Rovers Bay

“Never Seem Too Perfect.” So says Robert Greene in his book, The 48 Laws of Power. Ha! As if! I’m sure you’re all saying, “Now how in the world would someone so terrifically successful as I go about achieving this task?”

Let’s face it, most of us face much bigger obstacles than the difficulty of not appearing too perfect. But then again, most of us have also experienced the envy of another at some point. Being “perfect” implies perfection in all things, so naturally most folks just don’t worry about that. But just achieving success of any type, or demonstrating excellence in any field can be enough to arouse the envy of others. And envy can be a killer.

Remember that commercial: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful?” Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. That was brilliant marketing because it cuts to the core of what is going on in every woman’s heart. Every man’s heart too, just the envy is about different things. When you seem like you’ve got it going on, people tend to both love and hate you. You’ll be the “go to” person when a job needs to be done, but eventually others will plot against you because you make them look bad. So law 46 raises the age-old question: how can you excel at your work without arousing envy?

Well, this is a subject that many great writers have dealt with quite successfully over the years. The key is to have a sense of humor about yourself and expose your flaws so creatively that people love you for it. Will they envy your creativity? Yes, but they’ll never envy your life, because your sense of humor is all about how screwed up your life is. So you will be successful for not being successful. Your flaws become beautiful, yet they’re still flaws. You are willing not only to admit to, but to detail your bad-hair days, your delusions of grandeur, the times you took advantage of the innocent and the weak. You revel in your pathetic imperfection. It takes a lot of bravery to do this, but its exactly what sets the good writers apart.

David Sedaris is the perfect example of this. Okay, here’s a guy who was an extreme obsessive compulsive as a child, who felt compelled to lick lightswitches and touch random objects with his nose, and who cried out at odd times in tiny high-pitched voices for no reason anyone could discern. This only ended when he became a chain smoker, which somehow cured the problem. He never learned to drive because he was just too afraid. His life has been a succession of dead-end menial jobs, and his voice sounds like a muppet. As a child he was a gay-basher, but he was gay. As an adult he is frequently downtrodden but feels no sympathy for the downtrodden. But he is immensely loveable. Here is a bit of his enviable/ not-enviable work for your enjoyment (as published in the New Yorker). The zinger comes at the end of the segment:

Letting Go

It was in a little store a block from our hotel that I bought my first pack of cigarettes. The ones I’d smoked earlier had been Ronnie’s—Pall Malls, I think—and though they tasted no better or worse than I thought they would, I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. Carltons, Kents, Alpines: it was like choosing a religion, for weren’t Vantage people fundamentally different from those who’d taken to Larks or Newports? What I didn’t realize was that you could convert, that you were allowed to. The Kent person could, with very little effort, become a Vantage person, though it was harder to go from menthol to regular, or from regular-sized to ultra-long. All rules had their exceptions, but the way I came to see things they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems for alcoholics, and Mores for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never lend money to a Marlboro-menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular-Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultra-lights not only threw a wrench in the works but made it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight. All that, however, came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.

The cigarettes I bought that day in Vancouver were Viceroys. I’d often noticed them in the shirt pockets of gas-station attendants and, no doubt, thought that they’d make me appear masculine, or at least as masculine as one could look in a beret and a pair of gabardine pants that buttoned at the ankle. Throw in Ronnie’s white silk scarf and I needed all the Viceroy I could get, especially in the neighborhood where this residence hotel was.