Be a Better Poet

A fundamental law of human social dynamics is that it is harder to fake interest when you are indifferent than to fake indifference when you are interested.

For a simple reason. Indifference is a state of subtraction. You just have to say less, react less and keep your face still. We even have a popular name for it, poker face. Most adults develop one eventually. You have to. If every flicker of interest showed up on your face, you would be too easy to read. Easy to become manipulated. Survival requires concealment.

But faking enthusiasm is different. Enthusiasm is additive. You have to produce something that is not naturally there. You have to make the other person believe this subject generated authentic energy in you. That is harder to pull off.

Salesmen live inside this ambiguity. That’s why they seem nutty.

Their job is to read the buyer who appears indifferent but may not be. So they learn to treat every no as a maybe or every hesitation as evidence that the hook is in. Sometimes they are right. Often they are wrong. But sales is a numbers game. They do not need every no to be a yes. They only need a small percentage of noes to conceal yeses. That is why sales advice can sound deranged when applied to ordinary life. It is built for a profession where false positives are tolerable.

@5am_success

“Not interested” is a level of interest? Do you agree?? #grantcardone #jordanbelfort #sales #entrepreneur

The Job Interview

Everyone knows generating fake enthusiasm convincingly isn’t always easy. Look at job interviews. The worst question is always “Why do you want to work here?”

The honest answer, for most candidates, is, “I want money. I want somewhere tolerable to use my skills. You were hiring. I applied to eleven places this week and you called back.”

That’s because most people, employers are interchangeable. Just like the old Aesop fable of “The Donkey and His Masters”

But you can’t say that.

So you talk about the mission. The culture. The exciting opportunity. The chance to grow. The values. The work. The team. You make things up. You try your best.

If the answer sounds convincing, you may get the job. If it doesn’t, you may not get the job. Even though you have skills. Like I said, it’s an important question.

Some interviewers genuinely believe in the company. For them, the question is sincere. They identify with the mission or the owners. Other interviewers may be just as cynical as you. But it doesn’t matter. Either way, you must sound convincingly enthusiastic about joining this particular company.

What ends up happening is that the ability to fake enthusiasm gets selected for. People who can do it smoothly move more easily through organizations. The candidate who can sound genuinely animated by the company’s mission has an advantage over the candidate who is merely competent but cannot perform the ritual.

Over time, organizations fill with people who are good at this performance. Over time the highest rungs of society are filled with these people. And the people who don’t have this skill never really advance.

The Relationship Enthusiasm Gap

The same issue happens in relationships. One of the oldest fights between men and women is about indifference and feigning enthusiasm.

How this plays out is that a woman is telling a story to her man. The man is listening at first, but he is listening in the way men listen to women they love, looking for the problem to solve. When he notices that there is no problem to solve here, he tunes out.

But she is not asking for a solution. She is just venting. The point of the conversation for her is not to fix the situation. She wants the experience of being heard.

So he starts, very badly, pretending he is interested. He nods. He says “that’s crazy.”

Then she asks the fatal question. “Are you even listening?”

Now he has two options. He can tell the truth and admit he wasn’t. She may forgive it, but she may also file it away as evidence in the permanent narrative of the relationship

Or he can lie and say he was, which creates another problem. Now he has to pretend that he was not pretending.

Try Speaking in Analogies

If you find yourself in a situation that requires fake enthusiasm, which we all do, try speaking in analogies.

Real enthusiasm becomes analogical. Fake enthusiasm usually stays literal. It can say, “I’m excited.” “That’s interesting.” “I’ve always admired the company.” “That’s so crazy.” That is the tell.

Real enthusiasm does the opposite. When people really care, they start comparing. They pull in other domains. When the mind is genuinely interested by something, it starts making connections. It cannot leave the thing alone. It has to compare it to something else.

All men become poets about the things they love. It happens naturally.

Sports guys may be the least self-consciously poetic people alive. But get them talking about the teams and players they love, and the analogies come without effort.

A linebacker hits like a truck.
A team is a buzzsaw.
A pitcher is dealing.
A boxer has a granite chin.

You see the same thing at the other end of the social spectrum with drug addicts. A man describing a drug he genuinely loves starts reaching for images. The metaphor arrives because literal language is not enough. Like Theo Von and his cocaine problem.

This is also why women often want men to speak poetically about them. Literalism is not enough. They want evidence that your enthusiasm is real. They want to be compared to something else.

Why Analogy Is Everything

Most people treat analogy as something you add after the real thinking is done. Analogy is the thinking. You find the metaphor, and that is how you know you understood it. Until then, you may have facts. You may have impressions. You may have opinions. But you do not yet have the underlying structure.

Lakoff and Johnson made this argument in Metaphors We Live By. Metaphor is not a feature of language. It is a feature of thought. Much of our abstract thinking depends on metaphorical structures. We understand argument through war, time through money, love through journeys, status through height, and so on.

Hofstadter pushes the point further. It is one of the basic operations of intelligence.To recognize a chair as a chair is already to make an analogy. This object belongs to the same pattern as other objects I have called chairs. It may have a different shape, color, material, style, or number of legs. But the mind sees the underlying relation, a thing designed for sitting.

At the simplest level, analogy lets the mind say, “this is like that.”

At the highest level, it lets the mind say, “this hidden structure appears again in another form.”

This is why analogy is so closely tied to enthusiasm. When the mind is genuinely alive to something, it starts building relations. It starts seeing the object from multiple angles. It starts reaching beyond the literal category.

Become Better at Analogy

You should get better at analogy. A person with weak analogical range is trapped inside literal categories. Business is business. Dating is dating. Sports is sports. Politics is politics. Health is health. Work is work.

Everything stays in its assigned box. But a person with strong analogical range can move across domains. In conversation, it makes you sound alive. In dating, it makes the other person feel seen. In sales, it makes the buyer feel that you understood the real problem. In writing, it compresses argument into image. In comedy, it creates of recognition.

This is why Aristotle famously said metaphor is a mark of genius.

To make a good analogy, you have to perform three mental acts. You have to see the subject clearly enough to identify its texture. You have to search your mental library for a match. Then you have to bridge two unrelated domains and arrive at its essence.

That takes energy. And the other person can feel that energy. Analogy does not only express enthusiasm. It induces the other person to believe enthusiasm is present.

On Poetry

That was one of the old functions of poetry. Poetry is the oldest art form we truly have. It also happens to be a gymnasium of analogy. It trained the mind to see one thing inside another, to compress experience into image, to make language carry more than its literal load. Poets were celebrated throughout history. For good reason.

Unfortunately, it’s mostly dead now. No one grows up trained to be a poet. There are not many true poets left. Some elements of poetry exist in music, stand up comedy or other places. But the field itself is not very popular. Which has downstream effects. Most writing now lacks interesting analogies.

Train Your Analogy Muscle

The good news is that analogy can be trained.

Not perfectly. Some people are naturally better at it. You may not be able to turn a literal bureaucrat into Shakespeare. But you can make almost anyone better. You can widen range.

Here are 10 time-tested rules to help you become a better poet:

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.