CHAPTER 11

Framing Perceptions and Attributions Your Way

Your mission isn’t your guide. You have to find your own way.

—Yellow Tanabe

Deciphering how others see us is sometimes like putting together a jigsaw puzzle: we have only a vague notion of what the overall picture looks like at first, but clarity and specificity come as pieces start to come together. But what makes it even more imprecise is that each time we interact with someone new, it’s a new puzzle image.

It’s like going on a diet, really. A couple of years ago, I decided to go on the Paleo diet, which you may have heard of or even done yourself, because it was all the rage for a while. A friend of mine, Anna, was raving about how it was changing her life. She was seeing amazing results. Like, incredibly obnoxious results. I tried to be happy for her each time I heard her say something like “The pounds are literally just melting off!”

Now, this is a friend of mine who has never been known for her willpower, someone who had tried every diet in the books and was never able to stay on any of them, and yet she was exclaiming how happy she was and how amazing she felt. And so I tried to cheer her on. And then I decided that if Anna could do it, I could too.

And for a while, I actually did do it. I had to avoid many foods, including but not limited to sugar, oatmeal and other grains, and processed food in general. Those things took a few days to get used to, but it was manageable. The hardest part for me was cutting out dairy, as I have a love affair with cheese—but I made do because the diet lets you eat lots of meat (bacon, even!), and oil is totally fine.

The first week, I felt like crap, but Anna reminded me that feeling like crap the first week means that the diet is working. (Apparently it’s a real thing. People call it the “Paleo flu” because the first week you feel tired, sick, and sluggish, as if you really have the flu.) But then I started seeing some results. I lost a few pounds (not as many as Anna, but still . . .).

And it became easier. I started to get used to eating only eggs at breakfast. I incorporated almond butter and nuts into my regular repertoire, and even got accustomed to putting my meatballs and pasta sauce on top of spaghetti squash instead of actual pasta.

Three, four, five weeks passed. And I started talking about how this was no longer a diet, but a lifestyle (yes, I was one of those annoying people). But then, about six weeks into the Paleo diet, something happened. I had an allergic reaction. Like, a nightmare of an allergic reaction. Rash, swelling, blisters all over my face, especially around my mouth.

What I discovered is that there are different body types based on different genetic makeups (but of course). With different body types come different dietary needs, one of which is called an arginine-lysine balance (lysine and arginine are two amino acids found in protein-rich foods). Though I am not allergic to nuts, when I have too many, it throws my arginine-lysine balance out of whack and I find myself highly deficient in lysine. Apparently, I actually need lots of dairy. Like, lots and lots of cheese.

What did I learn? Not every diet is suited for every body type. Just because the Paleo diet forbade cheese didn’t mean that I could, or should, stop myself from eating plenty of it. And, more philosophically, there are an infinite number of people in this world, all of whom need and want different things. Creating your edge in any situation requires a personal perspective and personalization. We have to find our own paths, not just follow the paths that others have made.

Not only are there infinitely different people, we often forget that we are dealing with imperfect creatures who are themselves fickle, people who might hold multiple expectations of others simultaneously. This especially applies to those who are in positions of power and are making decisions on behalf of others. We tend to think people generally agree and that there is a universal norm surrounding beliefs and perceptions that we can follow.

But that is far from true. The people we depend on to make important decisions that alter the progression of our lives don’t know what they are looking for or how they make their decisions, and even when they claim to know what they are looking for, the target shifts from instance to instance.

Over the past ten years, I have met and interviewed more than 500 entrepreneurs and 350 investors. I often ask entrepreneurs to describe what they believe is the single most important quality that investors are looking for. Their answer: passion.

For the investors, I similarly ask them to describe what they believe is the single most important attribute that they look for in making their investment decisions, and again, overwhelmingly, it’s passion. Some, like Mark Suster, state it immediately. “The goal is to invest in passionate entrepreneurs. That’s it, end of story. Passion,” he often says, unapologetically.

Other investors will describe it in a more offhand manner—for example, an investor once told me, “I want someone who, at four o’clock in the morning, would not be able to go to bed because they are so excited.”

Another shared, “This gal, she would light up when she talked about her business. She was so interested in anything that I would say. She just had to make it work, and the intensity of her passion was just obvious.”

Still others try to provide more of a philosophy to back up their assertion, explaining what this passion means and why it is so important to them:

Ninety percent of success in anything comes from just giving a shit. The older I get, the more amazed I am at how many entrepreneurs just really don’t. Ten percent is skill and luck, but just caring enough, having passion about something, means that they will do their best. If they have passion, they will not fail one way or the other, and that matters more than you can imagine.

In my research, I’ve tested the perceived passion of an entrepreneur, and investors are right—it does matter. It is actually one of the most significant factors in determining who receives start-up funding. I’ve found that entrepreneurs presenting in pitch competitions who are rated high on passion by investors are 7.4 times more likely to receive funding than those who are rated low on passion. In fact, perceptions of passion compensated for poor performance and weak objective data on the venture—things like profitability, product performance, and market size.

It’s no wonder that entrepreneurs feel the need to show passion when they are presenting their ventures to investors—and they often ask me how they can do it. Other scholars have tried to pinpoint what passion is, as well. For example, Melissa Cardon, a professor at Pace University, along with several colleagues who also study entrepreneurial passion, defines it as “an entrepreneur’s intense positive feelings that [are] the result of their engagement in entrepreneurial activities.”

The influence of such passion is that it presumably impacts an investor’s own levels of passion—whereby they experience a change in their own internal emotions. I’ve heard this echoed by investors as well, who say things like “He was so passionate about it that it made me passionate about it. I could feel myself getting excited in the same way he was.”

So to gain an edge, at least in the start-up world, the trick is to be self-aware and pinpoint how you can demonstrate your passion in a more focused, self-enhancing manner, right? Well, not exactly.

First off, what I’ve discovered is that in the minds of investors, they don’t actually know what they’re referring to when they say they want a passionate entrepreneur. That is, investors don’t agree on what passion is; different investors have different definitions of what it means. Some investors think it’s about an entrepreneur demonstrating passion for the vision of the company—that you believe in what you’re working on. Others think it’s about demonstrating commitment—having the type of passion that can sustain you through the rough cycles. Some investors see these as being linked, while others argue that it’s two entirely different things. So as an entrepreneur, you might be trying to enhance in the very ways that would turn one investor on and turn another very much off.

But it’s not just differences between investors—in which one investor thinks passion means X, while another thinks passion means Y. Often, when I pushed individual investors, even gently, to define passion, they couldn’t. To illustrate: One day an investor told me that he doesn’t invest in anyone who doesn’t have passion. But then, not more than five minutes later, when I asked him to tell me about an entrepreneur whom he decided not to invest in, even though all the objective business data was telling him that it was a good investment, he told me, “Well, there was this one guy who looked like he had had waaaay too much coffee. He was so passionate, and I couldn’t invest in him.” People might think they want one thing, but that can change at any time.

Not only do people not know what they are looking for in others, they’re not likely to notice even if you feel that you are being particularly compelling in demonstrating your passion—or charisma, as it were. This type of “spotlight effect” occurs everywhere. As humans, we all tend to forget that although we are at the center of our own world, we are not at the center of everyone else’s. We drastically overestimate the effect we have on others.

We need to train ourselves to redirect that spotlight and get people emotionally invested in people other than themselves. Guiding entails being purposeful in helping others frame the attributions that they make about us.

Gary Vaynerchuk, the mastermind behind Wine Library and VaynerMedia, once told me, “There is not a single person’s opinion that bothers me. I have no expectations of anyone.” I called bullshit (his term, not mine) on this pretty quickly, pointing out how much of the success of his companies depends on his public persona and how he is able to deftly interrelate his sense of self with other people’s perceptions of him. He is unrepentantly who he is while simultaneously harmonizing with what people think of him. He replied by retorting, “Nope, I’d literally walk away from VaynerMedia and start all over. I think that would be fine and I would make something else incredible. I think that would be fun.” Which proved my point exactly.

Gary, as opposed to me, was not a good student in high school. I don’t say this with any sort of grandiosity (he does, after all, have a net worth of over $160 million, whereas my net worth is closer to . . . well, never mind). And I only know that he wasn’t a good student because we both attended the same high school—a public high school in middle-of-nowhere New Jersey. Rather than endeavoring to earn gold stars, Gary occupied his free time with a small side business selling and trading baseball cards. He started out by going to baseball card shows at a local mall, where he would pay a table fee of $100 to $150, and then try to make a profit selling the cards. When he wasn’t selling cards, he was helping out at his dad’s wine and liquor store, where he would help crush ice, stock shelves, and manage inventory.

Gary told me once that if he was to have just been himself, he would have spent his early twenties watching sports and looking at baseball cards. But he cultivated a strong sense of self-awareness very early on, and despite his protestations otherwise, he found a way to guide in a manner that allowed him to reconcile who he was with his external responsibilities—namely, the expectation that he join the family business. He said, “I realized that wine is no different than baseball cards. We had the Beckett Monthly and every month it came out with what cards were going up and what cards were going down. And with wine we had the Wine Spectator that rates wines and dictates what every retailer tries to buy and sell. It’s basically the same thing. I would joke about it.”

Upon graduating from college, Gary joined the wine and liquor store full-time and started applying some of the techniques that he had learned from selling baseball cards to help his dad make larger profits. He reminisces, “Instead of ‘Hey, what about this baseball card?’ now it was ‘Hey, what about this wine promotion?’ or ‘What about carrying this type of wine?’” Inexhaustible, he would come up with fifteen or twenty such ideas every day.

Gary, along with his best friend, Brandon, who eventually joined the store as well, continued to formulate ideas for how they could drive more revenue to the store by turning it into a major wine store. Quite quickly, he began to face barriers and realized that he was at a disadvantage relative to others in the industry—he was considered too young and too inexperienced to be a wine connoisseur. His family didn’t own a vineyard, just a discount wine and liquor store. He was perceived to be completely unconventional in his thinking, and others in the industry resented that he didn’t respect the sanctity of the wine business.

Gary and Brandon knew that to be seen as a major wine store in the eyes of customers, they would need to keep up with trends first and foremost—just as they had kept up with athletes and trends in selling baseball cards. They began to connect with premier wine-producing areas, beginning with a few big but lesser known importers from both Australia and Spain. Over time, this garnered them a huge selection of some of the best wines from emerging regions that would later become regarded as prestigious collectible wines. This then gave them access to more traditional collectibles, such as Insignia, Dominus, Caymus, wines that you previously could get only if you knew the owner or had your name on a special list.

Gary began to connect and engage with customers, and realized that while the wine world was very elitist, he saw wine as something that should be widely accessible. Just as he was seen as unconventional, so too were many consumers. In this way, his unconventional background helped him tap into a market of unconventional customers.

Gary began to build a customer list and openly offer quality wines to all, providing everyone with the opportunity to access high-end collectibles, Spanish and Australian imports, and other new and upcoming wine regions. He started a fax service to fax people offers in the middle of the night. Before leaving his store at nine p.m., he would set up a fax to go out at three a.m. advertising all the high-end collectibles that they had. The idea was that in the morning, people would come into the office and find wine offers on their fax machines. It was Gary’s way of getting out large amounts of information to customers quickly with just the push of a button.

As business improved, their fax service evolved into an email service. Gary started emailing thank-you notes to each of his customers, and then he started sending attachments of short videos of him personally saying thank you.

These videos led to other videos, in which he continued to try to make wine accessible to everyone by posting short instructional clips on wine and wine tasting. Gary’s friendly and approachable demeanor resonated with his viewers, and soon he found that he had a huge audience—which led to a video blog on YouTube called Wine Library TV and an eventual rebranding of their liquor and wine store into Wine Library, a platform that offered online sales and a wine-delivery service, currently bringing in more than $60 million in annual sales. Gary now also owns VaynerMedia, a social media–focused digital agency, where he helps companies create an accessible persona and brand just as he did for Wine Library; as well as VaynerSports, a full-service sports agency; a shoe line with K-Swiss; and his own YouTube show called The #AskGaryVee Show.

Those who know Gary describe him as straightforward, real, and raw. He is immensely self-aware. Gary doesn’t often mention that his road to success was paved with lots of biased perceptions from others, especially from those who were in the wine industry early on. He was truly an unconventional player in the wine world because of his lack of experience, as well as his youth and background.

But what gave him his edge was being unapologetic about who he is, while simultaneously being attuned to the perceptions of others so that he could align his strengths with the opportunities he saw in his external surroundings to connect and engage with customers. He relied on his strengths—a casual, approachable demeanor—to create associations with customers and suppliers. He was able to guide wine consumers in a way that others could not. He delighted them with his no-nonsense, brash perspective on wine, and enriched them with a new type of experience with wine.

Hearing Gary’s story, it seems simple. But Gary did not fit in. He was not part of the wine elite. Often when we’re confronted with situations like Gary’s—feeling out of place or unqualified—we try to fake it till we make it.

Remember that we all have something. Perceptions and attributions are being made about all of us—and getting into a contest about who has more privilege is not likely to lead to your own long-term success. In the long-term, on a macro level, posturing and faking it provides just temporary value. It doesn’t endure, and what ends up being more long-standing is a belief that inevitably holds people back—an enduring feeling of uncertainty and self-doubt. The fear that you will be stereotyped will be more pervasive than any amount of “elite brass” that you can channel, and you will start to anticipate situations in which you may not be as valued as you should be, in turn leading to more self-doubt.

This was what I experienced in all those engineering classes years ago, as one of four females majoring in electrical engineering, where none of us exactly fit the masculine persona—yet we all tried to act that part.

Scholars have found this exact type of posturing in women in mathematics and women and minorities in the workplace—finding that while it does provide some temporary respite, it nonetheless has negative effects on perceptions of performance in the long term.

And thus, it was quite by accident that I discovered my elite brass equivalent (or as a good friend calls it, carrying herself with the confidence of a “mediocre white male”). That is to say, my personal solution to how I should be framing the conversation when I found myself in those situations in which the culture, the norms, and the environment were dictated by the “elite”—or any fill-in-the-blank type of person (my recent favorite version of the instruction is to “act like Oprah”: channel what you think Oprah would do) that I, quite simply, am not.

That was certainly true for me, as I discovered early in my career. Recognizing that guiding myself by acting like someone I wasn’t (whether a white man or Oprah) had tended to get me into trouble, I had just given up. I found that overwhelmingly, when I acted like a man—or how I thought a man would stereotypically act—I got pushback. People saw me as aggressive, and I had nothing to show for it.

I had just started a new job, and a trusted mentor had told me that in my new role, it was critical for me to be good at networking and making connections with those in power. He advised me to reach out to people, be assertive, and ask them to coffee. I followed his advice and I did manage to make a few connections and set up a few coffee meetings.

After a few of these encounters, however, I noticed that it was feeling superficial—like I wasn’t really getting to know these people. They would offer me the same sort of surface-level advice, and I seemed to be having the same conversations over and over: they were glad to have me, the company provides wonderful opportunities to those who work hard and seek out stretch assignments, and I should get to know lots of people. I didn’t really feel like I was making any meaningful connections with any of these people.

And yet, all around me, I’d hear my colleagues saying things like such and such VP “took me to this awesome sushi place and totally hooked me up with the tech team,” and such and such managing director “invited me to join him at the sales awards meeting,” and even things like “Oh, I’m so wasted. I was doing shots last night with such and such senior head until three a.m.”

I was clearly not as proficient in my networking. Again, I received advice along the lines of: “You need to do that—invite people to lunch, invite them out for drinks, not just normal coffee meetings.” But in the back of my mind, I remember thinking, “Me? As a young Asian female? I should be inviting my senior male colleagues out for drinks?” There was no way that was going to happen. I knew intuitively that I was not going to be able to pull that one off.

But a few weeks later, I discovered that I too had the ability to make connections with senior leaders in my organization—authentic connections, even more so than I had imagined. I was scheduled to give a presentation at an industry conference and was taking an early flight to get there. It wasn’t until we landed and I got off the plane that I saw that the senior VP of the division I belonged to was on the same flight.

I went over and said hello, and asked him if he had flown in for the same conference and was planning to attend, or if he was in town for other business. He indicated that he was attending the same conference and then asked me, “How are you getting to the conference center?” I told him that I was going to catch a cab, to which he replied, “Oh, I have a driver coming to pick me up.” (Of course he did. I too was having a driver come to pick me up . . . only my driver works for a cab company, and his private driver works for him.)

But then he offered, “Do you want to catch a ride with me?”

Over the course of the forty-five-minute drive, we chatted and he got to know me, on neutral turf where I felt confident and comfortable. Not in a restaurant or bar, where I would feel the need to make that time worth his while; where I would feel the need to impress him, or be interesting or insightful so I wouldn’t feel bad about asking him to drinks. Or where I felt like I had to have some agenda (which would be clear to him). Here, I could just be myself.

There was no time pressure, no meeting for him to rush off to. We were captive for forty-five minutes and just enjoyed the time. Our conversation progressed naturally, like conversations are meant to when you’re merely trying to get to know someone with no alternate agenda. I asked him for advice on things that came up organically; I was witty and let my natural sense of humor show. And he saw that I was a smart, insightful person. He got to know my personality.

At the conference, even though he was running between meetings, he made the time to catch the last ten minutes of my presentation and then came up to me to tell me how well he thought it went. He told me that I was a natural presenter. A few weeks later, he invited me to give a presentation to his internal team. To this day, he remains one of my most trusted and closest mentors.

It is stories like this one and the one with Gary of Wine Library and VaynerMedia that I hope you remember when thinking about guiding others’ views of you. Gary didn’t pretend to be a snooty, typical wine elitist, and I didn’t try to be one of the bros doing sake bombs. We can’t try to cater to what we think others want, because we have no idea how to do that, or what they want, and they don’t know either. Instead, we have to be opportunistic and savvy in seizing chances to demonstrate who we really are, and be unapologetic and confident.

Guiding others does not have to be arduous or painful, nor does it have to be an act that takes you out of your own comfort zone. It can be a simple by-product and an organic extension of your surroundings. Let things work for you, especially in guiding perceptions about you.