How to be as sucessful as Obama and Zuckerberg:wear the same clothes every day

The US president and the Facebook founder have both pared
down their wardrobes so they can concentrate on changing the world
M ark Zuckerberg’s brain is a mega-processor that constantly
operates at full tilt. He is perennially, dizzyingly consumed with
Facebook. He lies awake at night, fizzing and whirring with
ideas about how to fully maximise the Facebook experience.
“What’s the best way to let everyone know exactly how racist
all their old schoolmates have got?” he thinks. “How can I
make the average Facebook visit as annoying and unwieldy as
physically possible? How many pointless hoops can I
reasonably expect my users to joylessly clamber through in order
to retain a basic veneer of privacy? Ten? Fifty? A million?”
This is the high-frequency attention to detail that makes Mark
Zuckerberg one of the most powerful men on the planet.
But it comes at a terrible cost. Zuckerberg’s mind is so busy
maxing out with new ways to cram your timeline with irritating
Candy Crush life requests that he’s forgotten how to wear
clothes properly. Whenever you see Mark Zuckerberg in
public, chances are he’ll be decked out in a grey T-shirt,
possibly offset with a black hoodie if he’s unable to warm
himself with the fury of his exasperated users.
His lack of sartorial variety hasn’t gone unnoticed, either. At
a Facebook “town hall” meeting last week , Zuckerberg
answered a question about his limited wardrobe by claiming that
he simply lacks the time and energy to pick a new outfit every
day. “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have
to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how
to best serve the community,” he said.
This is a tactic that’s long been used by influential
megalomaniacs. Steve Jobs could focus all his attention on
Apple, for instance, because he always dressed up like a
French mime artist. Barack Obama owns so many identical
suits that whenever he goes off-grid with something in a nice
shade of tan, the internet immediately starts spasming with
hysterically surprised mockery. American TV presenter Ryan
Seacrest has even launched a modular clothing line,
numerically coded by colour , for men too powerful to worry
about the social alienation that comes with the knowledge that
they’re being dressed by the man who executive produces all
the Kardashian shows.
Why do they do this? To stave off decision fatigue, a real
condition where you become overloaded with so many pointless
decisions that your productivity ends up falling off a cliff. You
spend so long wasting precious mental energy on frivolous
distractions – such as what to wear or what to eat – that you
stop being able to do your job properly. You become paralysed
with choice. You start making bad decisions and exercising
poor self-control until you end up being booed out of your own
boardroom by a gaggle of elderly puce-faced stockholders.
And, by the look of it, limiting your sartorial peripheries
actually works – Barack Obama has pared his wardrobe
down to such a degree that he can confidently walk into any
situation and make decisions that directly impact on the future
of mankind. Meanwhile, Louis Walsh owns dozens of
different suits and can’t even decide which dismal knock-kneed
X Factor contestant to send home each week, even though
that’s literally his only job and nobody even cares about it
anyway. Faced with evidence as watertight as this, perhaps
we should all start following Zuckerberg’s lead.
In fact, in retrospect, I think I might already do this. Sure,
an outsider might see my insistence on shuffling around my
house in a manky dressing gown all day as a sign that I
suffer from dangerously low self-esteem, but really it’s just
because I’m saving all my cerebral energy for my work.
Similarly, I’ve come to realise that I no longer have the
spare mental energy necessary to shave or wash. Do I use
long strokes or short? Do I use the Gillette razor or the
Wilkinson Sword? Do I rub a flannel on my face first, or do
I rub it on my bum? Maybe this is why I eat Weetabix for
about 60% of my meals, too. It’s not because I’m so
ashamed of being undressed and unwashed that I can’t even
bring myself to go to the supermarket and buy real food. It’s
because I’m just like a powerful CEO. It works!
Reducing unnecessary decisions is such a good idea that I
might even take it one step further. Instead of booking a
holiday next year, I might just let a travel agent drive me
around in a coach for a couple of days. Look, there’s
France. Look, there’s Germany. It’s lunchtime, so here’s a
binbag full of porridge. At 10pm they’ll come around and
physically close your eyes for you, and then shout numbers at
you in your sleep so you can dream about maths.
Mark Zuckerberg, if you’re reading, come on holiday with me.
We can do this together, dressed identically and being spoon-
fed by poorly paid underlings who obviously resent doing our
donkey work. We’ll have so much fun. But not enough fun
for you to ignore your plans to pointlessly spread the mobile
Facebook experience out across 20 different but equally
unnecessary apps. Priorities first!