From Ugly to Hot: The REAL ROI on Perceived Competency

Commentary on Holistic Excellence, Establishing Status, and Getting Everything You've Ever Wanted

When you’re an exceptionally academically gifted little girl, everyone waxes poetic about how great your life will be someday.

You’ll be valedictorian at graduation, attend an Ivy League college, go straight to graduate school

…(they never tell you that you’ll spend the rest of your life working off that debt)…

yadda, yadda, yadda.

Every step is planned out for you the minute people realize you’re marginally better at taking tests than your peers.

You’re delayed in developing a strong sense of identity, because why would you ever need to?

You can skate - you ace AP classes without trying, graduate with honors, get full scholarships to college, and you constantly fantasize about a life where you’re not just smart and successful but also beautiful.

That was my experience, at least.

Before I was Fawn, I was like Mia Thermopolis, the protagonist of a 2000s-era coming of age novel and movie called The Princess Diaries.

Frizzy-haired and dorky, I watched as my classmates evolved from kids to good-looking young adults.

I saw the pretty girls around me get boyfriends, positive attention, and unique opportunities.

I’d seethe to myself, thinking about how I was “so much smarter” and how I’d eventually be more successful while secretly wishing I was like them now.

But more importantly, I watched curiously as a small sect of my class separated from the rest of us over the years like cream slowly rising to the top of your morning coffee.

Not only were they beautiful, but they were smart, athletic, and they were winning at everything.

They were what I now know to be renaissance men and women:

Elite in every way.

I observed as the kindest girls I knew on the kindergarten playground surpassed me academically, athletically, artistically, and socially, while losing none of their beauty or effervescence.

Objectively, I was succeeding - I continued to get good grades and make surprisingly good money at my part-time job, but I’d come home and look at myself sadly in the mirror.

Why did everyone tell me how great my life would be someday because I was good at taking tests when these renaissance women were even “smarter” than me and still excelling in other areas of personal development?

I was left with one answer: cope.

You know what the one good thing about cope is?

If you have even a modicum of self-respect, once you recognize that you’re engaging in cope, you have to stop immediately or you won’t be able to live with yourself.

So I was done being just “smart”.

I wanted to be everything: an athlete, a scholar, an artist.

A modern-day aristocrat.

Mostly, I wanted to live my life on easy mode.

All the renaissance women made their lives look easy, even if no one who has built their own success truly has it “easy”.

I knew if I wanted to be one of these renaissance women, I had to be beautiful.

But “beauty” is such an abstract concept to someone foreign to it.

Beauty is intangible - you know it when you see it, but I couldn’t quantify it.

My turbo brain struggles to understand that which I cannot put numbers to.

Rather than attempt to distill the abstract, I leveraged what I had learned from years of now near-worthless academic success to develop the following mental model:

• Attraction is based on the desire to procreate

• Healthy people are wired to seek out healthy mates to give their offspring the greatest chance of survival

• People trust, give slack, and make allowances for others with whom they want to procreate

But I knew being good with people and leveraging my strengths to my advantage wouldn’t be enough to give me tactical advantages across all areas of my life.

The real conclusion was that I needed to be able to establish frame as efficiently as possible in every scenario.

In an ideal world - I could walk into any room, ask the first person I saw for what I wanted, and I would get it.

That’s when I stumbled on the greatest discovery of my life: the power of perceived competency.

You see, beauty has utility of its own, but it is also a skill to be leveraged when combined with charisma, EQ, and the mastery of social dynamics.

Beautiful people have easier lives.

Beautiful people make more money and even self-report higher happiness scores.

Any person that’s been ugly and not ugly (like me!) can tell you that life is better when you’re not ugly.

Being not ugly is deceptively simple.

You’ll need to develop the following, in order of importance:

1. Normal body fat percentage (sub-15% for men, sub-22% for women)

2. Figure to enhance secondary sex characteristics (v-taper for men, hourglass figure for women)

3. Positive health indicators (thick hair, clear skin, full lips, etc.)

Not quite easy, but easier than you might expect, and one of the highest ROI decisions you can make for yourself.

The quickest way to unconsciously signal status is to optimize your appearance.

If you “look healthy”, life becomes easier because you’ve already proven baseline competency at taking care of yourself.

The best part is that you don’t even need to open your mouth or use your brain.

Your meat shell will do the talking for you.

In a country where over half the population is overweight, establishing baseline competency through a normal body fat percentage is crucial to signal status.

If you don’t believe me, consider the following scenario:

All else equal, who would you guess is more likely to be punctual - the ripped guy at 12% body fat or the guy that appears to not even be able to control his eating habits sitting at 25% body fat?

Regardless of how ridiculous this sounds to isolate one specific variable, that is exactly my point.

This instinctual bias is pervasive.

You can be a fat activist and campaign to change the world’s enduring perceptions based on centuries of evolutionary biology, or you can accept Darwin’s rulebook and focus your efforts on liberating yourself from the game altogether.

I suggest you choose the latter.

In Corporate America, beauty means little without legitimate competency.

The two compound on each other to enlarge your moat to improve your perceived competency.

Greater perceived competency decreases the opportunity that you can be replaced.

And what did we learn from the aforementioned near-worthless academic excellence in basic Economics 101?

When substitutes are low, price elasticity drops.

Therefore, as the supplier in the labor market, the more difficult you are to replace, the more control you have over your own pricing.

A 1% edge in perceived competency is the difference between your first six-figure job and getting passed over again for a job you technically should be qualified for on paper.

Crazy, but it’s true.

Take it from the academically-inclined little girl all grown up now: optimizing my appearance to establish status according to the above guidelines has made me far happier and wealthier than the prophesied advanced degrees from my childhood ever could have.

That’s the ROI on perceived competency.

@BowTiedFawn

P.S. This is my first time writing about personal experiences, so let me know if y’all enjoyed reading or if you prefer just skin alpha. Thanks!

P.P.S. I got my frizzy hair under by deep conditioning a few times per month and scrunching a leave-in conditioner into my hair after washing :)