in the game for the right reasons

Unlike being smart or smooth, being in the game for the right reasons might not be discernible for your audience right away. Their intuitions and biases may give them the wrong sense of this about you - they associate your haircut or race or clothes or diction with motives/principles they think are not the right ones. So it’s not a bad thing and maybe even an important thing to say “I’m in this for the right reasons. In my view, those reasons are [reasons].” You might illustrate this with a principled choice you’ve made, a tradeoff you’ve accepted along the way. Maybe you did a version of this job for free (for the love of the game).

I’ve worked with political candidates who are policy wonks - they are good-hearted geeks who care a lot about the details of financial instruments and regulatory drafting and interagency cooperation. This kind of person places a premium on smarts. Intellect is probably one of their competitive advantages, or at least has been for long seasons of their life. 

These candidates worry about looking and sounding smart enough. I found that this worry led them to make mistakes. They overdid it on policy detail and sophistication. Their anxiety about their core competency - the thing they were obviously strongest at - blinded them to other harder things they needed to accomplish. For the audiences they addressed, the “is this person smart enough?” bar was usually met in the first couple sentences that came out of their mouths. Those sentences probably had semicolons and dependent clauses in them. 

The thing the audience needed to be reassured about was something more like “does this person get it? Are they fired up about the most important thing? Are they in the game for the right reasons?” I suspect those questions mask one underneath: “do they share my values?”

This can sound naive or guileless to some: if the person you’re talking to doesn’t even care if you’re in the game for the right reasons, you might want to minimize how much you depend upon them. You might not be that helpful to each other. When the sh*t hits the fan, you’re likely to prefer very different choices.

-eric