want rizz? get reps.

The fetish for talent, for genius, sits atop a noxious belief in fixed abilities. Some people have the mojo; some don’t. Those with it get ahead, get famous, get praised. Those without get lucky sometimes and otherwise grind to little effect. Poor them.

Ben and I write here because we believe - based on loads of lived and documented evidence - that this worldview is hot garbage.

Work and life are better when you see people as adaptive, resilient, indomitable forces. When you invest your emotional and practical energy in sponsoring growth instead of spotting talent. 

I think it’s worth calling out the importance of growth mindset for a quality that even the most growth-oriented folks assume is a talent. The rizz. Charisma. The ability to compel and inspire a crowd of 1 or 100 with personal magnetism.

When someone delivers inspiring remarks that bring a team to tears, it’s so seductive to assume that they are possessed of, even possessed by, some magic force that the rest of do not have and cannot acquire. 

In work on political campaigns and in public schools over the last 15 years, I have come to believe that even the rizz is the fruit of reps. Practice, feedback, more practice. Taking risks at the edge of your skills with the belief that what comes next will be better than what is, in part because you just had the chutzpah to try. 

You put a first butterfly on the page, then asked everyone how to make it look more like a butterfly. Then did what they said.

A case study:

The current mayor of Denver is a dear friend whose earlier campaigns I worked on. Before he was in politics, Mike was a high school teacher and a high school principal. He got in front of young people who had every reason to doubt and ignore him, and then in front of teachers with maybe even more reason to doubt and ignore him, and did his thing. He spoke. He told stories. He painted a picture of what was possible and then told them how the next step could make that picture real. 

During his education days, Mike got thousands of reps, literally thousands, with nearly as many instances of very direct feedback. (There may be no more unrestrained version of feedback than a teenager’s hot take before 900a.) He dedicated himself to refining his stories, calibrating his pacing, finding the rhythms and references that made his stuff land with each audience. 

Mike is very smart, deeply compassionate, and yes, charismatic. He’s also immensely hard working. He’s got lots of rizz. But it feels almost disrespectful for me to point that out. His rizz is a product of his reps and resilience.

…

You might not buy much of this at all. If not, I draw your attention to a distinct question - if our abilities are inborn, so what? What do you still control and influence? 

To borrow a Jim Collins phrase, wherever you entered this world in the genetic lottery, what are you going to do to maximize your “return on luck”?

-Eric