First and Last Impressions

I've been thinking a lot about first impressions lately. Chalk it up to my personal hiatus. If I hadn't decided to go on a "personal hiatus," I wouldn't have started to interview and subsequently, I would not have given much thought to first impressions.

Today, I went on a job interview. I prepped and I primped, all the while wondering what they would think? Of my personality? Of my resume? Of my ... outfit? The interview went well (I think) but while I was sitting in traffic on my way home, I started to think about first impressions. After all, an interview is all sized up on a first impression and a resume, isn't it?

It started me thinking--in today's media-based, retail infused society, first impressions can make or break an interview, a friendship and even a potential relationship (speed dating for example--you barely get enough time to learn his or her name before the next "date" sits down! But in that moment, you can already tell if you want to see that person again...which is the whole premise of the speed dating circuit...)

But what is the "right" first impression?

Is the goal to fit in? To always look your best? To say and think and do exactly what main stream society dictates at that precise moment in time?

And what happens if, by chance, you don't say the right thing at the right time? Or are maybe shy? Or in my case, tongue tied? What then? Do you only have one chance for a first impression or do you get a re-do?

One of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, wrote an entire book on first impressions entitled Blink. In fact, he wrote 200-plus pages on the data we humans can gather in just two seconds of meeting someone:

"It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good."

I read Blink more than two years ago and enjoyed the read. Gladwell's discussion of what he calls "rapid fire cognition" rings true with me. I've always prided myself on my judgements and my first impression of others, call it "intuition" (Gladwell doesn't...in the book he desribes intuition as too overly "emotional" which in my case, maybe true...). Being Malcolm Gladwell, he delves into the psychology of rapid fire cognition and starts by contradicting everything we've been taught in society:

"We live in a society dedicated to the idea that we're always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. As children, this lesson is drummed into us again and again: haste makes waste, look before you leap, stop and think. But I don't think this is true. There are lots of situations--particularly at times of high pressure and stress--when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world."

Yes, rapid fire cognition can go horribly wrong, which actually is what prompted Gladwell to write the book in the first place:

A few years ago, to grow my hair long. If you look at the author photo on my last book, "The Tipping Point," you'll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time--and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it, and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that in fact the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller, and much heavier, and about fifteen years younger (and, I added, in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking.) All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After twenty minutes or so, the officers finally agreed with me, and let me go. On a scale of things, I realize this was a trivial misunderstanding. African-Americans in the United State suffer indignities far worse than this all the time. But what struck me was how even more subtle and absurd the stereotyping was in my case: this wasn't about something really obvious like skin color, or age, or height, or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist, and the impression formed in those first two seconds exerted a powerful hold over the officers' thinking over the next twenty minutes. That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions.

...I love how he can boil the whole incident down to the...hair! (Which from my perspective, is very true! Hair is the first thing I notice on people). Hopefully I had a good hair day today--and will get a call back for a second interview!