What the Netflix series reveals about perception, femininity and the strategic advantage of being misread.

Netflix's Inventing Anna follows Anna Delvey, a young woman who presents herself as a wealthy German heiress while moving through New York's elite social circles.

One of the most fascinating things about Inventing Anna isn't simply that Anna Delvey deceived people. It's how many intelligent, successful and professionally experienced people believed they already understood what they were looking at.

A young woman in designer clothes who stayed in expensive hotels, moved through exclusive spaces and spoke with extraordinary confidence appeared to belong there, and people completed the rest of the story themselves.

That is what makes Inventing Anna so interesting to me.

Beneath the fraud, money and spectacle sits a much more interesting question about perception: what happens when people underestimate a woman because they think they have already figured her out?

Anna understood, and illegally exploited, something most of us experience on a much smaller scale. People don't only respond to who you are. They respond to who they think you are.

Sometimes being misread gives you room to move.

THE POWER OF BEING UNDERESTIMATED

We are often too eager to correct people's perception of us. When someone underestimates our intelligence, experience or capabilities, ego immediately wants to prove them wrong.

But why give away information that isn't necessary yet?

There can be an advantage in allowing someone to underestimate you for a little longer. People become less guarded when they don't perceive you as competition.

They explain things you may already understand. They reveal opinions they might otherwise keep to themselves. They talk because they believe they are the person in the room who knows more.

Meanwhile, you are learning.

Playing stupid doesn't have to mean pretending to have no intelligence. Sometimes it simply means resisting the urge to demonstrate everything you know.

You ask another question. You listen to the answer. You allow someone to keep talking.

That isn't weakness. It can be strategic restraint.

FEMININITY CAN BECOME CAMOUFLAGE

Women have an interesting advantage here because femininity is still routinely confused with superficiality.

A woman who loves fashion, beauty, relationships, spirituality or aesthetics can easily be placed inside a category that has very little to do with her actual intellectual capacity. The assumption seems to be that if a woman spends considerable time thinking about what she wears, she must have less time available to think about anything important.

Inventing Anna plays beautifully with this contradiction.

Anna's clothes weren't separate from her strategy. They were part of the language through which other people interpreted her. She understood that perception enters the room before your résumé does.

If someone mistakes femininity for weakness, beauty for vanity or kindness for naivety, you can simply continue observing.

Their assumption may tell you more about them than it does about you.

DON'T SHOW EVERY CARD

This becomes particularly useful in environments where something meaningful is at stake.

Your career. Your business. Your money. Your reputation. Even your heart.

You don't need to enter every environment immediately revealing your ambitions, vulnerabilities, connections, knowledge and complete plan. First understand the room you're standing in.

Who has actual influence? Who talks too much? Who keeps their promises? Who becomes uncomfortable when another person succeeds? Who treats people differently depending on their status?

You aren't manipulating the room. You're learning it.

The same applies to relationships. You don't need to explain every boundary before someone has even had the opportunity to reveal how they naturally behave. People will show you what they do with kindness, freedom, disappointment and access.

Sometimes we interfere with our own discernment because we are constantly correcting people before they have a chance to reveal themselves.

Give people enough room to show you who they are.

Then believe the information.

WHERE ANNA'S STRATEGY COLLAPSED

This is also where Inventing Anna becomes more interesting than a simple story about a brilliant manipulator.

Perception can open a door, but perception cannot indefinitely replace substance.

Anna wanted to build the Anna Delvey Foundation, an ambitious private arts club in Manhattan. Yet the identity supporting her access depended on claims about wealth and resources she did not actually possess. Eventually reality caught up with the image.

That is the limitation of perception without foundation.

A strategically underestimated woman doesn't need to lie about who she is. Her advantage comes from allowing other people to reveal their assumptions while she continues building something real. That is far more sustainable.

The goal isn't to become better at creating smoke and mirrors. The goal is to understand perception without becoming trapped inside your own performance.

LET THEM FIND OUT LATER

There will always be rooms where somebody thinks you're less intelligent because you're beautiful, less serious because you're feminine, less powerful because you're kind or less informed because you aren't fighting to be the loudest person in the conversation.

You don't have to correct every assumption. Sometimes the smarter move is to ask another question. Listen. Learn the room before the room learns you.

Know what you're building before you become distracted by proving yourself to people who were never part of the plan.

Being underestimated isn't always something you need to fight. Sometimes it gives you exactly what strategy needs most: time, information and room to move.

Let them think they have figured you out. Just make sure that while they're watching the image, you're still building the substance.

WATCH

Inventing Anna is available on Netflix and is worth revisiting as a fascinating study of status, femininity, ambition and the extraordinary power of perception.’

With Love,

Mara Michels