Infect the group with a sense of resolution that emanates from you. You are not upset by setbacks; you keep advancing and working on problems. You are persistent. The group senses this, and individuals feel embarrassed for becoming hysterical over the slightest shift in fortune. You can try to infect the group with confidence, but be careful that this does not slip into grandiosity. Your confidence and that of the group mostly stems from a successful track record. Periodically change up routines, surprise the group with something new or challenging. This will wake them up and stir them out of the complacency that can settle into any group that achieves success. Most important, showing a lack of fear and an overall openness to new ideas will have the most therapeutic effect of all. The members will become less defensive, which encourages them to think more on their own, and not operate as automatons.
Daily Law: People are naturally more emotional and permeable to the moods of others.
Work with human nature and turn this into a positive by infecting the group with the proper set of emotions. People are more susceptible to the moods and attitudes of the leader than of anyone else. The Laws of Human Nature, 14: Resist the Downward Pull of the Group—The Law of Conformity
In Greek myths, in India’s Mahabharata cycle, in the Middle Eastern epic of Gilgamesh, it is the privilege of the gods to use deceptive arts; a great man, Odysseus for instance, was judged by his ability to rival the craftiness of the gods, stealing some of their divine power by matching them in wits and deception. Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power. Deception and masquerade should not be seen as ugly or immoral. All human interaction requires deception on many levels, and in some ways what separates humans from animals is our ability to lie and deceive. Outwardly, you must seem to respect the niceties, but inwardly, unless you are a fool, you learn quickly to be prudent, and to do as Napoleon advised: place your iron hand inside a velvet glove. If you can master the arts of deception and indirection, learning to seduce, charm, deceive, and subtly outmaneuver your opponents, you will attain the heights of power. The month of June will teach you how to make people bend to your will without their realizing what you have done. And if they do not realize what you have done, they will neither resent nor resist you.
A few years ago, to help my mind get over the grind of writing The 33 Strategies of War, I bought a pool table. After a hard day’s work, I would settle into the game of pool and make myself completely focus on the green felt, the cue stick, the stripes and solids. It ended up being the perfect choice of a diversion. Pool, it became clear to me, is all about angles. First, there are simple angles, as you must hit the cue ball to either side when you are not straight on. This is often not as easy as it seems. Then, there are the angles you take when you bank the targeted ball off the sides, an entirely new game in and of itself. This goes further with the double bank shot.
There are the angles of the combination shots, and even more slippery combinations when you use a solid to slide off a stripe and knock in a solid.
Then there is the whole language of angles that comes into play when you are thinking ahead and trying to keep the cue ball in solid position, working with the open spaces of the table.
Finally, there are the abstract angles in psychological space and time: Playing with your opponent’s mind; letting him get ahead, but putting himself in a corner in relation to the final balls on the table; snookering him into impossible positions (the trick bag); or seeing the entire table and how you will run it in short order. In other words, there are layers of angles, all more subtle and artistic as you go up the ladder and improve your game. I am no longer a rank beginner, but I am certainly no hustler, not yet.
To play well, to raise your game, your focus must be total.
As in pool, so in life. Suckers and beginners are locked into the singleball- at-a-time mentality and get all excited when they knock one in on a clever shot, but leave themselves nowhere to go. They never learn the angles above the angles above the angles.
Then there are people who raise their game a little, who give the appearance of knowing how to hustle, who can actually knock in a few shots in a row. In Hollywood, I worked for some people like that. They would let others do the work and take all the credit. One director I knew would constantly play the game of hiring someone else to direct the pet script he had written, someone young and eager and inexperienced. This person would inevitably fail rather early on in the process; the director would have to come in and rescue the situation, his goal all along. Better to set it up that way than for him to be seen as being overly ambitious and greedy, always insisting he direct all the projects on his plate. Similar to how Pat Riley engineered his whole return to coaching.
But these types do not really see the whole table, or have a good endgame mapped out. They have some angles, but not of a high order. They never really get that far. They stir up much resentment and resistance. They are low- to mid-level hustlers.
An acquaintance of mine who runs his own media business came to me a few years ago with a problem: a high-level employee had leaked something embarrassing about him to other employees. His angle in leaking this was to get the boss’s attention and warn him about what else he might do. He was worried the boss was planning to fire him, and so this was his warning shot across the bow.
My advice to him was to be aware first of what the leaker was up to, and then to not indicate any kind of negative reaction on his part. He was to continue seeming friendly, as if nothing had happened. This was a front, a distraction. The employee would have to focus on this and figure out what it meant. Was the boss being coy? Did he not care? Was he trying to win him back over? Was he intimidated? This would buy the boss time.
As we then investigated the situation, we saw more of what was going on and a solution came to us. First, he fired two other employees who were allies of the leaker and obvious troublemakers. A third he got transferred to an office in a distant location. All of this was ostensibly done as a reaction to their lack of performance and had no apparent links to the leaker in question.
The purpose was twofold: to isolate the target, make it harder for him to conspire and stir things up; and to send an indirect warning to him that the boss was not someone he could easily mess with.
His moves were not simple to figure out; they got the leaker’s attention and froze him in place. As we considered the leaker’s possible reactions to these moves and how he might ratchet it all up if he felt threatened, we worked on a higher angle to this reaction, so that we had as many bases as possible covered. We had mapped out a way to even checkmate him if he maneuvered to go public with his information.
Iceberg Slim is one of my favorite authors. To Iceberg, the world is divided between hustler and sucker. You are either one or the other. The sucker has no angles on life, no sense of the art of indirection, and can only make one stupid play at a time. The hustler always aims for the angles, learns how to play them, and becomes an artist in the game.