Trying to seem cool betrays the very need for approval that coolness is supposed to signal away.

Research suggests that magnetism comes from absorption in the work, not from a strategy aimed at the audience.

Mimicking or rebelling against social desires both signal dependence on others' opinions.

On the set of The Thomas Crown Affair, director Norman Jewison became increasingly frustrated with his star actor Steve McQueen. Jewison kept imploring him to play the role with more visible charisma, more swagger. McQueen refused. He underplayed everything. He let silences hang. He did less when the script called for more.

Jewison's frustration reportedly reached a boiling point just before he watched the dailies. It was then that he could see that McQueen, by refusing to perform coolness, had become the most magnetic thing on screen. It wasn't a technique or performance. He seemed constitutionally uninterested in trying to impress anyone, and that particular quality, that specific absence, turned out to be the thing nobody could look away from.

We recognize this dynamic instantly when we see it. The person at the party trying too hard to seem indifferent, the band making a show of not caring about record sales, the startup founder who won't stop telling you how little they care about what VCs think. An obvious attempt to seem cool and detached is its own kind of neediness, and everyone can feel it. As Luke Burgis, the author of The One and the Ninety-Nine observed in a recent conversation, "There's a danger in a kid in high school who's trying way too hard to be cool. It just doesn't work like that."

We get........

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