Leave them guessing

The easiest way to give away all your power is just to lay it all out in the open. No filter. No nothing. Anything that comes to mind you just sling out into the world. Until one day you realize that no one listens. No one cares. You don’t want to be this person.

But the fact of the matter is: most people are that person.

Because it takes cunning, skill, and understanding to play a different game. One where you build reputation not by what you do say, but by what you leave out. When you play the game like this, you create an enigma because no one will be able to exactly pin you down.

You leave little breadcrumbs. Little clues. You give hints, but no instructions. You give a direction, but no roadmap. And by doing this you will instill this question in the back of everyone’s mind: who is this?

And you will find out that this is the way to get attention, because then you are turning your public figure into something that’s larger than yourself. You become hard to pin down, and exactly because of that people will want to know: who is this?

But you have to be out there. People will have to be able to find you. They will have to be able to find some sort of resource, which will allow them to spend two hours getting to know you.

You will have to be deliberate about what you put out there. There will have to be some original thought. You will have to be a critical thinker. You will have to be aware of using as few words as possible to get your point across. You will have to have the ability to finish most of an idea, but not all. You will have to connect your ideas to some other ideas, but you will have to do so loosely.

After those two hours of going through the stuff that you put out there—-- they will feel like they got to know you, but just like the enigma that you created around yourself: they will feel like they know some, but not all. And that’s the way that you answer the question: who is this?

And then, after a few years of “building” like this, you look back and you realize that you learned more about yourself than you ever did before. You have transformed, you have become more interesting, and you have a better life because of it. Now ain’t that something?