Many years ago, back when I had a proper office job, I used to work with a handsome and muscular guy named Roland.
One time at lunch, a woman on our team started reaching across the table and straining to get the salt shaker, which was in front of Roland.
Roland noticed this, and reached for the salt shaker himself, as though to push it closer to the woman and make her job easier. But instead of pushing the salt shaker towards the woman, he pulled it further towards himself, and firmly out of the woman’s reach.
The woman, now fully splayed out across the table, gave out a bit of an shocked gasp and then started laughing.
(I’ve repeated this little trick several times and it’s never failed to produce the same result.)
Example two:
Keith McNally is a New York restaurateur. Back in the 1980s, he opened up a restaurant called the Odeon that became a cultural icon — it was featured on the cover of Jay McInerney’s book “Bright Lights, Big City” and in movies like American Psycho.
When McNally used to walk around the Odeon, a new customer might ask where the bathroom is. To which, McNally would smile and say, “We don’t have one.” And then he would walk away, leaving the confused costumer to wonder for a second whether that could possibly be true.
It was small details like this that made McNally’s restaurant the “in” destination, and kept people coming back over and over.
So those are two examples of how to be a charming cad.
Though it might not look like it at first, they share a common structure. Perhaps you can see the structure, or perhaps you’ve heard me talk about it before. If not, you can find it laid out and explained in chapter, I mean, Commandment IV of my new 10 Commandments book.
But I won’t give you the link to buy that.
No, I wish. Here it is:
https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments