The Social Climber's Bible: A Book of Manners, Practical Tips, and Spiritual Advice forthe Upwardly Mobile (19 page)

More important, subliminally you’re also saying your brand—i.e., you—is a product on par with Prada or Mark Wahlberg. If Ashton Kutcher can get over fourteen million people to follow his tweets, why can’t you?

If your answer to that question is a self-pitying, “Because he’s Ashton Kutcher and I’m not,” you need an attitude adjustment.

Stop making excuses for yourself and get creative. All you need is your iPhone, a little ingenuity, and some imagination. Say there’s a gala for a Mark Wahlberg movie premiere sponsored by Louis Vuitton/Chopard/Hewlett-Packard. If you’ve been doing your homework, you will observe that the press and paparazzi photos of the somebodies, celebrities, and Big Fish at last year’s gala were taken against a blue backdrop plastered with corporate logos. While people who have been invited to the gala
are getting dressed to go to the gala, you get dressed up, too. Put on your tux or slinkiest cocktail dress. Now take a photo of yourself and superpose it against the Louis Vuitton backdrop you’ve lifted from last year’s photos of the event. Once you get one that makes you look good and seems believable, wait until the party you aren’t at and haven’t been invited to is just getting good, then tweet that you “#
LV” or Mark Wahlberg’s movie is a “must-see” and attach the photo you’ve created of yourself on the red carpet.

Now, don’t answer your phone until the next morning, leading all your friends, virtual and real, to believe that while you’re sitting at home alone all dressed up with no place to go, you were in fact too busy having an awesome time at the party to answer.

The next morning, after you read about the after-party on “Page Six,” turn your phone back on and tweet that you’re too hungover to tweet the details of what a fabulous time you had last night with all the celebrities you now know attended the after-after-party at the Standard hotel’s Boom Boom Room.

Remember: When tweeting yourself into fantastic events that you weren’t invited to, always gush positive and instruct the ever-growing number of people who are following your virtual but truly fantastic life to immediately go out and buy the shoes, see the movie, and purchase whatever products the sponsors are selling.

Do this often enough, and convincingly enough, and eventually those sponsors, and their PR flacks, will start actually sending you invitations to the kinds of events you need to go to to make your real life live up to the virtual life that has spawned the person you now have genuinely become.

Instagramming from a posh, desirable, elite location is your way of substantiating the authenticity of the lifestyle you want people to think you’re living but cannot yet afford to live.

Say you’d like to be perceived as the kind of person who lunches at Nobu but lack the wherewithal to afford even a single slice of their signature sushi. All you have to do to make people think you’re having lunch at Nobu is to stop by at lunchtime, tell the maître d’ you’re meeting friends but don’t know the name the reservation was made under, and sit at the bar. Take an artful snap of a nearby plate of Black Cod with Miso, tweet how delicious it looks and how hungry you are and that you’re lunching at Nobu.

Do this often enough, and you not only have a shot at becoming the kind of person who can afford to have lunch at Nobu, you’ll also lose those pounds you put on while sitting around your house eating chips and onion dip while pretending to go to premieres you weren’t invited to.

Pinterest a pic of a 1964 Ferrari Dino you see parked on the street and post, “Love this Ferrari ’cause it reminds me of the one Mom drove me to school in.” With the Internet, it’s all up to you, and people will think you’re almost as cool as your mom.

Worried about getting caught? Or leaving a cyber-trail that will be used against you when all the social climbing tricks we’ve taught you are about to pay off and you’re on the verge of getting engaged to Prince Harry, or being made partner at Goldman Sachs? Post your confabulations with Snapchat and the self-promoting lies you post about yourself will be permanently erased from cyberspace after ten seconds.

Undoubtedly there will be newer and more effective cyber tools to help you climb by the time you’re reading this book.

If you have a modicum of imagination, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and whatever is the next social networking tool to come down the pike, when worked in conjunction, will not only allow you to redefine yourself but are a venue to offer proof that you have the same taste and lifestyle as the people you want to get to know, even if you have not acquired the kind of friends who can help you live out those aspirations.

Put up enough flags in cyberspace and someone will salute you.

I
n today’s postrecession economic hard times, social climbing for financial gain, aka networking, is a no-brainer. The origin of the expression says everything about the world’s hypocritical attitude regarding the social climber. One would expect an expression like “networking” to have come out of a bastion of capitalism like the Harvard Business School. But in fact the word was first concocted by radical sixties counterculture icon and social activist Jerry Rubin. Mr. Rubin coined this expression after his politics took a sudden right turn. Realizing that “wealth creation is the real revolution,” Rubin began to throw parties where the people he used to call “capitalist pigs” would be charged admission for the opportunity to meet other “capitalist pigs,” i.e., networking. Clearly, Mr. Rubin was too embarrassed to call his scheme what it actually was: Mountaineering for money.

Jerry Rubin’s reluctance to tell it like it is speaks to a basic attitudinal and philosophical divide that separates the two basic
schools of entrepreneurial Mountaineering (networking)—those who maintain that they only social climb to make money versus those who insist they make money in order to social climb.

If you are one of those Mountaineers who feel the need to rationalize their climb with profit, you are still operating under the pernicious and hypocritically false value system that has demonized social climbing. To those readers we say: Stop hating yourself, come out of the closet, and take pride in what you are. Likewise, to those of you in the other camp who take false pride in boasting that you only make money so you can enjoy the pleasures of social climbing, we say, own up to your greed.

Strange but true, 99 percent of those same small-minded souls who will call you a brownnoser/asslicker/social climber for engineering an invitation that will allow you to enjoy the
company of those more celebrated, famous, accomplished, or refined than yourself will turn on a moral dime and proceed to call you smart, clever, a go-getter for sucking up via tennis, golf, PTA meetings, etc., to get something as mundane as a raise.

To us at
The Social Climber’s Bible
, there seems to be a conspiracy at work at the highest level of the entrepreneurial community. Talk to any Big Fish in the financial world, and the first boastful excuse they’ll make in defending their obscene salaries is that the world of finance, like America, is a “meritocracy.” Which, by implication, is a good thing. The only trouble with that line of thought is that is not what the word “meritocracy” means.

Look it up. It’s not a good thing. Especially not for social climbers. “Meritocracy” was a word coined to describe how the English class system in the mid-twentieth century was designed to keep the haves on top and the have-nots on the bottom.

Know this: Big Fish and Whales do not misuse the word “meritocracy” by accident. They do it diabolically and deliberately. They have redefined a pejorative as a positive to trick you with a carrot that isn’t a carrot. Why? Because they want to be the only ones who know the system is rigged so that networkers who have networked into the right network win even if they lose money.

If you have been following our advice in previous chapters, by now you have undoubtedly made at least one new best friend who is a Big Fish businessman/woman. Well done. Yes, it has been pretty fabulous just being able to hang out with somebody who’s rich enough to spend more on wine at dinner than you make in a month. But honestly, aren’t you getting a little bored simply being a great guest?

Given all the fun and polite conversation you’ve invested in your Big Fish friendship, isn’t it about time you had something to show for it, other than that sunburn you got lying next to their swimming pool and all those blisters and bruises you endured playing endless games of tennis, golf, or touch football with your Big Fish and their children?

Do not be ashamed if you feel awkward or unsure about
how to turn a purely social friendship into a business relationship that’s a can’t-lose proposition for you. All social climbers feel that way before they turn their first Big Fish into a cash cow. Do not feel guilty about exploiting your first Big Fish—how do you think they got their start?

Unlike the denizens of Wall Street who boast about eating what they kill, you are merely taking your much-deserved pound of flesh. Also know that if you not only make money off your Big Fish by persuading him to invest in an idea or business opportunity but actually end up enabling him to turn a profit, he won’t simply like you, he will love you!

So how does a social climber, aka a networker, who wants a Big Fish to invest in his/her gizmo or business scheme or who needs a job broach the subject of needing help?

To begin with, no matter how desperate your financial straits are or how long you have been unemployed, erase the thought that you are asking for help; you are offering the Big Fish an opportunity to help themselves by helping
you
get in a better position to make the Big Fish money . . . hopefully. You are doing your Big Fish a favor. And if you lose his money, he still owes you for trying.

For starters, say nothing about your business proposition or job request to anyone, most especially to the Big Fish you plan on approaching, who, for the purpose of this exercise, we will call Big Fish Bob. Stay off the subject of business entirely except to flatter Big Fish Bob for his business savvy. If, when you are in Big Fish Bob’s presence, you witness someone else make a business proposition to Bob or if Bob asks your opinion of another’s
proposition, always subtly indicate how pathetic and foolish you find it that someone would stoop to exploiting a social friendship with a shrewd man like Bob for personal gain.