Have We Misunderstood What “Charisma” Really Means?
I often hear the word “charisma” been thrown in my environment. More often that not, I’ve heard it quite a bit by the ladies to describe men who display confidence and I emphasise on the word display because you can display confidence as much as you want, but at the end of the day, underneath all that “confidence” is a insecure dude with little substance surrounded by people that make them feel good rather than be honest with them and too insecure to admit that you are probably not as smart as you think you are. Was that too harsh? I’d give you a tissue but we seem to be running out of that in Sri Lanka’s economic crisis.
But seriously? Have we misunderstood what Charisma really means?
By the way, I can be wrong about this in a complete a**hole like way but I’ve honestly been thinking about it for a while and I can’t help but put it out there.
According to Oxford Dictionary, Charisma is “the powerful personal quality that some people have to attract and impress other people”. The more definitions I read about it, the more it starts to make sense as to why people misunderstood it. But it’s not that it’s been misunderstood now, is it? It’s just been guided completely in the wrong way as most things have been in today’s world.
I remember speaking to one of my friends who lectures in Psychology and I really loved the example he used when we talked about this. There is a thing called “Charismatic Leadership” often described in the business world. Leaders who are known for being the best at what they do, sometimes they are so good, it’s almost as if it’s an illusion. Charismatic individuals who are also leaders in Business have an easy influence in people, people listen to them, every word that comes out of their mouth has the potential to change lives (I’m not even exaggerating that, I’ve witnessed it myself). They hold a certain social status, people wanna take pictures with them. Simply said, they are known amongst the crowd.
But there is another side to this that we don’t hear about because nobody bothered to find out what happened to those particular leaders. The influence you have in People, can get to you, and when it starts inflating your ego, that’s when the slow downfall begins and the truth is, you won’t know about the downfall, until you are halfway or more down. You’re slipping and you’re slipping fast. You start caring more about the social capital you get from people, life becomes more about you unconsciously feeding your ego, it starts becoming less about adding value and more about how many people know you and so on and so forth.
You won’t be able to take criticism from anyone, you wont enjoy taking feedback from employees because you’ve been told that you’re the best right? Your employees start keeping their distance from you, you’re no longer influential, you’re just an egotistical little shit. Employees start backbiting against you, whereas some employees start brown nosing you because they wanna be on your good side for that promotion, then culture takes a hit and boom! there goes your business.
Today, Charisma has been guided to make people think that your ability to do multiple things is what makes you “Charismatic”. But if you really have an in depth factual look today with the generation that seems to be doing “multiple things”, if you ask them about it, they’d probably give you a bullshit answer filled with reality distortion. They’re not as good as they think they are, but they’ve been told that they are by people who probably have no idea about much either. I’m not trying to attack anyone by saying this but it does makes sense, yeah?
In you taking blind pride in doing multiple things, how many of them are you willing to master? Mind you that being a master in something takes years or maybe even decades. I love how Jason Fried (CEO of Basecamp, an old school software company founded in 1999) said that “Depth and not Breadth is where mastery is found”.
Hey, I get the other side of this as well. Sometimes, we need to make money to support our families and doing multiple things to earn a few bucks is necessary but I once read something Jordan B Peterson or Robin Sharma said, one day you will have to sit down and ask yourself, what you wanna do for the rest of your life? Which one do you want to master?
From my personal perspective, if you are someone willing to take the hits, go through the rough waves, get back up and be courageous enough to stick to something no matter what, I’d say that’s the best definition of Charisma because you believe in it, even if nobody else does.
I’d leave you with one more thing, if you read about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Chamath Palihapitya and pretty much any individual that reached the perceived high ranks of life and stayed there, it was because they never really cared about the social capital it brought them, they just wanted to win and they built the substance to win. In order to influence, first build your own substance and the rest will follow.
I’ll ask you one more time,
Are we taking Blind Pride in doing Multiple things rather than beIng courageous enough to stick to something no matter what?
Take your time, the answer will probably take decades.
Much Love Everyone,
Azfar
