After visiting both MIT and Stanford this last month, one thing I noticed from these talent-dense communities is that the unquantifiable quality of having ‘aura’ is one of the most important character traits there is. In these environments, raw intelligence alone is not enough. The ability to communicate competence coexists with the competence itself, and neither flourishes without the other.
Aura is easy to recognize but hard to explain. It’s not difficult to see who people respect, but the reason for this respect is more challenging to pinpoint. I think there are two types of aura: intellectual aura and rhetorical aura.
The former is literally how smart you are, based on objective measures. These are people that you genuinely know are smart when you are around them. They have good ideas in conversations, and have accomplished respectable things. Most people are able to respect people with intellectual aura pretty easily, mainly because the ways we prove intelligence are difficult to replicate (e.g. an olympiad medal).
Now the latter. Rhetorical aura is the ability to make other people trust your skills before they can verify them. People with this type of aura are good at communicating, and they are sought out because they are charismatic and excited. They seem to know what they’re talking about, but don’t necessarily actually do.
Because it's a ‘cheaper’ signal, rhetorical aura can sometimes mask a lack of substance. Some people associate rhetorical aura with 'grifting' (fake it until you make it!), but many genuinely have the technical depth to back their rhetoric. Because rhetorical aura is generally a more superficial signal, it's harder to maintain it in isolation for the long run. I actually think the more intellectual aura you have, the better your BS detector is when faced with people that have rhetorical aura.
To me, the most annoying part about rhetorical aura is that it's almost impossible to optimize for. Take, for example, confidence— an integral part of rhetorical aura. If you're thinking about your confidence actively, it's pretty obvious that you aren't confident. And reflecting on your confidence is a way of measuring this confidence more than a way of improving it. You can actively optimize to be smarter and accomplish more academically, but it's a lot harder to actively become more charismatic.
Both types of aura are difficult to develop in their own ways, but focusing solely on developing one without the other doesn't work that well. If you're the smartest person in the room but don’t express this, you don’t really have a foot in the door. Similarly, if people think you're smart but you fail at technical things, people will cut through your facade pretty soon. I think, alongside test scores and job titles and extracurricular lists, aura is underrated as a goal. You want to be able to walk in a room and immediately be taken seriously.
Successful people have both intelligence and good rhetoric, and that makes people value their ideas and their time. There’s little point in most skills if you aren't taken seriously for them.
"Rhetorical" aura seems slightly mishandled here. It is initially described as, roughly, commmunication skills and charisma, but eventually is construed towards how intelligent other people think you are (" people will cut through your facade")...
ReplyDeleteContrary to the blog, I think that intellectual aura is harder to quantify than rhetorical aura. Rhetorical aura is largely constant across settings. A charismatic person will be charismatic wherever they go, and thus have "aura". However, intellectual aura significantly fluctuates. For example, Rithwik Gupta has immense intellectual aura in the competitive programming sphere, but in a different realm, like playing in ball pits, he actually has negative aura.
I think the stereotypically 'superficial' nature of rhetorical aura may be exaggerated at times in the post, but generally I still think charisma is correlated with the perception you create of yourself within other people.
DeleteBall pits! The reason I say intellectual aura is relatively easy to measure is there are rather objective metrics, like olympiad results or the university you go to, though within these broad subsets further delineation is probably difficult. I guess once you take intellectual aura to be multidimensional, it becomes harder to quantify, but with a similar argument rhetorical aura is also multidimensional. Someone can be confident in selling businesses but be terrible at selling bluffs in poker. In general though, especially in the communities I (and probably you too lol) have been in, intellectual aura is a given, and rhetorical aura is harder to measure amongst everyone.