Cavil Coolidge, out twenty-ninth president, was noted for his habit of keeping his thoughts to himself. People called him “Silent Cal.” Some – particularly those who didn’t like his conservative, business-oriented political leanings – suggested that the reason why he didn’t say much was that he didn’t think much. But it was most unlikely that was true. The evidence is that Calvin Coolidge, a man who enjoyed uncommonly good luck all through his life, understood or intuitively felt that unnecessary talk can become a barrier against lucky breaks.
As we’ve noted many times in this book, our paths through life are determined to a great extent by events not of our making, which is our definition of luck. We cannot control the flow of these events nor predict what they will be. But we can know that they are going to occur. Time and again, we are going be dealing with the unexpected. That being so, the best strategy would seem to be one of maximum flexibility: keeping ourselves free to deal with those unknowable events in whatever ways seem appropriate at the time.
The trouble with too much talk is that it can constrict that valuable freedom and flexibility. Talk can tie you up, lock you into positions that seem right today but may be wrong tomorrow.
“I have often regretted my speech, but never my silence,” wrote Publilius Syrus, a Roman author of mimes and aphorism who flourished in the first century B.C. He may have been referring simply to the morning-after regret that has been familiar to men and women through all the ages: “Oh God, did I really tell that story?” But it is more likely Publilius was thinking about the kind of regret that seizes you when an unexpected shift of events leaves you stranded.
“I’ve never like Marie much,” you confide to a group one day. The next day, in one of those unpredictable shifts, Marie finds herself in a position to direct a lucky break your way. Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut?
“I wouldn’t work for that company no matter how much they paid me,” you declare. Those are words that you may one day wish you had never spoken.
“I’m uncomfortable dealing with people like him.”
“I think they did a pretty poor job of organizing that project.”
As Publilius Syrus knew, words can come back to haunt you. Silence almost never does.
This doesn’t mean you must turn yourself into a stone statue. Fast-flow orientation requires you to be in contact with a lot of people, and that requires talk. Moreover, there are times when events force you to take positions and state views strongly. The lesson of this Ninth Technique is that the luckiest people guard against unnecessary talk. They are particularly careful when talking of subjects that have great personal importance to them. They reveal no more of their thinking than they have to. They don’t lock themselves into positions where there is no good reason to do so.
Typically, others think of them as somewhat mysterious. “I never really know what’s going through her head.” And that is as it should be.
Calvin Coolidge lived in an era that was almost as talky as ours. He was by no means a stone statue, but he did shun unnecessary jabber, and that made him stand out. He became the subject of caricatures. A motor-mouthed Washington hostess reportedly buttonholed him one evening and gushed, “I do hope you’ll talk to me Mr. Coolidge! A friend bet me I wouldn’t get more than two words out of you!” Coolidge replied coolly, “You lose.”
He wasn’t really that silent. No man so taciturn could have used the fast flow as successfully as Coolidge did. He talked enough to attract the lucky breaks he needed. Starting adult life as an obscure young lawyer in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1898, he took exactly 25 years to become president of the United States. He did it by moving quickly, smoothly, and almost effortlessly through successively higher positions: mayor, state senator, governor, vice president, president. He never lost an election, and this astonished people. “There was a certain inevitability about the way he moved ahead,” wrote his wife’s awe-struck biographer, Ishbel Ross, “without seeming to exert himself unduly or beat the drums.”
He didn’t often need to exert himself because his acquaintanceship network did much of the work for him. He was always in the right place at the right time. Though there is no record that he ever used the term such as “fast flow”, he must have realized in thinking about his life that he owed his continuing success mostly to the very big network of contacts he had established.
The “Coolidge luck” was almost as much talked about as was his parsimony with words. When he was elected vice president of the United States in 1920, his young law partner, Ralph Hemenway, cracked a joke that turned out to be grimly prophetic, “With your luck,” Hemenway said, “I wouldn’t want to be in the president’s shoes.” Three years later President Warren Hardin died in office, and Coolidge succeeded him.
It troubled Coolidge that some of his most important lucky breaks depended on other people’s bad luck. He may even have owed his life to such a break. In 1915, shortly after he was nominated for the office of Massachusetts lieutenant governor, he was knocked over by a car while crossing a street. The impact hurled him against a woman, and he fell on top of her. Because of that cushioned landing he was able to get up with only some trivial bruises, but the unfortunate woman sustained more serious injuries, including a broken arm.
But that kind of luck is blind, random, and uncontrollable. There is nothing sensible to said or done about it. The main threads of explainable luck in Coolidge’s life came from his acquaintanceship network and his frugality with words.
According to Ishbel Ross, Coolidge’s philosophy was expressed in a snatch of doggerel that he had framed and hung over his mantel when he was mayor of Northampton:
A wise old owl sat on an oak.
The more she saw, the less he spoke.
The less he spoke, the more he heard.
Why can’t we be like that old bird?
Great poetry it wasn’t. And there is some evidence that Coolidge’s gregarious wife, Grace, regarded this snippet of middlebrow parlor furnishing with considerable distaste. But it did sum up one of the major reasons for Coolidge’s lifelong good luck.
People liked silent Cal, and in this fact lies one lesson of the Ninth Technique: You don’t have to have your mouth going all the time to establish a circle of good friends and a widespread acquaintanceship network. As a matter of fact, in a talky time such as the present, people often find silence pleasantly surprising and refreshing. You can make friends as easily by listening, really listening, as you can by generating great heaps of words. Indeed, nonstop talk can irritate people – especially those who wish to be nonstop talkers themselves.
People not only liked Coolidge but were intrigued by the mystery of the man. What was he thinking? Nobody knew, except on the rare occasions when he chose to tell them. And because of this frugality with words, he preserved the freedom to react flexibly to unexpected events and turn them into strokes of good luck.
The event that hurled him to national prominence was a strike by the Boston police in 1919, while he was Massachusetts governor. Coolidge had never talked much about his views on unionization of public employees. When the threat of a strike boiled up suddenly, he warned the union leaders that he would not tolerate a police walkout, but they chose not to believe him. It was a serious miscalculation. To their astonishment, the inscrutable governor threw the full weight of his authority against the strikers – and, still worse for them, made a national issue of it by deliberately getting into a public debate with Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor.
“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime,” Coolidge declared flatly, and the majority of the U.S. press and public cheered. From that moment on, Calvin Coolidge was on his way to the presidency.
It was a fine example of how to seize an unexpected event and turn it to good fortune. Coolidge was able to do this because he had kept himself free. He had not done a lot of talking. He had not aligned himself with unnecessarily with groups and positions, only to find that he had to do a lot of wiggling to get free. When the potentially lucky event occurred, he was free.
The event required that he take a position, and he did – unequivocally. He locked himself into that position for the rest of his life. He was willing to do this when it was necessary – but only when it was necessary.
And so it went throughout Coolidge’s career. He avoided making enemies when there was no good reason to do so. In 1920, when he had his first shot at the presidency, his nomination was impeded by the powerful Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Coolidge ended up as vice president under Warren Harding instead. A less lucky man might have made a life long enemy out of Lodge by losing his cool and firing off a salvo of angry words. Coolidge did not, though many felt a few nasty remarks would have been justified under the circumstances. “Coolidge’s secret thoughts of Lodge are not fit to print,” former President Taft wrote. The point was that Coolidge did keep those thoughts secret, since there was no good reason to reveal them.
And since he did not utter the words that may have been in his mind, they did not come back to haunt him. In one of those unexpected twists of events that fill human life but that only the lucky are prepared for, Lodge found it expedient to support the idea of a Coolidge presidential candidacy in 1924. He could not easily have done so, and Coolidge could not easily have accepted the support, if they had been enemies. Both would then have been accused of shallow opportunism. As it was, Lodge was able to offer generous support, and he lived just long enough to learn of Coolidge’s landslide victory in the 1924 election.
Calvin Coolidge was by all measures one of our luckiest presidents. He obviously knew a lot about luck – though just what he knew or thought, of course, nobody ever found out. Not only was he master of this Ninth Technique, but he seems also to have conquered the Fourth, the technique of run cutting. He cut his greatest run of luck short and he did it brilliantly, just when the run was at its height just when every loser in the world would have been gripped by greed and would have held on for more.
The four years of Coolidge’s elected term, from early 1925 to early 1929, were years of absolutely unprecedented prosperity. The world had never seen anything like it. The “Coolidge prosperity”, as it was universally called, was capitalism’s finest hour to date. Americans themselves had trouble believing what was happening to them, and as for European and Russians they watched in pop-eyed amazement. Business boomed. Factory wages in America soared to more than twice what could had anywhere in Europe and six times what could be earned in the worker’s paradise, Russia. The stock market went wild. For every $100 you invested in General Motors common stock at its low in 1923, you found yourself sitting on $2,150 at the high in 1929. Thousands of ordinary middle-class citizens were getting rich.
It was a lovely time to be alive. And a fine time to be president. To have such a boom named after you what more could a president ask for?
What more? Many presidents, probably most, would have said “four more years.” Not Calvin Coolidge. This accomplished student of luck knew about run cutting.
One morning in August 1927, he called some reporters to the White House and handed them each a slip of paper on which was a single astounding sentence: “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.”
That was it. No elaborations. No explanations. Nothing but the plain, short statement: “I do not choose o run.”
It was entirely in keeping with this inscrutable man’s character that he had not discussed this decision with anybody, with the possible exception of one or two close friends. Many politicians and sundry autobiographers later came forward and said, “Oh, he told me months before.” But one can doubt the truth of such claims. Coolidge’s wife, Grace, was as startled by the announcement as anybody. Evidently he had never let slip, even to her, the faintest hint as to his thoughts about running in 1928.
He went home to his beloved New England. Unlucky Herbert Hoover succeeded him as president. A few months after Hoover took office, the great Coolidge run came to a disastrous end. The stock market crashed late in 1929. By the end of the following year, the nation and most of the world wee in the grip of the worst depression in modern times.
Lucky Cal Coolidge, he was out of it. Was he content? Nobody knows. He never said.
It is a central assumption of modern psychology that talk is the cure for all ills and and the route to all private and public heavens. Sigmund Freud was one who held this unlikely belief. He taught that if are troubled, you can get cured by lying on your back, gibbering to a shrink. Neither he nor any of his disciples ever offered trustworthy evidence that this is true, but the idea caught the imagination of he Western world.
Today the volume of doctor-endorsed talk is vastly greater. Mass-media shrinks like Dr. Joyce Brothers assure us over and over again that “communication” is the key to marital bliss, sexual ecstasy and whatever else one might want. In her books and magazine articles on these topics, Dr. Brothers has couples making lists. Lists of what they like and dislike. Lists of what they’re mad, lists of why they’re sad. And then they read these lists and they talk, talk, talk.
Part of the rationale is the century-old assumption that it is bad for us to “bottle up” your feelings. If you’re angry you are supposed to open the valves, let off the steam and reduce the pressure. Shrinks have been asserting this, without proving its correctness, ever since Freud’s day and particularly in the very talky era that began in the 1960s. If you accept the analogy that men and women are vessels filled with steam under pressure, the assertion may made a goofy kind of sense. But the fact is that it is almost certainly untrue.
Studies at Cornell University and elsewhere have demonstrated, in fact, that the reverse is true. People who “bottle up” their anger – in other words, control it – don’t come to any great harm. People who habitually vent their anger, on the other hand, only get angrier.
They get angrier largely because they continually stir up their environment. By lashing out at people, they provide angry responses, to which they respond with still more anger. The let-off-steam kind of personality lives in a never-ending storm of blows and counterblows.
Calvin Coolidge, by contrast, habitually held his feelings in. If he felt anger – at somebody like Henry Cabot Lodge, for instance – he sat on it. A psychiatrist would almost certainly have advised Coolidge to let the anger out. But Coolidge knew better. He kept the lid on.
And where did it get him? The presidency.
It is unlikely that talk would have been of any more help in Coolidge’s private life than in his public one. He and Grace were not in the habit of “communicating” a great deal, and the idea of making little lists would have amused them. Yet their marriage was so serene that it deeply moved Howard Chandler Christy, a painter who lived at the White House while working on the first lady’s portraits.
Historians learned years later that silent Cal not faithful to his wife. There is no conclusive evidence to tell us whether Grace knew about this and didn’t care, knew about it and elected to ignore it, or didn’t know about it. Perhaps she, too, was unfaithful outside the marriage. Nobody knows for sure. What can be said for sure is that talk could not have improved the situation in the slightest and might have made it very much worse. It was a silent and uncommunicative marriage, but in its way, it worked. What would have been the sense of destroying it with talk?
Silence doesn’t only protect you from getting locked into unwanted positions, and it doesn’t only keep you from revealing facts and feelings you may not want known. It has one other great virtue. By avoiding excessive communication, lucky men and women are freed of the need to explain and justify actions to other people.
Other people’s opinions can tangle you and slow you disastrously. Typical sad story from Wall Street: The chronic loser buys some stock and blabs to his or her spouse, explaining all the reasons why this investment is so nifty. Bad luck obtrudes. The stock price plunges. This is the time when the speculator ought to apply the Fifth Technique, luck selection. The venture has soured, so it is time to discard bad luck before it becomes worse luck. It is time to sell out.
But the loser, being a loser, has communicated too much. Now the spouse is jeering. “You sure know how to pic them! Wow, what an expert! This nifty investment has cost us 6,000 bucks so far. Boy I hope it doesn’t get any niftier!”
The jeering may not be so badly spoken. It may be merely implied by looks or gestures. It may even be entirely unintended. It may be simply felt by the loser. No matter. There it is, and its effect is to jam the valuable Fifth Technique and make it unusable. The loser finds it impossible to say ” I was wrong”. Instead, he is forced to take a stand: “This is just temporary, I tell you! Just wait. I’ll be proved right in the end!”
And down the drain go the talky two.
Since life is ruled by luck and you can never predict what actions you will need to take, it is best to say as little as possible about what you are doing and thinking. Then, when action is required, the only person you must argue with is yourself. That is often tough enough.
A New York psychiatrist – one of the few on earth who doesn’t urge his patients to keep their mouth going all the time – tells of a woman who communicated too much to her son and daughter. She had absorbed the doctrine of nonstop communication when they were grade school kids in the 1960s. Everybody in the world seemed to think it was a good idea for parents to have frequent “frank talks” with kids. Teachers thought it, school shrinks thought it, magazine articles repeated it endlessly, and only the consistently lucky questioned it.
When the woman and the kids’ father were divorced, she conduced the required frank talks with her kids about the episode. When she joined a local chapter of Parents Without Partners, a service and social organization of the widowed and divorced, she felt it incumbent upon her to explain her reasons to the youngsters. When she began meeting new men friends, she told the kids much more than they needed to know and probably a good deal more than they wanted to know. They may have wished their mother would shut up and leave them alone. But she was only doing what every good parent was supposed to do.
The “frank talk” dogma was widely preached in Parents Without Partners’ chapter newsletters and its national magazine, The Single Parent, during the 1960s and 1970s. But around 1980, many PWP members seem to have come to feel that the dogma was overrated. Some, indeed, arrived at the conclusion that it was plain rubbish. “What earthly good is it going to do to discuss my private life and feelings with my kids?” one woman wrote. “To the extent that my divorce directly affects their lives, they’re entitled to hear from me. But as for why I got divorced, it’s none of their business.”
That determinedly silent woman may well have been a lucky one. But the woman who is the subject of this case story was too talky to be lucky.
Unlike many of her fellow PWP members she continued the practice of nonstop communication in the 1980s. Her son and daughter were now adults. She continued to shower them with unsolicited details of her affairs with men.
There was one man in whom she invested more than a trivial amount of emotional capital. She met him at a PWP function. He was an early-retired teacher. He and she got into the habit of doing things as a couple. She then started inviting him to traditional family gatherings such as Christmas dinner. Finally, he suggested that their sexual and financial convenience could both be served by his moving into her apartment and sharing the rent.
She gave a detailed account of this progression to her son and daughter. It was a mistake, for in doing so she gave away her freedom to act in her own best interest.
The son found the retired teacher congenial enough, but the daughter took an immediate and instinctive dislike to the man. Certain clues made her suspect that he was in fairly desperate financial straits and had joined PWP at least partly with the purpose of finding somebody to support him.
“He’s nothing but a charming gold-digger,” the daughter said. In time her brother came around that view, too.
The mother earnestly denied it. “If he’s after money,” she pointed out, “there are lots of richer women around than me.”
This was true. On the other hand, the mother did have a comfortable middle-class income and nest-egg. This was more than the ex-teacher seemed to have.
Unwilling to let her son and daughter think she had any doubts about this man in whom she had invested so much, the mother went along with his suggestion and invited him to move in with her. She did it as much in a spirit of defiance as for any other reason. She was going to show her son and daughter that she had faith in her own judgment.
If she had kept her thoughts to herself all along, she would not have needed to show anybody anything. Her only debating opponent then would have been herself. But she had invited other people’s opinions into her life. Those opinions had begun to push her in directions she might not have chosen if she had been free.
It got worse. By bad luck, the ex-teacher had a heart attack soon after moving in with her. It was not serious, he recovered fast. But it was expensive, and it worsened his already bad financial condition. He was unable to pay his share of the rent or even contribute much to the food budget.
The woman, through her job, was enrolled in a group health insurance program that would have paid for the man’s illness had he been her spouse. It would not pay for a nonmarital partner, however. For this and other reasons, the ex-teacher began to talk about their getting married.
She was now beginning to feel some of the doubts expressed by her daughter. The man was charming, but was he just looking for a free ride? With these doubts mounting, she should have cut her losses, abandoned her investment, and withdrawn from the venture long ago. But she could not make herself say “I was wrong” – particularly to her son and daughter. She talked herself into hoping for the best and then, into believing the best. She talked herself into optimism – a dangerous state of mind, as we’ve seen in other contexts. She married the man.
It turned out disastrously. The man was not only broke; he was up to his ears in debt. His creditors now began dunning his new spouse. The total of their demands was more than her life savings. The marriage disintegrated under the strain. Eventually the ex-teacher ran off with another woman, leaving his wife a good deal poorer and, perhaps, wiser.
If he left her less talky than he found her, then some good may have come out of the miserable situation. The psychiatrist who told me this story, counsellor to many PWP members in the New York area, says that excessive talk seems to be a contributing factor to the troubles of many of those life-scarred people. He doesn’t discuss the phenomenon in terms of luck. What he does say is that the talkiest marriages often seem to the shortest lasting. “These ‘frank’ and ‘open’ kinds of relationships are volatile,” he says. “They tend to blow up.”
The reason is luck – the continual intrusion of the unexpected. Once you realize that luck is always going to play a dominant role in your life, you become aware that anything you say may turn against you. A statement that seems safe today may become dangerous in the changed circumstances of tomorrow. The friend to whom you whisper a confidence today may be your enemy tomorrow. If you talk too much about a venture this year, you may find you’ve given away your freedom when you want to get out of it next year.
It doesn’t mean you must take a vow of eternal silence. You must have relationships, after all; you must take chances; you must talk to people. The message of the Ninth Technique is only that you avoid unnecessary talk about your problems, plans, and feelings. When there is no good reason to say something, say nothing.