Unpopular opinions: Be beautiful and learn stuff
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.
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).
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.
Andy @ liberate.life (on Rebo)
Thoughts?
How about you? What unpopular opinions do you hold?
I thought your unpopular opinion was going to be hooking up with your boss after a drunken night out there for a second!
There is definitely a beauty premium, people do judge books by their covers. Great thing is though, we live in a world on anonymity. Blogs can be written anonymously, software can be developed without judgment, authors can masquerade under different sudo names, changing genders at will. The traditional corporate work environment and its beauty premiums are slowly dwindling.
Thanks for joining in again Caveman 🙂
Wow! That would have been a plot twist. I mean he’s a lovely guy but I’m not sure I could cope with his drinking.
You’re right about the easy of anonymity. I hadn’t really thought about that. As you said when we met up you had a whole different impression of what I was like from my blog to what I was like in real life…sorry to burst your bubble!
I can’t think of any unpopular opinions salt the moment but alas I agree that life is easier for people considered attractive by conventional standards. I can definitely see how they could even get more pay. Charm is a big part of negotiating and it’s easy to seem charming if you’re good looking I think.
My mom learned to juggle when I was young. They started people out with women’s scarves since those take longer to fall. Only problem is that after she learned she’s sometimes randomly mortify me in the grocery store by grabbing fruit and juggling it for no reason.
Interestingly when it comes to charm I would merge my two unpopular views. I think that it’s possible to learn charm, or more precisely in the way that you say it: It’s possible to seem charming. In my consulting days I watched with incredulity while senior colleagues would turn on the charm for clients in a way that was totally unlike anything that they normally did. Even more amazingly the clients would lap it up. Extraordinary.
I grab fruit and juggle as well, but I keep it to the privacy of my kitchen…still mortifies my kids though, even though I only do it in front of them!
Don’t want to burst your bubble, Caveman but from my dating experience, many men think they are ‘good looking’ when they’re not, but I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
That said, I think there is some truth though in what you say, appearance goes a long way but often needs to be combined with a certain amount of charisma too – combined, it’s very powerful..
In my experience, the main ‘looks’ criteria seems to be height with guys. In the corporate company I worked for, pretty much all the top guys were 6ft plus, the short ones were an exception and made up for it with what could be described as ‘bigger characters’.
Great story on the juggling and I’ve done it myself – got given a juggling set once and can still decently juggle with 3 balls years later. I wouldn’t be on Britain’s Got Talent but I can say I can juggle!
Oh don’t misunderstand me Weenie. I’m absolutely not good looking. I’m very ordinary looking. Fire Starter, Saving Ninja and Bangkok to Blighty will all confirm that! To be honest my boss wasn’t either, which bears out your point about a lack of self-awareness (and humility) in many people.
Interesting point about height. I think that I read something about there being a height premium as well a beauty premium in pay but I can’t track that down. It would make sense. Conventional society associates height with power and authority I guess.
There really is some truth on what you have said. And I tend to agree that whatever you look like will have an impact on how you’ll get the things that you like in life (at a certain degree). That’s why I notice some people really capitalising on this, I guess it all boils down to our human nature to favour the things that we are attracted to or the things that are pleasant to our senses (we like beautiful things, we like things that smell good etc).
I should be clear that looks aren’t the only thing that matter, rather that they can have an impact on our careers…I also don’t think that this is right or fair.
I like your point about being attracted to things that are pleasant to our senses. That’s not something that I had thought about in before. I’m sure that I read somewhere that the reason that children like sweet things is because there’s nothing in nature that’s both sweet and poisonous…it’s all about nature!
I like unpopular opinions. They challenge established ways of thinking and often lead to change.
With regards to appearance driving behaviour I don’t see how this is unpopular. We all intuitively know that people act differently with really stunningly attractive people. So why wouldn’t there be a scale?
Likewise if you’ve ever visited an upmarket establishment underdressed and noticed a difference in how you’re treated compared perhaps to when you’ve previously visited dressed to impress you’ll have witnessed another form of judgement based upon appearance.
Its natural to judge, score and rank, it happens throughout nature and in every species. If anything we should be more questioning of why its become unpalatable for us humans.
You make a fair point Kristian. I put it forward as an unpopular opinion as looks aren’t meant to matter. If as friend was complaining about not getting promoted I can’t imagine telling then that the reason was probably as they were shorter, fatter and uglier that their rival. But that could just be me!
Your point questioning why ranking has become unpalatable is similar to mine. In many parts of the world, and in the past, judging wasn’t seen as an issue. Ultimately, it’s all just cultural norms that hold us back.
Totally agree on the beauty premium.
> My second unpopular opinion is that I believe that everything can be learned
I was so bought into this idea that I almost cried when I read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. I now hold almost the exact opposite view.
When I was at uni doing my engineering degree, I assumed that I must be working really hard and that peers who could not grasp some of the material were just not applying themselves. It turns out that people have natural aptitudes (I also noted this during times where I was the one who couldn’t master something like certain physical activities).
I’m not saying that it’s not possible for anybody to learn something about anything, just that it’s much easier for some than others. Try and be a 100m sprinter without having a high proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibres for example.
Totally agree about some things being easier for some people than others. I also agree that at the top of many fields there can often be something more than hard work (but read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers who makes the case that even genius are made, not born).
What I would say is that people can get a lot way in almost any area they want to, it will just take desire and effort. Maths, sports and the arts are the classic examples. People think they just can’t do these things. I think that with effort you can be competent, even good, in all of them.
I like when people tackle sticky subjects like this. I worked at Hooters once as a young lady out of my parents’ house and gained 20 pounds on purpose just to see how I was treated. As a musician, I learned the looks game gets really weird and tricky. How I dressed impacted how much I was paid (big surprise).
I have a refuting fact – my husband is very traditionally good looking but only gets made fun of for it and has never made more money because of it. I have seen people literally resent him and tease him about how life must be easy. Not complaining, just pointing out something people may not think of. He makes himself scruffy on purpose.
I was thinking about my unpopular opinion lately – I just don’t care about wedding rings. It’s not that I even have a strong reaction against them. I SIMPLY don’t think about them at all. If someone is judging our bank account based on my like of jewelry or not, this capitalized society is straight up whack.
I can see that somewhere like Hooters the premium would become very explicit.
Your point about your husband is interesting. I suppose one way to look at it is that how he looked STILL affected his life and success…maybe not quite in the way that most people would expect. What’s impossible to know is whether despite the teasing his looks have still affected his success in life positively.
I like your wedding ring point. I go through phases of wearing mine or not. Whether I wear it or not doesn’t affect how I think about my wife or marriage, but I can see that the physical ring would be important to some people.
(oh and I think that capitalist society is definitely whack, but that’s a whole other story!).