Complete Upmanship [Paperback]

Stephen Potter (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 349 pages
• Publisher: Grafton (October 19, 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0246640006
• ISBN-13: 978-0246640000
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,716,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book is Definitely One-Up!, May 14, 2006

By 

R. Schultz (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Complete Upmanship: Including, Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-Upmanship, Supermanship (Hardcover)

This is a work of genius. It deserves to be on everyone's top-ten list.

This volume is a collection of all Potter's individual works on the subject of Gamesmanship, One-Upmanship, and Lifemanship. If you can't find this one compendium, go out and beg, borrow, or steal any of the individual books you can lay your hands on. You will laugh uproariously. But you will also learn to recognize the literal, nasty little games people play, and if you are of a mind, you will be instructed in how to play the games yourself.

I've always been rather annoyed when I find an entry in a Match Making column from someone looking for a mate who "Doesn't play games." I've never quite known what that means. It seems to be some generalized, rote admonition against people who don't return phone calls, or something like that. But if the games mentioned in singles columns refer to just the plain meat-and-potatoes sort of maneuvers - here with Stephen Potter you will find a voluptuous smorgasbord of suggested games. You will find ploys of breathtaking diversity and subtlety.

As Potter introduces his subject, the key to being one-up in any social setting is to break the flow of other people's conversation. Put an end to any social momentum they may be building. Throw them off their game. The classic Potter squelch (one which is also illustrated in the movie based on Potter's writings, School for Scoundrels) involves offsetting any success someone at a party may have had by telling a joke. Say someone just scored a big laugh by telling a joke involving a man with one leg. You laugh heartily right along with the others. Then get up off your chair and limp painfully toward the bathroom, mumbling something about a "danged old piece of shrapnel." All the social credit the joke-teller built in the course of the evening will immediately plummet. He and all his appreciative listeners will be made to feel apologetic and guilty and will be effectively silenced.

Not all of Potter's ploys involve directly diminishing someone else though. Some ploys enable you to bolster your own social credit without regard to what others around you are doing. For example, Potter gives a tip on how to be popular with children, an important skill if you are courting a single parent or trying to impress your boss at a party. Potter states that you must talk in a perfectly natural, adult way to the child. Talk to him just as you would talk to one of your golfing partners. You might express concern over your stock portfolio. Confide your fear that pork bellies and crude oil are going down, liable to leave you in a pretty pickle. The toddler may not know what you are saying, but will be fascinated by the strange phrases, and will appreciate your talking to him like an equal. And you will be in like Flynn with the child's parents.

One final example of Potter's brilliant social observation - and then you really must read the book yourself. Potter tells how to always appear to be the youngest, "coolest" person in the room, even if you are well into your nineties and on death's door. Older people assume they must burst onto a party scene with as much upright vigor and energy as they can muster. Do JUST THE OPPOSITE, Potter instructs. Instead, you must appear to be infinitely weary, weary in body and spirit. Don't stand up straight. Slouch against every upright you find. When you come through a doorway, lean for long minutes against the doorframe before proceeding into the room. I imagine if you can effect a long, liquid disaffected slump, like the iconic poster of James Dean - you will have the image of youth down pat. Then as a clinching fillip, Potter advises you to head for a sofa and recline on it. But - the difference between a 99-year-old invalid waning on a couch and a young man stretched disaffectedly there - lies in a small postural detail. When you collapse down on the couch, fling one leg over the back of it. And there you have it - an eternally insouciant young man. No plastic surgery, dieting, or exercise required.

Potter gives page after page of such slaying advice. And he gives the reader the machinations of such expert Lifemen as Gattling-Fenn and Odoreida to follow as example. The Dickensian, oddly apposite names of these (fictional?) characters alone is enough to make them memorable and make you laugh.

But couched in all the laughs you'll get from this book, you will discover a whole coherent psychology of behavior. It preceded the more heavy-handed best-seller Games People Play, and easily presents a more telling interpretation of human motivation than Freud. This truly is a master work.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Handbooks For Life, July 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Complete Upmanship: Including, Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-Upmanship, Supermanship (Hardcover)

These are the four funniest books I have ever read. And yet, the basic concepts and strategies set forth are exactly what's needed to reign supreme in all situations social and competitive. Many times over the years I have employed some variaton of a Potter "opening" or gambit, often with better results than I had even hoped. Just as many times, I've realized (too late), that I have missed a golden opportunity, or worse, have been "one-upped" myself.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It doesn't matter if you win or lose, so long as you win . ., March 31, 1998

By 

The Demon Prince ([e-mail]) (Clovis, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Upmanship: Including, Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-Upmanship, Supermanship (Hardcover)

British humor, very, very British. If you *don't* like losing, develop the skills needed so that you always win. In any social situation a definite hierarchy develops. Potter's work can be considered a manual for anyone seeking to become the top dog. This volume contains four books previously published separately: Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-upmanship, and Supermanship. Potter's own work in the field of becoming one-up on one's fellow man is supplemented by the researches of others in various fields: the carmanship of Godfrey Plaste; the art of not rock-climbing of G. Odoreida; the clubmanship of Hugo Coating; and the many contributions of Gattling-Fenn. Recommended reading for anyone wishing to make Machiavelli gasp in admiration . . .