What do
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, our current president and Homer Simpson all have
in common?
They've all
worn the same outfit, pretty much every day.
Why? It
isn’t a coincidence. Jobs and President Barack Obama, for example, are both
part of the same-outfit club, but for different reasons. And both are logical,
from both a scientific and business perspective.
The
Science
If you
notice, Obama wears a blue or gray suit all the time (when he wore a tan suit
earlier this year, it nearly blew up
the Internet). Why? Here’s the explanation he gave to famed writer Michael
Lewis, via Vanity Fair:
“You’ll see
I wear only gray or blue suits,” Obama told Lewis. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t
want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too
many other decisions to make.”
That logic
is backed up with some pretty convincing science. Two college professors who
have studied decision-making, Kathleen Vohs and Barry Schwartz, both foundthat a person has a limited amount of brain power
in a day, so the more decisions they have to make, the weaker their
decision-making process becomes.
"The
mere act of thinking about whether you prefer A or B tires you out,"
Schwartz told The LA Times. "So if I give you something
else that takes discipline, you can't do it -- you'll quit faster. If I have
lifted weights in a gym, later trying to lift a 30-pound weight is
impossible."
Vohs conducted a study where she asked a group of random
people how many decisions they made that day, and then asked them a series of
simple math questions. The more decisions they made in the day, the worse they
did on the math questions.
Jobs’
Reason
Jobs,
meanwhile, garnered the additional benefit of more brain power by choosing to
wear primarily a black turtleneck, blue jeans and white shoes, but that wasn’t
his main motivation. Instead, Forbes reports Jobs – one of the great marketers ever
– did it to establish himself as a brand.
“It is also
great to have a trademark look,” William Arruda, a branding expert, told Forbes. “It makes you memorable and distinctive.”
It makes
sense, when you think about it. After all, who can’t picture Jobs without that
iconic black turtleneck? Or Zuckerberg, with his gray shirt, portraying the ultimate irrelevant,
precocious 21st-century Internet entrepreneur? Or heck, even Bono, and his ever-present yellow shades?
For these
people, that look has become part of their overall mystique. And that makes
them more iconic, like a Homer Simpson, which people can recognize instantly.