The Economy of Cool

Cool behaves like money. The amateurs admire the balance; the operators spend it.

If you listened to the episode, you’d be forgiven for walking away thinking the “lesson” is: cool is a drug, it wrecks you when it leaves, stay clear of it. That’s not my intent. Cool is a drug, but it’s awesome to be cool. It’s more of a “beware of my experience” kind of deal. But, should you find yourself truly cool someday, definitely embrace it. That’s only a part of the desired takeaway. The other is that cool behaves like money.

Not that it is money. The money is a side effect; we covered that. I mean cool works like a currency. It’s leverage. Something you can hold, spend, and run out of. And like anyone holding a currency, the amateur sits there admiring the balance. The having is what feels good. That’s the drug talking.

The pro spends it.

Access is the clearest form of it — the same-day callback, the table at the place booked a month out, the wave-through at the door, the name that gets a stranger into a room they’d never reach on their own. There are two ways to spend that, and operators use both. One, you cash it in for something money can’t buy you. Two — the one most people miss — you give it away. You let a powerful person use the one door only you can open. You put their nephew on the list. You make the introduction. They remember it, and they pay it back, usually with interest.

What operators never do is the third thing: sit on it to feel the weight of it. That’s not saving. That’s the balance quietly rotting.

Here’s a part it took me years to see. Not everyone is moved by the same currency. There are people you cannot buy with money — but a little access, a little proximity to the cool, and they’ll hand you the keys. For a certain kind of person, cool outbids cash, and it isn’t close. Learn to spot them. They’re more common than you’d think, and almost never who you’d guess.

So, a small exercise — about the closest thing to advice you’ll get out of me. Think of the coolest person you know. Not famous. Cool. Now watch what they do with it. The ones who last are spending it — on loyalty, on favors, on people. The ones who don’t are spending it on the feeling of being cool. Same currency. One of them is building something. The other is admiring the balance, right up until the balance is gone.

That’s the whole thing. Spend the cool. Don’t become it. Because the day the currency runs out — and in all likelihood it will — you want to still own the thing you bought with it.

I didn’t. Took me a while to fix that.

— JC