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A POINT OF VIEW
By Lucy Kellaway |
Boasting used to be a very un-British trait - but in a world of work where its hard to measure one employee against another, it's increasingly important, says Lucy Kellaway.
I've got an IQ of 170, so I might have to bite my tongue not to over-awe people with my intelligence.
Actually I don't have an IQ of 170, I am just repeating the words of Simon Smith, a man who puts up satellite dishes for a living and is one of the contestants who has recently been fired from the television show The Apprentice. Whatever his true talents might be, he undoubtedly proved a genius at one thing - at boasting. The other candidates in this strangely addictive reality show are all champion boasters too.
The Apprentices: Variously giving between 100% and 150% |
Every gap in the conversation is filled by one or other of them slipping in a great, fat boast. What is striking about this is not that the boasting is particularly extreme, but that it's becoming perfectly normal. Britain is no longer a nation of shopkeepers selling cornflakes and chocolate digestives. Instead, we're a nation of individualists selling ourselves.
When I was a child, we were taught never to boast. For a start it was bad manners. If you went around saying I got 97% in my algebra test, you made the dunderhead who only got 23% feel even more wretched than he was feeling already. To boast was to let your achievements get out of proportion, and it clashed with that very English idea that everything had to be effortless. Trying was fine - so long as no one caught you at it.
I remember a family friend who used to visit our house. My parents would tell us how clever he was and marvel at the way he wore his intelligence so lightly. The great thing about him wasn't that he was brilliant, but that he hid it so well that no one would have ever suspected that there was anything special about him at all.
I didn't question this attitude until I went to university and took up with an American boyfriend. He looked a bit like Oscar Wilde - which pleased me. Yet what pleased me less was the way he used to tell me that his doctorate thesis on the economy of communist China was an important piece of work. It wasn't that I doubted that it was good. I was just mortified that he felt the need to tell me. Looking back I suspect he wasn't a particularly boastful person. He was just American, and so his mother had never told him that he must hide his light under a bushel at all times.
Cripes, I'm good
A quarter of a century later, I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. We are all boasters now. Even Boris Johnson has made the transition. His victory as Mayor of London surprised lots of people who thought he wouldn't be able to make the leap from clown to statesman. But it surprised me for another reason: that he made the bigger leap from duffer to boaster. Old Boris was the epitome of English self-deprecation. He delighted in telling stories like how he bust his flies on stage at school and had them publicly repaired by the headmaster's wife. Cripes, aren't I a shambolic twit, was the message. New Boris has a different message: cripes, I am the greatest, I can deliver, I am your man.
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 The self-esteem movement has a lot to answer for by dictating that unless we learn to love ourselves we won't be able to love others - where is the proof 
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The need to boast is part of the human condition, or in my view part of the male one at least. It has proved jolly useful over the past few thousand years in seeing off one's rivals in power and in love. The heroes of early literature did so much boasting that they make the candidates on the Apprentice look modest. Homer had Zeus bragging that he was so strong he could pull up all the other gods, sun and moon, earth and sea, from a golden chain fastened to the sky.
A thousand years later a little more humility had set in. Beowolf, though a champion boaster of his time, was less extravagant than Zeus. He contented himself with saying he had the strength of 30 men and could swim against sea monsters and kill nine of them with his sword, without breaking his stroke. It was only once polite society was invented that boasting went out of fashion. The upper orders were born into money and success and so had no use for it. And the lower orders, by needing to boast, were simply displaying their inferior roots. Christianity gave boasting the thumbs down too. Humility - one of the seven virtues - rules out bragging about how many sea monsters you have slain or discussing the vastness of your IQ on national TV.
But now boasting is back with a vengeance and is seen as cool. Pop songs used to be about love of other people, but now they are about love of self: The rapper R Kelly sings "I'm the World's Greatest", and Christina Aguilera responds with "I am beautiful, in every single way…"
Bigging up
The self-esteem movement has a lot to answer for by dictating that unless we learn to love ourselves we won't be able to love others, which strikes me as an extraordinary hypothesis. Where is the proof?
Coming out of the shadows - big-me -up Boris |
There is, however, a sounder reason for the rehabilitation of boasting. Most of us now work in jobs where the quality of our work is hard to measure and often pretty subjective. If we don't tout our own wares on a fairly regular basis we will be overlooked altogether. Until a couple of decades ago, what used to count were hard graft and seniority. You stepped on to the conveyor belt at the start of your working life, kept your head down and waited for the promotion which would surely come. Only now it doesn't, necessarily. What gets us noticed now is sharp elbows not elbow grease.
Exactly 10 years ago the management guru Tom Peters came up with the idea that each of us is CEO of Me Inc, and that we each have a personal brand to build up and promote. At the time I thought this one of the creepiest ideas I had ever heard. But now, grudgingly, I see he's right. Working life is more competitive, more uncertain and more unpredictable than it used to be. Many people are self-employed or job hopping and even those who stick with the same employer still have to promote themselves endlessly to stand out from the rest.
I'm always amazed at the number of perfectly nice people who send me e-mails telling me how great their new book is, or who forward me messages written by someone else that praise them to the skies. But now, that's not "boasting" or "bragging". Instead a new phrase has been invented: "to big yourself up", which is deemed to be an acceptable, even an admirable thing to do.
Pointless boasting
In some ways, though, I prefer the new brashness. Bigging yourself up leaves little room for false modesty - which is far more tiresome than boasting. The self-deprecating Old Boris never really thought he was a hopeless duffer, and so New Boris is to be preferred for being straighter.
'No darling, we'll start Das Kapital tomorrow' |
In this brave new bigged-up world, women are struggling a little. A recent piece of research from London Business School shows that by far the biggest difference between men and women at work is their attitude to boasting. If you ask a successful woman why she's good she will mention luck; a man in the same position will blow his own trumpet. This is becoming one of the largest obstacles to the advancement of women in the corporate world. If they could big themselves up a little more, they would do a bit better.
Despite its newfound advantages, boasting still has one major drawback that hasn't really changed since Zeus's time. Boasters are dull company. This seems to be Jane Austen's main objection to them: indeed, her champion boasters are all crashing bores.
In particular Mrs Bennett's boasting in Pride and Prejudice is dismal because it is not about her, but about her children. It is so tempting for parents to go on about how clever and charming and sporty their children are: it doesn't even feel like boasting. But actually it strikes me as boasting of the worst sort, as it serves no useful purpose.
I have an otherwise amusing colleague who likes to tell people how his eight-year-old completes the Guardian crossword and that his 11-year-old is much enjoying Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. He has no idea quite how tedious he sounds.
But no doubt boasting is here to stay and in schools, it's now taught to boys and girls alike. My daughter came home the other day with a form she had to fill in to get a position on the sixth form charity committee. The form invited her to come up with three adjectives that described her and would prove her leadership skills were superior to those of her classmates. Christian humility, evidently, was not what was called for.
I hope school will teach my children to be good boasters - who can boast wholeheartedly when they need to, but otherwise shut up. They should be told to limit their boasting to occasions when they are trying to get onto a committee, get a job or become mayor of London. On these occasions caution must be thrown to the wind and the most extravagant claims made. The rule of thumb is to think of something that describes you at your very best, and then jack it up by at least half.
The Apprentice shows us how to do it. One of the candidates claims he "gives 100%". This is as much as the laws of mathematics permit and more than the law of human nature does. Yet as others claim to be giving 150%, this means that the man who stuck to the limits of what is humanly possible ends up looking like a slacker.
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