Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones, as the wind douses a candle and fans a fire.
—François De La Rochefoucauld
Leaders must know how to balance presence and absence. In general, it is best to lean slightly more in the direction of absence, so that when you do appear before the group, you generate excitement and drama. If done right, in those moments when you are not available, people will be thinking of you.
Today people have lost this art. They are far too present and familiar, their every move displayed on social media. That might make you relatable, but it also makes you seem just like everyone else, and it is impossible to project authority with such an ordinary presence. Keep in mind that talking too much is a type of overpresence that grates and reveals weakness. Silence is a form of absence and withdrawal that draws attention; it spells self-control and power; when you do talk, it has a greater effect. In a similar fashion, if you commit a mistake, do not overexplain and overapologize. You make it clear you accept responsibility and are accountable for any failures, and then you move on. Your contrition should be relatively quiet; your subsequent actions will show you have learned the lesson. Avoid appearing defensive and whiny if attacked. You are above that.
Daily Law: If you are too present and familiar, always available and visible, you seem too banal. You give people no room to idealize you. But if you are too aloof, people cannot identify with you.
The Laws of Human Nature, 15: Make Them Want to Follow You—The Law of Fickleness
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.