How to Be Cool: 4 Lessons from Science and Hollywood

I taught myself how to be “cool” as a junior high student many years ago. It was an intuitive process for me at the time, though filled with social experiments and trial and error – and lots of beating up on myself to get it just right.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out a good way to teach all the aspects of being cool. A way to boil it all down to something simple, streamlined, and easily remembered and used by anyone who aspires to “cool”: who wants to be that person that everybody else just looks at and says, “Man, that guy is cool.”

How do you transform someone who “doesn’t get it” – whom others laugh at, make fun of, disrespect, or ignore – into someone they look up to, gravitate toward, and esteem?

To do this, of course, you need good tactics – you need to be able to give them the “what to do”; but more than this, you need the underlying principles: what is it about cool people that just makes them so damn cool?

Well, after years of non-starters on an article about this, I will say that I have successfully boiled “cool” down to four (4) core elements that are eminently doable and absolutely teachable.

Get all four of these right, and you will be – without question – unstoppably, unspeakably, almost unbearably cool.

And the best news is, all any of them takes is a little practice and, yes... a little discipline.