Unpopular opinions: Be beautiful and learn stuff

June 15, 2019 14 By Caveman

Well kids, it’s that time again when Saving Ninja launches another Thought Experiment.  Following on from the last one about what I want to do when I’m financially independent this Thought Experiment is about unpopular opinions. Specifically he asks:

“What opinion do you have that most of your peers do not share?”

Let’s get the easy unpopular opinions out of the way first. For most people reading this the idea that you don’t have to work until your 60s before retiring will not blow your mind. In our tribe it’s easy to forget that is not the orthodoxy. Similarly, the idea that you don’t need to go abroad on holiday or that you don’t need to buy a new car every three years. The idea that credit card debt isn’t healthy or that you should plan for bills, that you should have an emergency fund. Those are the ‘normal’ heterodox opinions that many of us shooting for Financial Independence or, frankly, even Financial Stability hold.

Oh, and I believe in dragons. Everyone believes in dragons though right? That’s not even controversial.

I suspect though that Saving Ninja has more than that in mind so this post share some of my opinions that others may not share.

What we mean when we talk about unpopular opinions

Before we dive in we should be clear from the start that no-one shares their REALLY unpopular opinions. Whenever you see a tweet or a Facebook post that’s purportedly sharing an unpopular opinion it tends to be a slightly left field opinion that very few people will have much of an opinion about and a lot of people will share. If you want genuinely unpopular opinions there are dark, unpleasant corners of the internet. Let’s not go there.

Also I’m not sure I hold any really unpopular opinions. I’m a pretty mainstream kind of guy. But I have a few things that I believe that are a little different. Here are a couple.

How you look matters

It was around midnight in an Art Deco themed hotel bar in Geneva. I was on a work trip and my boss was insisting that I stay up and drink with him. The German lager I was sipping was the same one that I had started at around 10pm. My boss had long since moved onto a variety of whisk(e)ys (yes, both with and without an ‘e’). He leant over to me and poked me in the chest.

“We’re lucky, you and me.”

Slurring words on top of a Welsh lilt made it hard to make out what he was saying but I just about managed.

“We’re lucky,” he repeated. “You and me. We’re good looking men.”

I squirmed in my seat and looked up to make sure the barman hadn’t abandoned me. Ignoring the fact that it just wasn’t, isn’t, true in my case, I really didn’t like the direction this was taking.

He saw me look and shook his head. “No, not like that you tit. You and me. We’re good looking men. We’re going to do just fine in life. Just fine.”

He took a sip and nodded to himself. “Just fine.”

I waited for more pearls of wisdom. After a minute or so I realised that he had fallen asleep. Gently, I put my unfinished beer down and gratefully escaped off to my bed.

What I’ve concluded in the years since is that my drunk Welsh boss was right. My first unpopular opinion is this: How you look impacts on how successful you are in life.

Unpopular opinions: Looks matter

Just another hotel bar, with my boss, late at night

Narcissus was onto something

To say that it matters how you look is seen as illiberal and politically incorrect. To say that your height, or your weight, or your looks affect how you do in life and what people think about you is anathema to many. The orthodoxy amongst my peers is that what you look like on the outside doesn’t matter, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

Sadly, everything that I have seen in the real world makes me believe that it’s just not true. There is a genuine Beauty Premium. The more you conform to societal norms of attractiveness the more likely you are to be successful. If you’re a handsome men on average you’ll earn 5% more while good-looking women earn 4% more. Rubbish isn’t it?

On a personal level I’ve seen this as well. Recently I have lost a bit of weight and I can see my colleagues reacting to me more positively. I’ve not acting differently in any way, it’s just about how I look.

This is, of course, all socially conditioned and what is seen as preferable in terms of features changes over time and by culture. That’s what makes it so ridiculous. What is seen as attractive by Vogue readers in the West today may well have been considered freakish in more distant times and places. Look, for example, in parts of Mauritania where greater bodyweight has, at least historically, been associated with attractiveness.

Wish ‘twere not so

To be clear I wish I lived in a world where this wasn’t the case. I genuinely believe that it’s what’s on the inside that matters. Over the years I have met too many beautiful, charming, and deeply unpleasant people to have any illusions that good looks and good people are correlated. But because I don’t want it to be true doesn’t mean that the world agrees.

On the upside the New York Times article I linked to also says that “15 percent to 20 percent of the beauty premium is a result of the self-confidence effect, while oral and visual communication each contribute about 40 percent”. So there’s a lot of the beauty premium that is actually in our control.

A corollary to all this. If you do conform to society’s physical norms that is no guarantee of success. There’s a lot more to success that just looks, but it doesn’t hurt.

Everything can be learned

There is, I believe, a myth about natural ability. In some areas of life the argument goes that you can either do something or you can’t. You were born with the ability. If the fairies didn’t sprinkle stardust on you as a baby then tough.

The argument is made most often in the arts or sports. How often do you hear people say things like “I’m tone deaf, I can’t sing” or “Two left feet me, I can’t play football to save my life.”? People go to an art gallery or a concert, or the circus and say to themselves. I could never do that.

Learning to juggle

I fundamentally disagree. My second unpopular opinion is that I believe that everything can be learned.  I was around 14 when I got my epiphany on this. My school decided that it would be a great idea to try to break the world record for the number of people simultaneously juggling. Yeah I know. What’s that all about? Anyway the head decided that this was A Good Thing so ‘twas decreed that we would make this attempt at the school summer fair which was a month away.

The obvious problem with that was, of course, that none of us knew how to juggle. When this was announced by our form tutor there was an outbreak of “But Sir we can’t do that.” “We don’t have any time” “That’s impossible” “It will take forever to learn to do that.” And the somewhat implausible, “I wear glasses. My Mum doesn’t allow me to juggle” (he didn’t live that one down for a while).

In response our teacher just said. “We’re going to do this at morning registration for five minutes every day. Let’s see how we do.” So we did. Starting with one ball in one hand and moving up from there. By the end of the month almost all of us could juggle for at least 30 seconds with three balls. Come the day of the world record attempt there were over a thousand of us juggling.

We had got there with just a few minutes of concentrated effort a day and zero self-belief from a standing start. (Oh, and in case you were wondering, we were no where near the world record, but at least we tried).

Unpopular opinions: anything can be learned

It was actually a tiny bit like this on the day

Just try

My point is this. Not everything in life is easy, but there is very little that’s impossible. If you put in the effort then you can learn to do almost anything. Once you get into the mindset of trying and working at something the world opens up.

I have one corollary to this and to misquote Paula Pant’s tagline: You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. By that I mean that if you want to do something well, or even competently you need to spend some time learning and practising it. That means you have to make choices about what you Basically you have to want to do it and put in the time.

But I even have a corollary to that corollary. I’ve been reading Tim Ferris’ Four-Hour Body recently and that is all about how you can achieve significant changes to your body with some relatively modest changes. It challenges a number of the orthodox views around getting healthier. What’s common to a lot of what he suggests is that you can achieve a lot without, necessarily, having to put in a huge amount of time. It’s, in many ways, a polemic on working smarter not harder. My point is that sometimes learning things can take a lot less effort than you think. Until you try you’ll never know.

Final reflections

So those are my unpopular opinions: What you look like matters to your success in life and EVERYTHING can be learned.

You’ll need to decide how unpopular, or not you think that they are…you may even agree with me!

As always there are a bunch of us doing this Thought Experiment. I’ll link to them below as they come in.

Saving Ninja

in-deed-a-bly

Mr A Way To Less

Miss A Way To Less

Merely curious

Marc @ FinanceYourFire

Dr FIRE

A Simple Life

Money For The Modern Girl

Fretful Finance

Left FI

Andy @ liberate.life (on Rebo)

James @ Rebo

theFIREstarter

Thoughts?

How about you? What unpopular opinions do you hold?