How to tell a man worth copying from a loud one

The best man I ever worked for drove a fourteen-year-old estate with a cracked wing mirror and never once told me what he earned. He turned up at 6:40 every morning, twenty minutes before anyone needed him to, and he used those twenty minutes to sort out whatever had gone wrong the day before so the rest of us walked into a clean start. I worked for him for three years. I learned more from watching him handle one furious customer than from every conference I've been to since.

The loudest man on that site earned roughly the same and had twice the following. He told better stories. He was funnier at the pub. Eight years on, I still use the quiet one's habits every week and I can't remember a single thing the loud one said.

That's the whole problem in miniature. The man giving the advice and the man living the result are usually not the same man, and you have to work out which is which before you hand over years of your life copying him.

Volume isn't the tell

Plenty of excellent men are loud. Some of the best fathers I know are the ones bellowing across a car park on a Saturday morning. Confidence isn't a warning sign and charisma isn't a character flaw. Don't build a rule that says quiet equals good, because you'll end up trusting anyone with a low voice and a moody profile picture.

The tell is the gap between volume and output. Does the man talk about discipline at the same rate he actually shows it? Does he talk about his marriage more than he invests in it? A man who runs eight miles before work will mention it less than the man who's planning to start running. That's not humility. It's just that the doing takes up the space the talking would have.

So the question isn't how much he says. It's whether there's something behind it that would still be there if he never said a word.

Look downstream, not at him

Anyone can present well for an hour. Nobody can fake the condition of the people around them.

Look at the men who've worked under him and left. Not the ones still on his payroll, who have reasons to be nice. The ones who moved on five years ago. Do they still ring him? Did he write their reference? Would they work for him again?

Look at how his kids are with him when he's not performing. Not the photos. The moment at a family thing when the eight-year-old comes over for no reason and leans on his leg. Kids don't lean on men they're managing.

Look at how his wife talks about his work. If she sounds proud and slightly tired, that's a real man with a real job. If she flinches when the subject comes up, you're being sold something.

And look at the people with nothing to gain. The junior, the cleaner, the bloke who lost the tender to him. A man's real character shows up most clearly in how he treats people who can't do anything for him.

The tests that actually separate them

Watch him when it costs. Anyone's generous when it's free. Has he ever taken a financial hit to keep his word? Has he ever said "that one's on me" to a client when he could have blamed a supplier and got away with it? One instance of that tells you more than a year of listening to him.

Watch him apologize. This is the single fastest test I know. A man worth copying apologises in about eleven words, without the word "if" in them, and then changes the behavior. A man who isn't worth copying gives you a paragraph about context, then a paragraph about how he was actually misread, then nothing changes.

Listen to how he talks about people who aren't there. Ex-wives, former partners, the old boss. If everyone in his history was unreasonable, there's only one common factor and he's sitting opposite you.

Find out who can tell him no. Every man worth copying is under something. A wife whose judgement he defers to. A business partner who can veto him. A pastor, a sponsor, an older man he actually rings. A man with no authority over him at all is a man whose next mistake has no brakes.

Check he's good at something concrete. Not "leadership". A trade, an instrument, a language, surgery, hanging a door properly. Men who have done the boring work of becoming genuinely competent at one hard thing tend to be honest about how long things take. Men who've only ever done the talking version tend to think everything's four weeks away.

The bad year rule

Don't take life advice from a man whose plan hasn't survived a bad year yet.

Anyone can look wise in a rising market. The advice you want is from someone who's been made redundant at forty-six, or buried a parent, or sat through a diagnosis, or run a business through a quarter where the money didn't come in and the wages still had to. Ask him about the worst twelve months he's had. If he can tell you what he got wrong in it, without a hero arc, you're talking to the right man.

The ones who can only tell you the winning version haven't been tested. They might be fine. You just don't know yet, and you shouldn't bet your twenties on it.

Copy narrowly

Here's the part most men get wrong, and I got wrong badly at twenty-four: don't try to copy a whole man. You'll pick up his flaws along with his strengths, and you'll pick them up faster, because flaws are easier.

Take one thing from each. From the man I worked for, I took the early twenty minutes and the habit of going to the angry customer first. From my father-in-law, the way he asks a question and then actually stops talking. From a man at church, the fact that he writes cards by hand and posts them, which costs him about eleven minutes and lands like a fortune.

Three or four men, one habit each. That's a life you can actually build, and it doesn't depend on any one of them turning out to be a disappointment. Some of them will. Men are men.

How to get near them

Don't ask anyone to be your mentor. It's a big word and it makes decent men nervous, because they hear an open-ended commitment and they already have three of those.

Ask for twenty minutes with one specific question. "You've run crews for fifteen years. How do you handle it when a good bloke starts coasting?" That's answerable. It's flattering in the right way. And it ends cleanly, which is exactly why he'll say yes to the next one.

Then be useful. Turn up early, carry the heavy end, stay to stack the chairs. The relationship gets built sideways while you're both doing something, not across a coffee table.

And report back. Tell him you used the thing and what happened. Men keep giving to the ones who actually use it, and they quietly stop giving to the ones who just collect advice.

One more thing. The man worth copying is often slightly annoying to be around — he's early when you'd rather be late, he doesn't join in when the conversation turns on someone, and he'll ask you a question you've been avoiding. That friction is the whole point. Comfortable company and improving company are rarely the same men.

Somewhere there's a lad who's about eleven right now who'll be running this test on you in fifteen years. He won't tell you he's doing it.