Can Bald People be Successful?

baktrax
Sun, 24 Nov 2013 19:48:20 +0000

The main disadvantage I see is that he looks older than he is, which may lead to people expecting more maturity than is realistic for a person his age. The same sort of thing happens to children who get eyeglasses when they’re very young. In both cases, people take a young person too seriously.



I don’t know how old your son is, but I’ve found that looking older can actually be really helpful early on your career (post-college, early 20’s). I’ve been on both sides of the situation with some people thinking I’m older than I am and some people thinking I’m younger than I am. There’s often very little lost when someone assumes you’re older than you are, but being seen as younger can often make it harder, at least in my experience. I work in healthcare, and I’ve run into a lot of hesitancy from patients because I look very young for my age (and many others who are much older than I am have the same sort of reaction when they look young for their age). We do all sorts of things to try and make ourselves look older, but there’s only so much you can do. People tend to be a little more patronizing when they think you’re younger than you are, and it does take some work to sort of earn that respect and authority back. It’s much, much easier to use looking older than you are to your advantage in the very beginning of your career (when you are relatively very young).

And as for looking older when you’re a kid, I had glasses at a young age and was pretty tall for my age so I looked older than I was. There really wasn’t any harm done–a simple I’m actually blah years old is enough for people to readjust their perception of you. I’ve found that it’s harder, though, for people to easily readjust their perception of you when you’re actually older than they think you are based on your appearance. That’s just my experience though.

Perhaps, the OP would be interested in this study on people’s perceptions of bald men: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/oct/04/bald-men-dominant-image

Be a little more confident, OP! Hair has very little to do with how successful you are going to be (unless you had dreams of being a hair model or something :P).