Dress The Part
Host: Isaac Mashman · June 14, 2021 · Episode 62 · 12 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
… A personal passage is left out for privacy …
I made a post, and I was saying that you need to dress the part. I literally said dress to impress. If you're going into a business meeting and you're dressed like a slouch, people are going to perceive you as such. And in that post, I also talked about cleaning your face, for guys. You need to make sure that you're shaving, you need to make sure that you're smelling good, you need to make sure that you're bathed, you need to make sure that overall you're showing concern for your appearance. Man, I have not seen so many people get offended by a post in quite some time, let alone a post that I made, because normally I try to steer away from controversy.
Yet here came this entire fleet of people saying, what do you mean clean your face? What do you mean shave your face? Like, you can't even grow a beard, [dude]. Then I had some people who were like, man, the top billionaires in the world, they never dressed in suits. They posted pictures of Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs in his turtleneck, on my post in the comment section. I'm like, man, this is going to be a fun night. I went through and I responded to a bunch of comments, and for some of the guys who were posting these billionaires who were dressed in t-shirts, I responded with more pictures of billionaires dressed in suits.
I'm like, see, this is really a horrible argument for you to have, because on one side of the spectrum, this guy isn't dressed in a suit, but on the other side of the spectrum, this guy is dressed in a suit. So what's your argument here? From there, I had more people who were commenting and engaging, saying if you're dressed to impress, then people aren't going to be able to get your authentic self. But I'm like, man, all of you have [been listening] to Gary Vee.
I'm like, y'all are listening to Gary, and I love Gary. He's a good dude. He is a good dude, but he says what people want to hear and not what people need to hear. This whole empathy thing and this whole, like, you don't have to dress to impress, is not going to get you far in life. Here's why. All these billionaires that you're trying to use in this argument, they have what is called fuck-you money. Fuck-you money. They don't care about your opinion. They could literally show up to a board meeting not in suits, but literally in pajamas. They could show up in sweatpants and a hoodie from Walmart if they wanted to, and everybody would do exactly what they told them. Every single person would listen to that executive, because he's a billionaire.
He has fuck-you money. He can do whatever he wants. He could buy a brand new house. He could buy the most expensive real estate property in the entire world. He could buy whatever car he wants to, and give you his credit card and say, get yourself a drink and buy yourself a house, and he wouldn't even fucking know, because he has that kind of money. You see, these people are using this as an argument, saying that he's not dressed in a suit. Yeah, because he doesn't have to, because people are still going to respect him. He doesn't have to impress anybody. He could pull up his bank account and pull up the property value of his company and of his estate and say, this is more money than you've ever made.
There's an aura about rich people and about super successful people that is not oftentimes discussed unless you've been around them. They have this energy of, like, they don't have to prove themselves to you. You automatically know that they're wealthy. But on the [other] side of the spectrum, a lot of those successful people know when they need to dress up. They know when they need to be in a suit. They know if they're going into a board meeting, they have to show a level of courtesy to maintain their team culture and to maintain the public's eye and the media's interest. They have an image to maintain.
They have an image to maintain. Those first 100 business meetings that they went into, I can pretty much guarantee that they were dressed either in a suit and a tie, or in a very nice dress shirt, or maybe a very nice polo.
They were still very cautious about their appearance, because how are you going to try to raise investment capital from somebody if you look like you can't even comb your damn hair or shave the peach fuzz off of your face? This is the other thing. Men are like, what do you mean shave your face? I'm not saying that if you have a beard, you remove your fucking beard. How dense do you have to be to think that I'm telling you to shave your beard if you have a beard? I'm talking about, dudes, if you're waking up in the morning and you haven't shaved in a few days, and you have this fuzz on your face, and you're not trying to grow a beard.
If it looks like it's not cut, you don't have it trimmed, you don't have the edges nice and flat and even in straight lines, you're going to look horrible, man. You're going to look like somebody who's off the street, and that's not going to impress anybody.
That's not going to impress yourself, and you're going to feel a little bit lower energy. If you're not dressed to your peak capacity, you're not going to feel as good as you could be feeling. This is something: if you've never dressed in a suit and a tie, if you've never dressed nice in a nice dress or something like that, for you ladies who are listening, then you don't know what it feels like. But [when] you put on nice clothes, you'll either be annoyed by it or you'll come to embrace it. People who are pursuing ultra success, or huge levels, they put something on and they know they feel nice.
It might feel a little uncomfortable physically, but they know mentally and emotionally that what they're doing and the care that they put into their appearance is an outward reflection of their inward values and their ethics.
Not so much their ethics, but also the way that they operate, their standards of living. How you look outwardly allows other people to see within you. They can literally see through you and be like, this person is a slouch. He has no concern for what he smells like. He's not wearing any deodorant, or he hasn't bathed in a couple of days. His facial hair is not trimmed. He doesn't look too good. His hair looks greasy. These are people who are able to take baths. These are people who are able to shave their faces. These are people who are able to go and put on a stick of deodorant.
Or if you're one of those guys who's anti-deodorant, then you could still make sure that your pits smell good. But no, you don't want to take that time, because that requires effort, and that makes you feel like you're trying to put on and portray something that you're really not. Well, face it, if other people [aren't] going to respect you, and you're wondering why they're not giving you any respect or any attention, it's because you do not look like you demand attention.
You do not look like you demand respect. That's just [it] at the end of the day. Man, it's sad. It's sad to think that people are so okay with not looking good. It almost hurts me to think that so many people are okay with mediocrity. But at the other end of the spectrum, I'm like, all right, cool, competition for me. I don't really have to worry about these people. They're not in my way, because they're not taking it as seriously as I am. They're not taking it as seriously as the team has taken it. They're not taking it as seriously as some of these other people who I'm working with.
You have to take yourself seriously. And if you take yourself seriously, other people will catch on to the drift, and they will follow you along. I remember my first business trip was to see the vice president of the network marketing company speak. I've mentioned this example a couple of times, but I was the only person in a suit. I think I might have been one of three people, and I was the person who he paid the most attention to, because I was focused on coming up to him. I had an appearance. I wasn't focusing on the Rolex on his wrist. I was asking him the questions.
There's an actual video that I'll find the link to, and I'll eventually post it across my socials so you guys can verify that I'm not [talking shit]. But everybody else was talking about the Rolex. They're like, look at this, look at this wrist, and I'm over here like, I deserve to be here, I want to learn from you. And so if you're one of those people who has been against dressing to impress, I want to challenge your thinking. I want to really have you take a couple of minutes today and think to yourself: am I doing this because I truly am trying to be my authentic self, quote unquote, whatever the fuck that means?
Or am I doing this because I'm just being lazy, because I don't want to take the time to dress up, because maybe this is uncomfortable? It's going to hold my crotch a little bit too tight, or it's going to make my back sweat a little bit too much. Or are you doing it to be lazy? Now, I know some of you are probably thinking, well, Isaac, what if you don't have the money? What if you don't have the money to invest in a suit? The suit that I was wearing and the shoes, the entire outfit, cost less than $200. Less than $200. I had a pair of shoes, I had a blazer.
It actually was probably like 250, all right. That's shoes, socks, underwear, blazer, dress shirt, all of it, even down to the belt, so less than $250. And even then, some people are like, 250 bucks is too much. All right, go to your local thrift store and get a brand new suit jacket for 20 bucks, pay five bucks at the cleaners, and now you're what, $25 deep. Then you get a blazer, so less than 50 bucks from a thrift store, and you have an entire set of clothes that look nice.
People won't know that you got it from the thrift store, but still, at the end of the day, it's presentation. You could have a car that's from the 1960s, but it was well maintained, so it looks like it's brand new and it has that high-quality presentation. Or you look at that car from the 1960s that was sitting in an empty field and is rusted. Are you looking like a rusted Chevrolet? Or are you looking like one of those classic Monte Carlos? I think that's the best analogy I can think of here. Are you maintaining yourself, or are you looking run down? Are you looking like somebody who doesn't have self-respect? There's nothing else I can say about this subject. I'm not saying to dress to impress. I'm saying to dress the part.
If you've always wanted to be this million-dollar CEO, this million-dollar business owner, this million-dollar influencer, or this million-dollar brand, you still have to dress the part. You have to wear your branded clothes. You have to make sure you look nice. You have to make sure you look sharp. You have to make sure you're in shape. How you dress externally is a direct reflection on how much respect you have for yourself internally. Much love, and be on the lookout for a new episode every Monday and every single Friday.