Getting People to Talk About You
In the 1940s there was no better-known face in Sicily than the face of Salvatore Giuliano. A peasant’s son from the mountain village of Montelepre, at twenty-one he shot dead a carabiniere who had caught him with a sack of black-market grain, took to the hills and put together a gang. Historians write that he had a charm of his own and an inborn gift for self-promotion. He was happy to pose for photographers: jacket off, shirt open, thumbs hooked into the belt with the holster, eyes straight into the lens. Once he publicly put a price on the head of the Minister of the Interior. He was, at one and the same time, easy for reporters to reach and impossible for the police to catch. After his death forty-one biographies of him came out. Alive, he would never have had that many readers: live bandits are read mostly by investigators.
He got all the attention he wanted. Look at what it got him.
While he was useful, the men of honour covered for him: without them, historians write, he wouldn’t have survived his first few years. When the relatives of the people he kidnapped wanted their loved ones back, they went to the local Mafia boss, and for a share of the ransom the boss arranged the return. So the Mafia took its cut from the bandit and from his victims. In an office they call that working both sides of the market. Then the political wind changed. On 1 May 1947 Giuliano’s men opened fire on a peasants’ rally at Portella della Ginestra; eleven people died, children among them. A few years later the bandit was inconvenient to everyone, and the Mafia started handing his men over to the police. In the summer of 1950 his body was found in a courtyard in the town of Castelvetrano. Historians believe he was betrayed, and probably killed, by his cousin Gaspare Pisciotta, acting for the carabinieri. Pisciotta himself died in a Palermo prison in 1954, after a cup of coffee laced with strychnine.
Attention Is Not Reputation
I’m not telling you this as a bedtime horror story. The young often mix up attention and reputation. Attention is when people look at you. Reputation is what people think of you once they’ve looked away. Giuliano was a master of attention and a bankrupt in reputation: in the end there wasn’t a single man left who stood to gain from his staying alive.
Al Capone is a similar story, only American. His passion for publicity and his noisy life, historians write, got him cursed by the Sicilian Mafia. In 1930 the Chicago Crime Commission drew up a list of “public enemies”, and Capone was number one. A year later he was sent down for eleven years for not paying his taxes. The noise that made him famous also made him the most visible target in the country.
Don Vincenzo Carmuso never gave a single interview in his life. On the street he was known to everyone who needed to know him. He liked to say that only brides and dead men get photographed, and a businessman has no business doing it. He sat for the camera twice himself: at his wedding and for his passport. The third picture, he said, would be taken without his help.
But don’t conclude from this that you don’t need attention. Without attention there’s no Business and no Family. People have to know about Peppe from the market too, or nobody will come to him. The question is a different one: whose attention you need, and what you do to get it.
Attention Costs Dear
People don’t have much of it. Every day hundreds of requests rain down on a man: look at this, listen to that, buy this. He waves nearly all of them away. So you can’t just take attention. You have to earn it, and every time it costs you money, time or risk.
Watch whose attention you’re paying for. Giuliano got everybody’s attention at once, ministers and carabinieri included. A businessman needs the attention of the people who can buy, not of the people who can get in his way.
People Notice What They Need Right Now
There’s something I understood late: people don’t notice you when you’re louder. They notice you when you talk about what’s already on their mind. A hungry man sees the signs over the eating houses. A man whose roof is leaking suddenly notices the roofers’ notices that have been hanging on his street for years.
Don Vincenzo knew this without any books. Every year in November, when Sicily presses the new oil, we made the rounds of our restaurants with one sentence: “This year’s oil is in.” In summer nobody would have heard the same offer. In November the cooks were waiting for the new oil and asked us themselves when we’d bring it. It cost us one tin for tasting and one day, and the orders lasted until spring.
If you want to be heard, come to a man at the moment he’s looking for the answer himself. Not earlier, when he couldn’t care less. And not later, when he’s already found somebody else.
Be Worth Telling About
One last thing. For people to talk about you, there has to be something in you they want to tell the neighbour. Not “a good laundry”, there are plenty of those, but “the laundry where they give you your jacket back in three hours” or “where they returned a cufflink I didn’t even know I’d left in the pocket”. People pass on the unusual. The usual they just use and forget.
Only check what exactly they’ll be passing on. People told plenty of stories about Giuliano, and in the end it cost him his life. They told even more about Capone, and the tax man came. Let them say the kind of things about you that bring clients to your door, not investigators. Capisce?