Evel Knievel – Self-Promotion and How to Do It Right

Before Evel Knievel lost control of his motorcycle trying to jump 13 buses, he had every reason to believe that he would succeed. Throughout his career, the legendary stuntman had a 95% success rate. That's a success rate most of us would kill for in our professional careers. DeAndre Jordan, the star center of the Brooklyn Nets, has the highest career shooting record in basketball, at 67%. The current #1 Wall Street analyst, Richard Davis, has a record-shattering 78% success rate at picking stocks. Impressive, but not 95%, Evel Knievel impressive. Evel knew he was good too, and he used his record to promote the hell out of himself. Muhammad Ali once claimed Evel Knievel as the “white Muhammad Ali," high praise from the best self-promoter in boxing. Newspapers and Evel’s day called him the modern PT Barnum, and history writers still compare Evel to the greatest promoter of all time.

In 1971, Evel jumped a line of nine cars in a van in Madison Square Garden. It was a perfect landing and a huge success promotion wise. In 1973, he jumped 50 stack cars in the LA Coliseum with, again, a perfect landing and a big show. Furthermore, back in 1965, Evel jumped a 90-foot box full of rattlesnakes, and he grazed the tip of the wooden box, allowing the rattlesnakes to escape. Spectators had to flee to avoid getting bit, but Evel was intact, and the jump was incredibly popular.

The point we're trying to make is Evel Knievel knew what he was doing. He had tons of career jumps, and we, as modern viewers watching his infamous Wembley Stadium crash, already know what's going to happen. We can see the stuntman on YouTube racing up to the ramp trying to clear 13 buses. We can shake our heads, knowing what he's attempting is foolish, but we, of course, still watch. Only this time, the stuntman was thrown from his motorcycle like a ragdoll, crushing his pelvis and hand. Now, we can judge him because we have hindsight, but Evel was positive he could do it. After all, why shouldn't he be? At 95%, Evel was a master of two things: being a stuntman and a world-class self-promoter. And since we can't all be a stuntman, we might as well take a lesson from the other half of Evel - the master self-promoter.

Humble, bragging, shameless self-aggrandizing, one-upping, tooting one’s horn, boasting, blustering. We have tons of ways to describe someone who does a poor job of promoting themselves, and so few describe positive self-promotion, like what Evel Knievel managed to do. So, that's today's topic. Self-promotion and how to do it right. We will cover the right way to self-promote that showcases your talents, and we will also cover how to do it the wrong way, which is bragging. To help us separate successful self-promoters from the bragging, we have three myths we want to bust.

Myth 1: When is bragging a bad thing? Some people say you should never brag, whereas some people build a career out of bragging. So, which is it?

Evel was a real-life superhero to a lot of Americans, but he also had a dark side. He was a violent bully who reported anyone that said anything negative about him. He would physically go after them, some with a baseball bat. Many also noted that it wasn't uncommon for him to sleep with three different women a day. So, as far as addictions go, he was an alcoholic, had a sex addiction, an adrenaline junkie, and even a shopaholic.

Regardless, it is clear that Evel had to do a lot of promotion, and a lot of that was straight up bragging. I actually went digging for the science of whether or not bragging gets people ahead in life. So, this should tell us whether or not we can keep bragging or whether we have to stop. This data comes from the Journal of Psychological Science and the City University of London, England. Researchers analyzed 131 workers on a crowdsourcing site called The Mechanical Turk. It's a site that lets you fill out surveys and do micro jobs online. The professionals asked these 131 people to recall a time they bragged about something or had someone else brag to them. It was purely an emotional reaction survey, and they found that self-promoting braggers usually boasted about topics such as success with money to their children’s development. It was basic bragging stuff. And then they ask them how they felt about other people's bragging. The results were that people assumed the listeners would be happier and prouder of the bragger. However, the listeners were often annoyed, upset, or angry while recipients of unwanted bragging and felt a sense of inferiority or jealousy. The researchers said this is called an Empathy Gap, which means both parties had trouble imagining how they would feel if the situation was reversed.

With that being said, how do we brag in a way that is actually interesting? Maybe in a way that kind of humanizes yourself afterward? What I do is talk with humor. I will brag about something, but then I will put in a joke to make sure they know I'm being self-aware and not taking myself all that seriously. Overall, the big takeaway from this is it's okay to brag, but you have to realize that as humans, we're overestimating people's positive reactions, and we're vastly underestimating their negative ones. Best advice, recognize the Empathy Gap in both directions when you're bragging to a crowd, and crack a couple of jokes.

Myth 2: What if you feel too insecure to brag about yourself? Is it okay to promote yourself if you feel like you haven't earned it? If you feel like an imposter?

Now, bragging worked for Evel and made him a millionaire. They got him those gold chains. But I have to ask, do you think Evel Knievel ever asked himself whether or not he deserves all the attention he was getting? Switching sides, have you ever looked at your own life and thought maybe you don't deserve all this? I believe that anyone who lives in the modern world does from time to time. This episode is all about doing self-promotion right and doing it in a self-aware way, so I went looking for the antithesis.

So, we're going to convince everybody in the audience that Todd and I are allowed to brag that as long as we do it in a self-aware way. It's okay because we're never going to become Evel Knievel without a little bit of bragging. This comes from a Time Article, and this time article is all about the imposter syndrome (they were referencing the International Journal of Behavioral). The imposter syndrome is anyone who isn't able to internalize their own successes. Basically, you don't think you earned what you have. And according to the article review, they say that about 70% of people have experienced imposter feelings at some point in their life. Because of that, we are going to go through a few different types of imposter feelings.

·         The Perfectionist - The perfectionist sets exceptionally high expectations, and even if they meet almost all of their goals, they will still feel like failures because somewhere in those goals there was a mistake, and it makes them question their competence.

·         Experts - Experts approach problems where they feel they need every piece of information before they start, and they're continually looking for clarifications or training. For example, they don't want to speak up in a meeting because they don't want to look stupid.

·         Someone Who Thinks They Are A Natural Genius - If you're a natural genius and everyone sees you like that, when you struggle to accomplish or fix something that doesn’t come naturally, it makes you feel like you're not good enough.

·         Soloists – Soloists feel like they have to accomplish tasks on their own, and if somebody steps in to help, they feel like they have become an imposter. They feel like they were faking their abilities because they are getting a helping hand.

·         Superman or Superwoman - These are people who push themselves harder than everyone else because they don't want to feel like an imposter. To succeed, they feel stressed when they're not accomplishing something.

Reading through these identifiers for impostor syndrome, there are so many episodes where we've covered celebrities who were insecure, and this makes everything more transparent. They are one of these consequential types of people, and they all feel like imposters from some time or another.

Now, we're going to talk a little bit about how to get around imposter syndrome because our success in the modern world really does take some self-promotion. If you go on LinkedIn, you are actually bragging about your accomplishments. You have to tell them what you've done in life. However, there is a right way to do it, and that is spearheading it in a self-aware way. Go ahead and brag at your next interview, but here are some steps you can take to get around feeling like an imposter.

1.    First, acknowledge your thoughts and put them into perspective. That means taking a couple of seconds to observe that you feel like an impostor. Just thinking critically and recognizing that you feel like you haven't earned something is a huge step. In summary, being able to identify it is vital.  

2.    Know that the goal here is not to never feel like an impostor. It's actually to be able to talk yourself down. It's to be able to say, “this is why I feel like an imposter.” Take a couple of moments or some mental health days. Then realize that you may have an imposter moment, but your life is not an imposter. You did not get everything you've earned by faking your way through it.

3.    Remember, it's a normal feeling to have, and it will pass. Don't let the doubt affect your long-term decisions or steer the ship.

Myth 3: How do we use honest self-promotion on a resume? If everyone else is lying about their accomplishments, how do we stand out when applying for a job?

When we're trying to promote ourselves, trying to get known, or trying to advance our career, what is acceptable if everyone's lying a little bit? We can't all put 433 broken bones on a resume like Evel Knievel. I wanted to look for not the science of resumes, but what people like and what is good embellishment? What are we allowed to put in? I think a way to put this is if you lie too much on your resume, you can and will get in trouble. It's easier than ever to check credentials, and gone are the days of Mad Men where you can just take another man's dog tags and be him. We have so many checks and balances online that you pretty much get caught instantly.

This comes from Science Magnet by David Jensen, and it is about scientists helping other scientists write their resumes. They gave each other advice and what to focus on. They basically reiterated what I said at the top of this piece, which is that it's so easy to get a fact-checker. It's so easy to go online and disprove that you have a degree or that you were employed at certain places, even if the place goes out of business. So, the first one they talked about in this article is that it's easy to fudge dates and cover-up resume holes, and apparently, that's really easy to check. They just have to look at your history of check stub. They can request that, and after that, everything else you said is a lie because you've lost all credibility.

Another way that people step back is they downplay when they were let go or laid off. Instead of saying they were fired, they tend to say the company was letting go of a bunch of people. And again, that's easy to check. All that has to be done is a quick call to the HR department or compare your work history to others in the same business. This is what the article really points out, and I love the point they make about this. They basically say to set aside your aversion to self-promotion but to retain your commitment to integrity. You can be a little bit like Evel Knievel, but you really want to commit to integrity and make sure there aren't any points that others can say you are a liar. Furthermore, feel free to promote yourself on paper and talk about your accomplishments, but also talk about your role in your team's achievements. You don't necessarily need to “make up” to promote things because your integrity really promotes you for you.

Final Thoughts

We may not be ready to jump 13 buses in front of 90,000 spectators, but we're all in the business of promoting ourselves, regardless of how we see it. Whether we're promoting an actual product, our academic career, or polishing our resume for an interview, we all have to engage in self-promotion at some point. It's okay to brag and boast about our accomplishments, but we should keep in mind that, as humans, we naturally overestimate our audience’s positive reactions to our boasting. We think they'll be more impressed by our bragging and less put off. Go ahead and talk about how you lost five pounds over the holidays. However, just be sure to sprinkle in some humor, so your audience recognizes that you're self-aware and grounded.

Talk about your accomplishments and promote yourself in interesting ways. Do great things and tell people about them, especially at your next job interview. But be sure to mention the team's accomplishments too and your role in that team. You don't need to make up anything to impress friends or employers. Your integrity promotes you for you. And if it just so happens that you really do have the highest number of broken bones, according to Guinness, then go ahead and toot your horn because you deserve a little self-promotion.

Bonus source to check out - Evel Knievel documentary.