Copying the frown

Xi Shi was a woman of Yue famous for her beauty. She had an internal illness, and when the pain came, she would press her hand to her chest and frown, and even then people thought she was lovely.

A woman east of her village saw this and thought: so that's the secret. She went home and spent the afternoon practising the hand on the chest and the pained expression.

The result was that the rich men of the village shut their doors against her, and the poor ones grabbed their children and ran.

Zhuangzi's verdict is dry: she knew that frowning was beautiful, but she didn't know why it was beautiful.

This gets told as a joke about ugly people. It's really about the mechanics of influence.

The visible part of anyone good at anything is the narrowest, most imitable slice: the tone, the pace, the pause before answering, the way they disagree without flinching. Copy those and you get the shape with none of the thing that produced it.

You can't have the frown without the illness, and you don't want the illness.

When you admire someone's manner, ask what they had to live through to get it. Then decide whether you'd pay that.

MOJOWAY is built around that question. What looks like style is usually the debris of experience, and growth means choosing your own price.