezed out of it, we secretly crave enigmas, people, or things that cannot be instantly interpreted, seized, and consumed.
That is the power of the mysterious: It invites layers of interpretation, excites our imagination, and seduces us into believing that it conceals something marvellous. The world has become so familiar and its inhabitants so predictable that what wraps itself in mystery will almost always draw the limelight to it and make us watch it.
Do not imagine that to create an air of mystery you have to be grand and awe-inspiring. Mystery that is woven into your day-to-day demeanour and is subtle has that much more power to fascinate and attract attention. Remember: Most people are upfront, can be read like an open book, take little care to control their words or image, and are hopelessly predictable. By simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways, you will emanate an aura of mystery. The people around you will then magnify that aura by constantly trying to interpret you.
An air of mystery can make the mediocre appear intelligent and profound. It made Mata Hari, a woman of average appearance and intelligence, appear like a goddess, and her dancing divinely inspired. An air of mystery about an artist makes his or her artwork more intriguing, and it is all very easy to do – say little about your work, tease and titillate with vague and ambiguous comments, and then stand back as people try to make sense of it all.
Mysterious people put others in a kind of inferior position – that of trying to figure them out. To degrees that they can control, they also elicit the fear surrounding anything uncertain or unknown. All great leaders know that an aura of mystery draws attention to them and creates an intimidating presence.
Mao Tse-tung, for example, cleverly cultivated an enigmatic image; he had no worries about seeming inconsistent or contradicting himselfas his words and actions meant that he always had the upper hand. No-one ever felt that they understood him, and he therefore seemed larger than life, which meant that the public paid constant attention to him and were ever anxious to witness his next move.
If your social position prevents you from completely wrapping your action in mystery, you must at least learn to make yourself less obvious. Every now and then you need to act in a way that does not mesh with other people’s perceptions of you, and this way you keep people on the defensive, eliciting a kind of attention that makes you powerful. Done correctly, the creation of enigma can also draw the kind of attention that strikes terror into your enemy.
During the 2nd Punic War, from 219-202BC, the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, who was known for his great cleverness and tactical awareness, was wreaking havoc in his march on Rome. Under his leadership Carthage’s army, though smaller than that of the Romans, had constantly outmanoeuvred it. On one occasion however Hannibal’s scouts made a terrible error, leading his troops into a marshy terrain with the sea at their back.
The Roman army blocked the mountain passes that led inland, and its general, Fabius, was ecstatic – he had Hannibal trapped! Posting his best sentries on the passes, he worked on a plan to completely destroy Hannibal and his army, but in the middle of the night the sentries saw a mysterious sight – a huge procession of lights was heading up the mountain! Thousands and thousands of light came towards the Roman army, which meant that Hannibal’s army had grown a hundredfold.
The sentries were baffled – had reinforcements come in from the sea? Had Hannibal had more troops hidden away in the area somewhere? As they watched the light get closer, fires broke out all over the mountainside, and a horrible noise came up at them from below, like the blowing of millions of horns. Confused and scared, the sentries fled, and the next day Hannibal and his army were nowhere to be seen.
So what had actually happened? What Hannibal did was to have bundles of twigs attached to the horns of the thousands of oxen that travelled with his troops carrying supplies, and these were then set alight, giving the impression to the sentries that a vast army was heading up the mountain to them. When the flames burned down to the oxen’s skin they stampeded all over the place, bellowing like mad and setting fire to the scrubland on the mountainside.
The key to this trick’s success was not the torches, the fires, or the noise of the oxen, but the fact that Hannibal had created a puzzle that captivated the sentries and terrified them. From their posts at the top of the mountain the sentries had no way of knowing what was going on and fled in panic, if they had known what was really happening they wouldn’t have been scared and would have stayed at their posts.
If you find yourself trapped, cornered, and on the defensive in some situation, try a simple experiment: Do something that cannot be easily explained or interpreted. Choose a simple action, but carry it out in a way that unsettles your opponent, a way with many possible interpretations, making your intentions obscure. There will seem to be no method to your madness, no single explanation, and if you do this right you will inspire fear and confusion like the sentries on the mountaintop.
Image: The Dance Of The Veils
The veils envelop the dancer. What they reveal causes excitement. What they conceal heightens interest. The essence of mystery.
Authority
If you do not declare yourself immediately, you arouse expectation.....Mix a little mystery with everything, and the very mystery stirs up veneration. And when you explain, be not too explicit....In this manner you imitate the Divine way when you cause men to wonder and watch. (Baltasar Gracian, 1601-1658)
Reversal
In the beginning of your rise to the top, you must attract attention at all cost, but as you rise higher you must constantly adapt and never wear the public out with the same tactic. An air of mystery works wonders for those who need to develop an aura of power and get themselves noticed, but it must seem measured and under control. Do not let your air of mystery be slowly transformed into a reputation for deceit, the mystery you create must seem a game, playful and unthreatening. recognize when it goes too far, and pull back.
There are times when the need for attention must be deferred, and when scandal and notoriety are the last things you want to create. The attention you attract must never offend or challenge the reputation of those above you, as you will seem paltry and desperate by comparison. There is an art of knowing when to draw notice and when to withdraw. Lola Montez was one of the great practitioners of the art of attracting attention. She managed to rise from a middle-class Irish background to being the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria, but in her later years she lost her sense of proportion.
In London in 1850 there was to be a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring the greatest actor of the time, Charles John Kean. Everyone of consequence in British society at the time was going to be there, and it was rumoured that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were to attend. The custom of the time demanded that everyone be seated before the queen arrived, and when she got to the theatre everyone rose and applauded her. Everyone then sat down, and the lights were dimmed, but then all eyes turned to a box opposite the queen’s to see a woman appearing and taking her seat later than the queen.
It was Lola Montez, and people looked on in amazement as she took off her cloak to reveal a low-necked gown. The queen however completely ignored Montez, and the rest of the audience then followed suit, and after that evening no-one in fashionable society dared to be seen with her. All her powers were reversed, people would flee on the sight of her, and her future in England was over.
Never appear overly greedy for attention, for it signals insecurity, and insecurity drives power away. Understand that there are times when it is not in your interest to be the centre of attention, for example when in the presence of a king or queen bow and retreat to the shadows – never compete.
My Opinion
I myself am not an attention seeker and won’t try and court attention at all costs. In my opinion if you do this you will attract positive attention but mixed in with that will be a load of negative attention as well, which will damage your reputation and image, so I don’t believe it’s a good thing to court attention at all costs.
I’ve come across a number of people over the years who simply have to be the centre of attention all the time, and all these people come across as desperate and insecure and, most of all, annoying. Wherever you turn they are there, whether you want them there or not, and in the end people simply tell them where to go and they get offended and go off and sulk.
They have to have everyone hear their opinion on absolutely every topic imaginable, and it doesn’t take them long to annoy and offend most people around them and instead of having the attention they crave they just get ignored by everyone, achieving the exact opposite of what they set out to do.