by Jeffrey Pfeffer | 12:00 PM March 29, 2011
The New York Times Sunday Styles section profile on best-selling author Tim Ferriss provides some important lessons and reminders on how to become powerful.
I have met Ferriss a couple of times at a small Bay-area business authors dinner organized by Pete Sims. He is charming and open and honest about how he has become successful. The lessons he shares apply to everyone, not just writers or professors.
When Ferriss wrote his first book, The Four-Hour Workweek, the manuscript was rejected by 25 publishers. When the 26th offered a contract, after it was signed, Ferriss was curious as to why. He told me that he asked what that person had seen in the manuscript that 25 others had not. “Nothing,” was the reply. “We can understand why publishers have rejected this work. But we aren’t betting on the book, we are betting on you. We believe you will do anything and everything you can to make the book successful.”
Bingo. Tim Ferriss is an individual of incredible determination and self-discipline — not only willing to run physical experiments on his own body, but to expend whatever effort is required to be successful. He has learned search engine optimization, is willing to blog and speak to groups tirelessly, to go anywhere and do anything to get the word about himself and his work publicized.
In a world where people and companies place lots of emphasis on intelligence, we forget that intelligence is sort of table stakes for success. There are lots of smart people. The differentiating factors become energy, drive, and the persistence and resilience to take 25 rejections and never give up and to expend the enormous effort and energy that separates Tim Ferriss and other successful people from the rest.
Second, as the profile and a web search makes clear, Ferriss is not everyone’s cup of tea. He is tirelessly self-promoting, and research shows that self-aggrandizing behavior sometimes puts other people off. But Ferriss, like most powerful and successful people, is not overly obsessed with having everyone like him or everything he does. He has a million or so followers of his blog and he is famous. One price of fame and power is that not everyone is going to approve of everything you do. Who cares? As long as you have enough support, enough allies and supporters to be successful, don’t worry about pleasing everyone. Many of us learn the need to be liked by everyone early in our lives — it’s something to get over if you are going to negotiate a path to power.
The third lesson may be the most important: power can create fame, but it is also the case that notoriety can create power. As the late social psychologist Robert Zajonc described decades ago, and has been shown over the years in numerous marketing studies, we prefer and choose what seems familiar. Zajonc called this the mere exposure effect, and it is potent. You can’t choose what you can’t remember, and you are more likely to prefer things that feel comfortable and known.
The corollary to this simple principle is one that Ferriss has followed in spades: become memorable. In Ferriss’s case, this includes doing outrageous things, using provocative language, making bold claims, posing without your shirt — in short, doing what’s necessary to get noticed.
Once again, too much sense of propriety can get in our way. If you want fame and the money and power that can follow, get out of your own way and don’t overly constrain yourself by what others would do or approve of. After all, if you are going to achieve extraordinary success, you need to stand out and be exceptional.
The success of Tim Ferriss might seem improbable until you recognize that he has followed, in extreme form, many of the rules for building a path to power. What separates most from pursuing this path is the hard work, resilience, and psychological (and in his case, physical) toughness required.
Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, where he has taught since 1979. His newest book, from HarperBusiness, is Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t.
JEFFREY PFEFFER
Jeffrey Pfeffer is Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. His next book, due to be published in 2015, is tentatively titled: Leadership B.S.: Why Workplaces and Careers Suffer—and What to Do About It.
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