What Con Men Can Teach You - Craft a Persona for 2023

A new year. And I think people are really embracing it. I’ve seen more posts and articles along the “new year, new you” theme this time around than I’ve seen since the early 2000s. It feels a little like a thaw, as if we’re coming out of a long and desolate and harsh winter.

I don’t really do the “resolutions” thing, but these days saying things like that is essentially a cliché. It’s almost eye-rolling to hear anyone say, “Yeah, I don’t really do resolutions. Goals are more my thing.”

Yeah… we get it, Kevin. You’re a little pretentious.

So, ok, I get what we mean by “resolutions.” This time of year is just a great excuse to double back, to realign, to make some decisions about how we’re going to go forward. We all really want to be “new,” for some reason. I am not immune.

Recently I’ve been researching con men. Or really, con people. There’s a surprising number of women who run confidence games and scams. But regardless of their gender, the people who run these schemes have a couple of impressive abilities.

Chief among these skills is something I find fascinating: They can assume a role—any role—and they know how to use social cues to get other people to believe they are who they claim to be. They craft a persona, and they know how to make people believe it.

Sometimes they’re so good a it, even they come to believe it.

Anna Delvey appears to truly believe that she’s a wealthy socialite, despite having no money. She’s convince others to believe it, too, even after being caught and called out as a fraud.

Frank Abignale, Jr.—the true-life con artist behind the book and film Catch Me If You Can, was also profoundly good at this sort of thing. He used clothes, cars, jewelry, and even just his tone of voice and body language to convince people that he was an airline pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, and and a dozen other personas.

This is fascinating stuff. I’m kind of obsessed with it. Because it hints at quite a lot about human nature. Not the least of which is the fact that we have the ability to assume an identity at will. We can choose what qualities and characteristics we exemplify.

I’m a big believer in choosing. I think we all choose, every minute of every day, exactly who we are gong to be. Today, I jotted some things down in my boring old analog journal about this idea. Here’s what I think:

• We should write down a “persona” that we can live into

• That persona should include all the books, movies, videos, and music that this person would consume

• It should include the values and principles this person would live by

• It should include the type of food they’d eat, the habits and routines the’d have, the quality of the clothing and products they would purchase

Basically, we should all be custom designing the type of person we want to be, then living up to that list.

That’s really what we already do, right? We have, somewhere in our minds, a wavy, foggy, unclear list of traits that equates to “I” for us, and we live to them. But we usually let those be determined by default.

We choose by not choosing.

So… how about we choose on purpose?

Why not write down exactly who you want to be, complete with what kind of food you eat, what quality of clothing you wear, what books you read and movies you watch, what exercise you get… whatever would go into the recipe for the perfect life, in your mind, you should write that down. And then, when you have the list, start choosing minute-by-minute to live into it.

Also, be aware that you’re going to fail. And that’s fine. Failure is a message. It’s a lesson. Learn from it, then recommit and start again. In fact, make one of the qualities of your ideal persona “Forgives my mistakes and learns from them, then happily starts again.”

I suppose I need to make this point clear: Don't scam people. Don’t try to fool people into believing something that will hurt them. That’s going to come back on you.

But you can certainly learn a very valuable lesson from con artists: We are who we present ourselves to be. Our persona is something we craft by our choices. We can either let it be dictated to us by default, or we can become intentional about who we become.

We can choose. And we definitely should.

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If you like this post, there’s a blog full of this kind of stuff. And Side Notes is basically an extension of my Note at the End, which you’ll find in all of my novels. And you can find those by clicking here. Share this post with your friends, if you found it helpful. And buy my books if you’d like to support me and my work!

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