Do You Wear the Mask or Does the Mask Wear you?

Novak Djokovic, Boris Johnson, and the Art of Creating a Professional Persona

Catch-up service:

Congrats Keir, You Won, Now Change
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Joe Biden?
The Age of Centrist Heroes Is Over
Birth of the Nudge Economy
Creativity Needs Stupidity

After winning his Wimbledon quarter-final on Tuesday, Novak Djokovic confronted a section of the crowd which had been chanting for his opponent Holger Rune, while also, he felt, booing him. “I don’t accept it,” he said, in his on-court interview. “No. I know they were cheering for Rune but that’s an excuse to also boo. Listen, I’ve been on the tour for more than 20 years, so trust me, I know all the tricks.” He looked proud, his chest out, like a Roman general admonishing enemies. He looked liberated.

I recently wrote about the role of charisma in politics, and it’s got me thinking about the masks we all wear in public, celebrities and non-celebrities. Political leaders cultivate charismatic personas. The persona may resemble their own personality - in fact, for it to be successful, it must - but it is not identical with it. Certain aspects of who they are get exaggerated, others played down. Even politicians who don’t appear to have a persona have one. Clement Attlee was taciturn and plain-speaking because that’s who he was, but it was also a character he played quite self-consciously, because he knew it worked as a contrast to Churchill.

The persona enables the politician to become larger-than-life: a more compelling and vivid presence than the human being behind the mask. Personas are less complicated and ambivalent than real people and therefore easier for audiences to grasp and connect to. But it is a delicate business, this mask-fashioning. Over time, a person can allow their persona to coarsen and degrade into caricature (think late-period Margaret Thatcher). The persona performs a reverse takeover of the human within, like an AI program turning on its creator. The novelist John Updike observed the danger of this in his own field:

Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen. (Self-Consciousness: Memoirs)

(“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face” is a sentence of genius - it would have been merely very good if he’d written “celebrity is a mask that becomes the face”).

It’s not just politicians and novelists who have to contend with the challenges of persona management. When I started working in advertising (my first career), my boss gave me some advice. To succeed in any organisation, he said, it’s important to develop a persona which helps you stand out from your peers - while being careful not to let the persona control you. It was good advice, even if I’m not sure I really succeeded at the first part. There are some workplaces where competence or productivity is quantifiable and transparent, and many others - advertising is one, politics another - where things are fuzzier. In these cases, the personal brand counts for a lot.