Who Are You Still Trying to Convince?

There is a specific experience that men have and never discuss.

You accomplish something real. Something that took years. And there is a moment, brief, where you think about a particular person finding out.

That is the tell. Not the accomplishment. The involuntary thought about who would need to see it.

The inventory

Before the three questions, run this. Fifteen items, yes or no, quickly.

Nine or more and you are running it hard. Five to eight and it is operating and you have been calling it conscientiousness. Under five, and check whether you answered honestly or answered the way a man answers a test.

That last sentence is not a joke. A man who audits himself while performing produces a flattering audit, and the flattering audit is itself the finding.

The four categories

Almost every man's audience falls into one of these, and most men have two.

A father. Living or dead, present or absent. The most common by a wide margin.

If he is dead, that does not end it. A dead man is the most demanding audience available, because he cannot be satisfied, cannot be argued with, and cannot revise his opinion.

A category of men. Not a person. A type. The men in his trade. The men at his church. The men his father respected. He is performing for a jury whose members he could not individually name.

A woman. A wife, an ex, a mother, or occasionally a woman from twenty years ago who has no idea she is in the story.

And a version of himself. The man he was supposed to become, who exists as a standard he is failing rather than as a person. This one is the hardest to see because it does not feel like an audience. It feels like having standards.

How to find yours

Three questions and they work better than introspection.

Who do you imagine finding out?

When something goes well, or badly, whose reaction do you picture first? Not who you would call. Who appears without being summoned.

Whose disapproval would cost you the most?

Not whose you would most dislike. Whose would actually change how you feel about yourself, which is a different and more revealing question.

And who do you argue with in your head?

Men run conversations with people who are not present, and the person they argue with most is almost always the person whose verdict they are trying to overturn.

That last one is the most reliable. Whoever you have been silently making your case to for eleven years is the judge, and the case has never been delivered, and it never will be.

The case you have been building

Every man in an audition is assembling evidence.

Not consciously. But there is a file, and it contains the things that would demonstrate he turned out well, and he adds to it, and he has never once submitted it to anybody.

The promotion. The house. The way his kids turned out. The business. The fact that he is not like his father, or that he is exactly like the good parts of his father, depending.

And the file has no recipient.

That is the thing worth sitting with. He is building a case for a court that is not in session, and the building never ends, because there is no verdict to conclude it.

I have watched men do this for forty years and describe it as ambition.

The delivery fantasy

Every man building a case has imagined the delivery.

Not consciously and not often. But there is a scene.

He is at a table, or a funeral, or a hospital room, and the man finally sees it. There is a moment where the whole record becomes visible at once and the verdict comes down.

Ask yourself whether you have ever run that scene. Most men have, and most men have never admitted it to anybody, and the admitting is uncomfortable in a way that tells you it is real.

Now notice three things about the scene.

It requires a specific event to occur that has not occurred in thirty years and shows no sign of occurring.

It requires him to have been keeping score, which he almost certainly was not, and which is the part that lands hardest. He has not been evaluating you. He has been living his own life, with his own audition running, against his own father.

And it requires the verdict to hold, which Chapter One already established that human verdicts do not.

The scene cannot happen, and if it happened it would not work, and you have organized twenty-five years around it.

What is actually in the file

Worth writing out, because a man who sees his own evidence assembled notices something.

Here is what men put in it.

The income. The title. The house. The fact that his kids are doing well. The business. That he never missed a payment, or never took a handout, or never asked anybody for anything.

And frequently, the negative version: that he is not like his father in a specific way, or that he did not do the thing his father did.

Look at that list and ask one question.

Would any of it change his mind about me?

For most men the honest answer is no, and it is not because the achievements are insufficient. It is because his opinion was not formed on evidence and will not be revised by it.

It was formed by whatever formed him, decades before you existed, and you have been submitting exhibits to a court that does not admit evidence.

The man who got the verdict

Here is what happens on the rare occasion a man actually gets it, because the outcome is instructive and it is not what he expects.

His father says it. Or the man whose respect he wanted says it, plainly, unmistakably.

It produces about six weeks.

Then it fades, and he is surprised by the fading, and he begins to wonder whether the man really meant it or was just being kind. And within a few months he has metabolized the verdict into the background and resumed the audition.

Because a human verdict is not final and both parties know it.

The man who said it could change his mind. He could learn something. He said it at a specific moment based on partial information, and that is all any human verdict can ever be.

Which is why it does not hold, and why a man who got the thing he wanted most is frequently more confused afterward than before.

The part nobody says

There is something underneath the audition that men rarely name, and naming it changes what the rest of this book is about.

A man who is auditioning does not believe he is acceptable as he is.

That is the actual belief. Everything else is downstream.

He believes there is a version of him that would be enough, and that he is not currently it, and that the gap is closable through performance.

And he is half right, which is why it is so durable. He is not currently what he was made to be. Every man reading this knows that about himself and the knowing is accurate.

Where he is wrong is in the mechanism. He thinks the gap closes by earning a verdict, and it does not, and no man in the history of the world has ever closed it that way.

Part Three is what actually closes it.

An excerpt from Whose Approval?. The free course is based on this material and is not the same thing.