Aura is All You Need

I was recently at MIT Campus Preview Week and Stanford’s Admit Weekend, and the one thing you notice by being in these talent-dense communities is that the unquantifiable quality of having ‘aura’ is the most important character trait there is.

Aura is easy to measure. It’s not difficult to see who people respect, but the reason why is more challenging. 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 people are the ones that when you’re around them, you genuinely know that they’re smart. They have good ideas in conversations, and have accomplished respectable things. Overall, they earn respect by being somewhat arrogant but having the intellect to back it up. Most people are able to respect people with intellectual aura pretty easily. 

Now the latter: rhetorical aura. The effectiveness of this type of aura is more variable, and a lot of the time it's synonymous with being able to ‘fluff.’ People with this type of aura are good at communicating, people want to talk to them because they are charismatic and excited. These people at least seem to know what they’re talking about, but don’t necessarily actually do.

But rhetorical aura can go both ways, because half the people with this aura are actually just 'grifting' (faking it until they make it), while the other half genuinely have the technical skills to back it up. I actually think the more technical aura you have, the better your BS detector is when faced with people that have rhetorical aura.

The most successful people obviously have both types of aura, but focusing solely on developing one without the other doesn't work that well. If you're the smartest person in the room and no one knows it, you're not getting anywhere. Similarly, if people think you're smart but you fail at technical things, people will cut through your facade.

The most annoying part, at least for me, about aura is that intellectual aura is quite easy to quantify and express. There are fairly objective measures of intellect: test scores, the college you go to, the comments you make in discussions. But rhetorical aura is almost impossible to quantify. 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 character trait more so than a way to improve it.

So the only way to improve rhetorical aura is to wait a bit, and reflect. So while the actual process of improving confidence is opaque, you can put yourself in environments that require confidence, and trust yourself to adapt. Which is really scary because you don’t have control.