how to be life's personality hire
you're charming but you're doing it wrong
This essay is the first of a three-part series on cultivating charm. Enjoy!
The first marker of maturity is realizing your parents aren’t perfect, just two people trying their best. The second is starting to make the most of the cards you’ve been dealt and not rotting in self-pity, however lucrative. The third is learning how to charm, and the direct effect it has on every facet of your life, yesterday, tomorrow, forever. Social fitness gives way to social capital — a property of the individual, according to Bourdieu, an “unceasing effort of sociability.” A destabilizing thought for those whose backbone is solitude, but fear not: if you can take your physical body from couch potato to marathon runner, you can take your presence from connection-averse to a crowd mastermind. And this has nothing to do with where you are on the extrovert scale — it’s about the light you spark in others.
Growing up with an acute sense of lacking charisma, as though there was a make-a-wish-shaped pit carved out in the middle of my chest where one’s charm should be, I quickly retreated to a no blame, head down territory where my social skills handicap wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it wasn’t mine either. Just how things are, I’d tell myself, I’m not charming. I don’t do networking. Oh, I’m not lucky. I’m not good with people or public speaking. I don’t send cold emails, are you crazy? I’m not giving a speech at your wedding and I’m not asking a guy’s number at the gym! Special things go to special people, not every personality is sharpened for the game. I have a brain of a hoarder and I’m fluent on the internet, I can do without the rest.
I’d entertain my reverie of charm, though, freakishly annotating the capable ones. I’d imagine a life with no restrictions, where I’m always on the guest list, reaching the mountaintops reserved for the most social beings, weaving connection webs through the room with an impression on everyone I meet in person without putting an ounce of thought into attention-winning — I just kind of made peace with the fact I wasn’t one for it. I knew about the extraordinary opportunities unabashedly putting yourself out there provides, but to imagine myself doing the work was a whole new ordeal. But Simone Weil once said, “Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).” This, too, applies to charm. Every dream of somehow becoming “more appealing” to others has to be shattered — it’s something you can start doing as soon as you’re done reading this paragraph. It doesn’t require a change in your look, your intrinsic quirks, or occupation. Available to all, even the most silent of us, charm is a transient balance of honesty and curiosity. Where do you begin? You begin with the only soft skill you’ll ever need: liking other people. Do you tell stories because you want the person next to you to grow a little closer by resonance, or do you just like the sound of your voice? Ironically, the more you practice liking other people, the less you have to worry about them liking you.
process, action
If you’ve been brought up in a strict household, or, like myself, come from a culture where hierarchy, obedience, and rules are respected above all else, you likely live in a paradigm of division where every social facet is either an action or a process, seeing those as uniquely separate, distinct concepts. An action is an extension of one’s agency, a resonance between two people, something high risk / high reward performed at your will, while a process is a rigid, inanimate system, governed by directives and external factors. Example: getting a job is a process where a chain of events has to unfold and things obeyed by the rules have to fall into place (having the right skills, sending a CV, doing a number of interview rounds, getting an offer), and something less predictable, like socializing, dating, and making friends are actions, one where intuition and charisma get to reign, unhindered by guidelines. For the longest time, I thought that my lack of action was not just negligible, but compensated by the fact I’m so-so-so good with processes, and that should be enough to get me from point A to point B. I’ve done my due diligence, ticked all the boxes, followed the rules, where’s my reward? But after watching one too many opportunities pass me by, struggling to queue for point B while others were lightspeeding their way through the alphabet and prying ungranted wishes out of my hands, I had to come to a rather bitter conclusion: there is just no such thing as a process. Everything is informed by action and action only. If something looks and feels like a process, it’s likely just a sequence of actions, comprised of people making human nature decisions. Processes, therefore, are bendable and bear a multitude of unspoken exceptions that inevitably favor those who are good with people and exercise charisma, joie de vivre, and curiosity in any scenario, regardless of how rigid the system is. Personality hiring happens to people armored with action. The world prefers those who see it as a playground, not a battlefield. And the real cheat code is not sweating over “getting better” at action — that’s just kind of Liking Other People’s birthright.
princess charming
That is not to say a mindset shift is all it takes to be charming — and you’re not crazy for having a harder time with it in 2025. Testing the limits of your charm requires, you guessed it, going outside — something that’s been slightly impossible to do in a way that isn’t perfectly automated for minimal human interaction. It’s getting exponentially harder not just to exercise charisma, but to find the receptors it can bind to, given that our lifestyles are antithetical to every existing driver of happiness. Consumerism calls us to go inward, to strive for preservation in favor of play, turning our lives into processes when what we want —and what would ultimately fulfill us— is action. From feeding our neighbors to asking a stranger directions or speaking with a customer service person who isn’t yet a barely trained AI bot named Alicia, the window of random chances to practice spontaneity and casual empathy is closing on us at a threatening speed.
Everyone wants to be charming and plump, but no one wants to sacrifice mandated comfort of perfection sealed under the soundproof walls of our apartments. You’ve learned how to avoid seed oils and restore your skin barrier with the right ceramide compounds, but you haven’t learned how to ask people questions and make them feel exhilarated in your presence. Who’s there to charm in shoebox isolation? Who’s there to be curious about when you’ve got all the answers at your fingertips? Moisturized and tense, hydrated and forgotten. Cinderella skips the ball and tosses her glass slippers in the recycling bin because she’s been too busy mastering the art of glass skin.
We go back to Simone Weil, who noted “it is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves” and if awareness of self is the ultimate goal, one that precedes charm and ultimately informs it, then we must know it’s achieved in tandem with relentless, playful interaction with the real world, not by studying your pores in the mirror. It sure is hard to feel charming when you barely feel alive. The first step to being understood is daring to understand, and that requires vanity sacrifices like going outside a little ugly and disheveled, skipping your 10-step routine for an unexpected sleepover, sparking up a random conversation, and having a greasy meal on an impromptu trip somewhere unknown and foreign. The minute opportunities are broad if not endless: call your designated chef friend for a recipe instead of googling it. Be present on your daily commute. Don’t wear headphones to the gym.
understanding charm
The shamelessly charming people of the world, the ones that steal your glance upon the first interaction, is it all natural? Is it their outgoing flair? A witty tongue? Nonpareil storytellers, aren’t they? Or maybe they’re just hot? Not all charming people are created equal, and I’m inclined to believe it has nothing to do with the essence of a person — it might just be the ability to instigate acceptance in you, relieving the heavy burden of being awfully human, even momentarily. In Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America, main character Tracy (played by the magnificent
) observes Brooke, a shamelessly yet awkwardly charming woman of all trades played by Greta Gerwig, citing her demeanor as “Her beauty was that rare kind that made you want to look more like yourself, not like her.” This quote is getting an eviction notice from my head because of the decade-long impact it continues to have on me, encapsulating the common denominator of charm. A charming person is not one that glimmers but holds a mirror to your glow — a conversation with them makes you fall for them by making you fall for yourself. Charm is not navel-gazed, but generated through your radical, loud embrace of both honesty and openness rooted in liking people enough to generously hand a piece of yourself to them.
Though social likability helps, it’s far from a prerequisite — I went looking for an example of someone both awkward and charming, and I found it. In his famous 1986 ITN interview, when asked what had prompted the inspiration for his then latest series of self-portraits, Andy Warhol hesitates and goes “I ran out of ideas.” The introverted, controversial artist wrestling with a lurid industry (likely on the spectrum, but never officially diagnosed) Warhol didn’t pose any less charming than somebody who could hold the entirety of Manhattan in their palm — he might’ve been ahead of them, even. His understated magnetism lay in unapologetic ownership of who he was and what he made, prevailing over shyness and reflecting in his most famous work. The in-your-face self-deprecating honesty, much like the themes in his art, attests to the fact charm isn’t necessarily seduction. The willingness to say something as casual about your life’s work as “I ran out of ideas”, without concern or care for how it might be received, standoffish in its own right like a punch in the gut, is a stark contrast to how most artists talk about their craft in utter seriousness. If that isn’t a moment of pure charm, I don’t know what is. The charmers are okay with underselling themselves if that means being honest, and by virtue of allowing themselves to lose in the eyes of others, they end up winning over our hearts instead. It’s as if they’ve got nothing to prove, the opposite of method acting. Can money buy it? Unlikely. Nobody likes Elon Musk because out of the entire one percent ensemble he sucks at this the most — cares too much about all the wrong things.
And charm is not about conventional hotness. It doesn’t have to be. I can’t stop thinking about
lately, whose career trajectory from global and sparkly male fantasy Playboy bombshell to a woman of agency is astonishing. An acclaimed 90’s pop culture icon best known for Baywatch has found herself in the spotlight again, this time driving her own narrative. Though I wouldn’t call it a resurgence or a rebrand; more stripping down performative chronicles where we get to see the real Pamela shine. Graciously moving past the hypersexualized attire, objectification, and male-gazed conventionality, Anderson gifts us an unfiltered look decades later: we’re getting to learn that she’s a stellar writer, an activist, a peculiar thinker, and a big cinema lover. I’m loving everything Pamela is doing and can’t help but think of her as the most charming celebrity now, today, aged 57 and bare-faced in white linen, more so than in her fantasy poster girl days. She exudes a light so dignified only a woman rediscovering her unfiltered, raw charm can. “It’s shedding those layers, those protective layers,” she tells Glamour UK. We see it, Pamela, and we’re charmed by you more than ever.
Between Warhol’s self-effacing honesty, Mistress America’s reflective beauty, and Anderson’s casual knitwear, you can see that the truly charming people don’t draw you in by dazzling or blinding you with their looks, money, achievement — they do it by stripping away your pressure to perform, laying a blanket of ease with your humanity with humor, honesty, or untethered simplicity. That is the common denominator, as proven by the celebrities you said you found the most charming (and how different your answers were): Ayo Edebiri, Willem Dafoe, Taylor Russell, Keke Palmer, Clairo, Megan Thee Stallion, Colin Farrell.
so… what now?
Your charm is not grown for the action, but found in it. You learn how to be around people by being around them, not reading manuals beforehand. Admittedly socially inept throughout my teens, I’m lucky enough to have been thrown into the deep end in my twenties to figure this shit out — my huge coat against the world, learning how to charm on the go when nothing about me felt particularly charming. Maybe I’d been the one unconsciously doing the throwing: there’s a reason I’ve lived in five countries in my 26 years of shyly walking this earth, saying yes to more things in a year than one probably should in a decade. Never an extrovert, but always a diligent doer. Having to converse with strangers at train stations. Making friends in a new city utterly alone, again and again. Dating in cultures opposite from mine. Going to events where the only greeting reserved for my entrance was a fussy “Wait, who the hell’s that?”. Something keeps calling for me, and I keep answering. Arriving with reluctance and leaving with an afterglow of unity, curious enough to offset fear, I know better now than to think I could ever get by without letting the world understand me.
I’m not done retreating to my old ways. I still forget my charm at home when I’m far and away in larger than life places with larger than life people. Whenever I’m in New York —a place that’s more exposure therapy than a city— I get an initial full body reaction to my mental stutter, because it’s great at setting you for a bare knuckle fight with your own reluctance. New York is a reflective surface of chatter and losing sleep with so many faces to greet, to argue with, and to walk home. As opposed to more gentle places like Paris, a city that eyerolls you and leaves you small clues to where you’re lacking but lets you sit in your snobbish shell, New York is a reality check: tells it to your face and breaks down every wall of trepidation you’d scrupulously built. It forces you to recalibrate. A shortcut to your charm, that is.
One doesn’t magically go to sleep and wake up charming. Muscle takes time and routine to bulk up. But charm is a practice of your own doing — not a trait grown in the womb or added on tax breaks. You navigate, you jump into discussions, you weave miracles from empty places and taut monoliths, you dare to fail, you talk to people, you don’t rehearse, and action, action, action. Maybe it’s in the unlocking the puzzling interiority of the world and just how hungrily you’re eager to learn it, sinking your teeth, barely chewing, napkins on laps and grease under fingernails. While most are barely scratching the surface, afraid of ego death or judgment, you stuff your face with possibilities to get to know this world a little closer. And who’s the personality hire now?
I absolutely love this! I really liked your point that true charm has nothing to do with money, appearance, or achievement---true charm is about creating comfort and ease in an interaction with someone. I think that the things people often use to charm others (money, appearance etc.) are often the exact opposite of charming---they create an unsettling feeling of inadequacy that interferes with true connection.
A lovely read and special one because it slowly raise many questions within. It got me thinking that behind all that is the idea of perfection that is ultimate control, how we want to be perceived vs how we truly are, that in reality creates separation, trying to achieve all these steps instead of being open to the spontaneity of life. So worry about how things look instead of how they feel.
Lately, I notice I find it hard to talk to strangers, to make the first move, and the first thing that pops into my mind is what do I say? But I think deep down, after reading your easy, what I think is, what do I say to sound interesting? Instead of being interested.