The Boring Fundamentals Nobody Practises#
Style, reduced to three things#
The whole of dressing well comes down to fit, fabric and function.
Fit is clothing that hangs properly — the right inseam on shorts, a hat that frames your face rather than swallowing it. Fabric is quality of make. Function is the right piece for the occasion, and the one people get wrong most often is shoes: they have to match the formality of everything above them.
Get those three right and your clothes stop being noticeable, which is the point. They fade back and leave you as the thing people see.
Worth adding: there’s always a dress code, even where nobody’s written one down. It’s shaped by the culture, the place, and the weather. A lawyer at a construction firm still dresses sharply — he’s representing the company — even when the CEO is in boots on site. Work out the code, build a default uniform around it, and stop spending mornings deciding.
Posture is free#
Shoulders back, sit up straight. It’s the cheapest possible change and people read it instantly.
The military “attention” stance is the clearest evidence — service members are consistently perceived as taller and more confident than they are, purely from how they hold themselves.
Eye contact has actual numbers#
This surprised me, but the ratios are specific enough to practise:
- Hold each glance for about 1.5 to 2 seconds — long enough to register someone’s eye colour
- Speaking one-to-one: roughly 50%, more on the important parts
- Speaking to three people: about 90% spread across them, roughly 30/30/30, with 10% loose
- Listening: about 70%, with steady nodding
Too long — three to five seconds — reads as aggression or attraction. A darting half-second reads as evasive. And it’s worth noticing where the remaining 30% of your gaze actually goes, because people register that too.
Difficult conversations#
Address things early, one-to-one, before anyone’s got an audience to perform for. Praise in public, criticise in private. Silence is a tool here rather than a problem — you can use a pause deliberately, or name the awkwardness out loud to break it.
The practical ones#
These take an afternoon and most people never do them:
- CPR and the Heimlich — including on yourself. Both learnable in about ten minutes.
- Changing a tyre. Loosen the lug nuts while the wheel is still on the ground, then jack it up. Don’t drive far or fast on a spare.
- Jump-starting. Red first, then black. Reverse on removal — black, then red. A portable jump battery is worth owning. Read the manual.
- Sewing a button. The gateway to mending things generally.
The one that outranks all of it#
The regret Antonio Centeno says he hears most often: a man spends years climbing a ladder, gets to the top of the wall, and finds it was the wrong wall.
Chasing someone else’s definition of success means arriving somewhere that was never going to satisfy you. He went down the med school route himself because his parents wanted it, then changed direction.
So: define it yourself, and learn to say no without apologising. Every other item here is a technique. That one decides what the techniques are for.
A few small things to try#
- Fix your posture right now, and again whenever you notice it
- Practise the listening ratio — around 70% — in your next real conversation
- Spend one afternoon on CPR, a tyre change and a jump-start
- Write down your own definition of success before you spend another year on someone else’s
