The unclothed guest

Xi Jian, a powerful man, wanted to find a husband for his daughter. He wrote to the Wang family, who had several sons, and asked whether he could send a man to look them over.

The sons were told. They dressed carefully and waited in the reception room.

Wang Xizhi, one of the younger ones, had heard about it and didn't care. He went to the eastern couch, lay down, and opened his robe to cool down. Then he fell asleep.

The inspector came back and reported: the men of the Wang family are all respectable. Only one of them is lying on the eastern couch with his clothes open and seems not to know he's being looked at.

Xi Jian said: that's the one. He married his daughter to him.

China has used the phrase "the husband on the eastern couch" for a thousand years to mean a marriage candidate who doesn't perform.

The principle under it isn't that indifference is attractive. It's that an interview gives you data about how people perform when they know it's an interview, and almost no data about anything else. What the inspector actually wanted was to know what kind of man this was. The men who dressed carefully told him what they wanted him to know.

I've been on both sides of this now. The people I end up working with are almost never the ones who were most impressive in the first meeting. They're the ones who were themselves in it and difficult to disguise.

You can't fake not faking. But you can notice how much energy you spend maintaining the version of you that gets looked at.

MOJOWAY's intake is one of the few rooms where being unimpressive is the point.