Why_Copying_Billionaire_Routines_Backfires

You know, there is this, there’s a really specific trap that I think pretty much every single ambitious person falls into at least once. Oh yeah. You see someone who is just operating at the absolute top of their game, like a CEO or a famous artist or even just that one friend of yours who seems to have their life perfectly together. And you notice a quirk. A quirk, like a habit. Yeah, exactly. Maybe they, they always wear a black turtle neck. Right. And they have the same emails in three in the morning, or they just had this very specific, maybe slightly blunt way of ending meetings. And your brain instantly goes, aha, that is it. That’s the secret sauce. So you immediately go out and buy the turtle neck? I buy the turtle neck. I start setting my alarm for 3 a.m. And the result isn’t that I suddenly become this visionary genius. The result is just that I’m exhausted. I’m crumpy. And I look like a floating head in a black shirt. Yeah, you’ve completely optimized for the accessory, but you missed the engine entirely. Exactly. And that is exactly what we are doing our deep dive on today, why we do that. We have a really fascinating stack of sources for this one actually, mashing up modern cognitive science. Specifically, this concept called the halo effect with a story from the warring state’s period of ancient China. It’s such a great collision of ideas. We’re going to be looking at excerpts from the swungsy, which is one of the foundational texts of Taoism. And it gives us this brilliant idiom, uh, Dong Shi Xiaopin, which translates roughly to Eastern Shi imitates the frown. That’s the one. Yeah, it’s a story that is, you know, well over 2000 years old, but it perfectly explains why we hire the completely wrong people or why we make terrible investments and why copying the exact morning routines of billionaires usually just backfires in spectacular fashions. So our mission for this deep dive is to deconstruct this frown. We need to figure out why our brains are just hardwired to mistake the symptom for the source and more importantly, how you can actually stop doing it. It’s all about moving from mimicry to actual substance. So let’s start with the source material. Take us back to the state of you. Set the scene for us a bit. Okay. So in the lore here, we have a woman named Shishi. And it is really important to understand just the sheer scale of her fame. She wasn’t just pretty. No, no, she wasn’t just pretty. In Chinese history, she is literally classified as one of the four beauties. We are talking Helen of Troy levels of societal influence here. Allegedly wars were fought over her. The legends actually say that fish would forget how to swim when they saw her reflection and they just sink to the bottom of the river. Okay. So she has maximum social capital. She is basically the ultimate influencer of her era. Infinite social capital. But the text points out she had a flaw or really a medical condition. She suffered from some sort of heart trouble. Right. So sources aren’t exactly specific on the modern diagnosis. But the physical manifestation of it was that she would walk around the village clutching her chest and furrowing her brows and pain. Which I mean, objectively sounds super unpleasant. If I walk around grimacing and holding my chest, people are going to call an ambulance or the least cross the street to avoid me. Right. Exactly. But this is where the psychology starts to kick in because she was Shishi, because she possessed this overwhelming pre-existing beauty. The neighbors didn’t see sickness. They saw vulnerability. They actually thought the frown added this haunting, fragile quality to her. It enhanced her beauty. It’s all about the context. The beauty completely reframed the pain as glamor. Precisely. The halo of her face illuminated the frown and made it this desirable trait. It’s sort of the ancient equivalent of like heroin chic in the 90s or those weird fashion trends were looking completely exhausted. Suddenly the in thing. Okay. So now enter our protagonist or maybe our victim here, East Kringi. Deng Shi. Right. So she lives in the exact same village. And the text is actually quite brutal here. It describes her simply as an ugly woman. Yeah. They don’t hold back. No. But I think that’s mainly a narrative device just to maximize the contrast. So she watches Shishi. She sees the crowds stopping the stare. She sees all this adoration. And she decides to reverse engineer. She’s running a mental algorithm. She really is. She looks at the inputs and the outputs. Input. Clutch chest. Knit brows. Output. Universal adoration. So her logical conclusion is, hey, if I’re in that exact same code, I’ll get the exact same result. Exactly. She completely confuses the accompanying trait with the causal factor. So she goes home. She practices the look and she hits the streets. She clutches her chest. She frowns with just maximum intensity. And the reaction is, well, it’s not adoration. No, it’s absolute panic. I really love the specific detail that Swangzy uses here. It says the rich people in the village slam their door shut and completely refuse to come out. Just locked down locked out in the poor people. They literally grabbed their wives and children and ran out of the village. That is such a visceral reaction. Like she’s out there trying to be elegant and mysterious. And she triggers a massive evacuation. It is tragic comedy for sure. But this actually brings us right to the core of the deep dive. It is so easy to just laugh at Eastern She. We can sit here and say, oh, wow, she was foolish. But psychological research suggests she wasn’t actually stupid. She was just falling victim to a cognitive heuristic that you and I use every single day. And this is the halo effect. Right. The halo effect wasn’t formally coined until, I think, 1920 by a psychologist named Edward Thorn Dyke. But Eastern She is the absolute perfect case study for it. How does the source define it? The definition is pretty simple. It’s a cognitive bias where our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about their specific character traits. Basically, if you are beautiful or rich or incredibly famous, we just automatically assume you are also smart and kind and talented. Yes. And importantly, we assume your actions are correct. She is beautiful, therefore her frown must be beautiful. Eastern She saw the halo that glow of the reputation and assumed the frown was the actual source of the light. There’s a specific term mentioned in the source notes here, fundamental attribution error. How does that fit into this? Because usually when I hear that, it means blaming someone’s character for their mistakes rather than looking at their situation. Yeah. But it actually works both ways. In this context, it’s about misattributing the cause of success. Eastern She attributed the beauty to a temporary disposition in the action of frowning. She genuinely thought the magic was in the behavior itself. When the magic was actually in the person and the context or even more specifically, the magic was in the congruence. congruence. Right. The frown worked for Shishi because it was authentic to her actual pain and it was framed by her natural features. It failed for Eastern She because it was just a performance. It clashed completely with her reality. It’s so interesting you use the word performance because that implies she was trying to deceive people. But she wasn’t really. She was just trying to optimize herself. It totally reminds me of the cargo cult mentality and anthropology. Oh, that is a fantastic parallel. You build the wooden runway on the island, hoping the planes will land with supplies, but you don’t actually understand the mechanics of flight. Right. Eastern Sheaver built the runway. She made the frown, but she didn’t have the airplane. She engaged in surface mimicry without understanding the underlying substance at all. Let’s widen the aperture on this a bit because this wangzi isn’t just an ancient beauty tip column. It’s a deep philosophical text. Was this story meant to be a broader critique of society at the time? Oh, absolutely. The sources strongly suggest this Eastern Sheaver behavior was rampant during the warring state’s period, particularly when you look at the civil service. Like the Imperial exams. The exams and just the bureaucracy in general. Think about how that functioned. If you passed the Imperial exams, you were instantly granted a halo of wisdom. You were officially a scholar. Right. Classics perfectly. You could write beautiful poetry. You had the ultimate credentials. Right. And because of that specific halo, the state just assumed you could also manage a complex irrigation project or lead a military garrison or balance an entire provincial budget, which are completely different skill sets being able to interpret an ancient poem does not mean you know how to build a dam. Completely different. But the system was totally blinded by the halo. They looked at the frown, the ability to pass a rigorous academic test and assumed it meant competence in literally all things. That creates a massive shield, doesn’t it? Like if an emperor is considered the son of heaven, that is the ultimate halo. Even if he is manifestly terrible at his actual job, the halo protects him from any real criticism. For a while, yes, the position itself is the halo. People start imitating the rituals of the court, thinking that those rituals are what create the power. But if the person sitting on the throne lacks what daoists call day, which is virtue or inherent potency, then all those rituals are just empty. Theater, just like eastern sheen’s frown. You know, there’s a slightly lighter example in the notes about artistic fashion that I found really funny. Okay, ugly calligraphy trend. Yes. Yeah, this is a recurring phenomenon in art history. You would have a very famous scholar or a master poet who is undeniably brilliant, but maybe as they got older, they developed terrible hand tremors. Or maybe they just naturally had incredibly messy handwriting. So there’s script ends up looking all jagged and weird. Right. But because they wrote it, their students would start studying that specific jagged style for years. They would intentionally write badly, thinking that if they just mimicked those ugly erratic brushstrokes, they would somehow capture the underlying genius of the poetry. They’re literally imitating the frown. Exactly. They’re copying a defect, hoping to gain a virtue. It’s like, it’s like if Einstein wore mismatched socks and suddenly every physics grad student thought wearing mismatched socks would help them understand relativity. Which naturally leads us to the deeper, dawas lessen here. Because Wang Zi isn’t just poking fun at these people for the sake of it. He is offering an alternative path. What does the text say is the actual antidote to being an eastern she? The core philosophical concept here is called pusu. Pusu? Yeah, PU SU. It translates often to the uncarved block, or sometimes simply just simplicity. The uncarved block. That sounds very stoic. What does that actually mean in a practical sense? It essentially means returning to your original inherent nature. She she’s frown was PU. It was natural. It wasn’t manufactured for an audience. It was a direct, authentic response to her physical reality. Whereas eastern she’s frown was carved. It was artificial. It was a striving. And in Taoism, striving is usually the root of the problem. Striving is the error. When you try to force yourself to be something you fundamentally aren’t, you lose your own inherent power. The source material has this really beautiful quote. Simplicity then nothing under heaven can compete with your beauty. That is really powerful. So if eastern she’s had just walked down the street being her authentic self, maybe not a legendary supermodel, but just a normal, confident person in her own skin, she wouldn’t have terrified the entire village. Exactly. She became monstrous, not because of her actual face, but because of the intense dissonance. The massive disconnect between who she truly was and what she was so desperately projecting. Authenticity resonates with people. Imitation repels them. OK, I want to bring this into our modern lives for a minute because when I was reading through this source material, I wasn’t picturing ancient China. I was picturing LinkedIn. Oh, LinkedIn is the absolute capital city of eastern she is. Right. I feel like we are just drowning in these halo effects today. Where do you see this playing out the most aggressively in the modern world? Hiring is definitely the big one. And it is incredibly insidious. There is endless data out there on what they call the beauty premium, which is the idea that good looking people literally get paid more. They get paid more, they get promoted significantly faster, and they are universally perceived as more trustworthy. If a tall, highly symmetrical, exceptionally well-dressed candidate walks into an interview, the hiring managers brain instantly grants them a halo. The subconscious logic is they look incredibly put together, therefore their marketing strategy must be incredibly put together. We are just hiring the suit. We are hiring the frown. We see the external, visible signal of success, and we just blindly assume the internal substance actually exists. But it goes way beyond just physical looks. It is about credentials, too. Harvard halo. Huge. If you are reviewing a resume and you see a top tier university at the top, you instinctively lower your critical guard. You just assume a baseline of extreme competence. You might completely gloss over their lack of actual relevant experience because the brand halo is literally blinding you to it. You assume the substance is there just because the label is shiny. This happens in tech constantly. I always call it the founder halo. Oh, 100%. You have a guy who builds a really successful app. Maybe he figured out a great way to optimize ad targeting algorithms. He makes a billion dollars. Then suddenly the entire world pivots and starts asking him, hey, how do we fix the public education system? Yeah. Or how do we colonize Mars? Which of the average person be eating for breakfast? And he answers them. That is the worst part. And we actually listen. That is the classic Eastern sheet trap. We look at his undeniable success in one highly specific domain. And we just assume that wisdom applies to literally every domain. Yeah, that’s a textbook logical fallacy. It’s called domain transfer. You’re assuming that because the frown in this case, the business success worked in software development, it will automatically work in civil engineering or global public health. It context is everything. She’s round worked in the strict context of her face. That tech CEO strategy worked in the strict context of zero interest rates and digital scaling. It very likely might not work in manufacturing or geopolitics. But we wanted to work. I think that’s the underlying issue. We desperately want the shortcut. We really want to believe that if we just buy the exact same luxury watch as the champion tennis player, we’ll somehow start winning at Wimbledon. Well, that is modern marketing in a nutshell. The endorsements are literally just the monetization of the halo effect. The tennis player knows everything about back hands. He knows absolutely nothing about the internal mechanics of a luxury chronograph. But our brains transfer the feeling of winning and excellence from the athlete directly to the watch. It’s almost scary how lazy our brains can be. We are so desperate to avoid doing the actual due diligence of checking for the substance. Cognitive miser. That is the term psychologists use for us. Raging is expensive. Like biologically, glucose wise, critical thinking takes a lot of energy. Following a shiny halo is cheap. It’s a mental shortcut. But as eastern she found out the hard way, sometimes the shortcut just leads you right off a cliff. Or leads to all the rich people slamming their doors in your face. Right. Exactly. So, how do we actually intervene here? If I want to stop being eastern she in my own life and I want to stop falling for everybody else’s halos, what is the protocol? What do the sources recommend? The source material really boils it down to two fundamental steps. The first is you have to separate the trait from the context. Okay. How do you actually do that in practice? You have to force yourself to ask a control question. Something like, would I still value this exact piece of business advice if it came from someone who was bankrupt? Or would I still think this interface design was revolutionary if it wasn’t made by Apple? Or even, is this particular frown actually beautiful on my face? You have to totally isolate the variable. Exactly. You mentally strip away the halo. If the underlying substance still holds up, great. Adopt it. But if the whole thing collapses without the brand name attached, you were just staring at a shiny object. And what’s the second step? Cultivate. Don’t imitate. This brings us right back to Pusu. The Uncarved Block. Right. The lesson of eastern she is definitely not, don’t try to improve yourself. It’s, don’t try to be someone else entirely. You cannot just copy paste someone else’s bespoke solution onto your specific problem. You have to build a solution that organically emerges from your own nature, your own unique strengths, and your actual reality. It’s basically the difference between memorizing the answers for a test and actually learning how to do the math. Beautifully put, yes. Eastern she memorized the answers. She got the frown down perfectly, but she didn’t know the math. She didn’t understand the underlying mechanics of the beauty. Here is a quote from the source notes that I think serves as the perfect summary for this entire deep dive. It’s the final verdict the text gives on Eastern she. It says, she knew the frown was beautiful, but she did not know why the frown was beautiful. That really is the killer line. The why is absolutely everything. The why is the context. If you don’t actually understand the mechanism behind why something works, you are just play acting. And you end up looking pretty ridiculous. Or honestly, even worse, you end up incredibly confident and totally incompetent. Well, this has definitely been a reality check. I think as soon as we finish recording, I need to go unsubscribe from a few of those billionaire morning routine newsletters I get. Yeah, that’s probably for the best. But before we officially sign off, we always want to leave you with a little bit of homework, a final thought to mull over. Yes. We’ve spent the last 20 minutes or so talking about ancient Chinese villagers and modern text CEOs. But try to turn the mirror around now. Look at your own career. Look at your own daily habits. What frowns are you actively imitating right now? Are you using incredibly specific corporate jargon in your meetings just because you heard a VP use it once and it sounded smart? Are you adopting a really aggressive management style just because you read about it in a biography of a guy who lived in a completely different century? You have to ask yourself. Yeah. Are you doing these things because they actually work for you in your own uncarved block? Or you just wandering around clutching your chest, desperately hoping the neighbors will think you’re a genius. Chase the substance. Not the halo. Things are taking this deep dive with us. See you next time.