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.