More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Adams
Read between
June 27 - July 2, 2019
If you are the seller of the business, you want to prime the buyer by mentioning the high price paid by someone else in an entirely different context. That’s often enough to anchor a person to the high number even though it is a different conversation.
Associations matter more than reason. The Hitler analogy was effective not because analogies are logical or persuasive but because any association of two things is persuasive. If you compare any two things long enough, their qualities start to merge in our irrational minds. The illusion created by analogies is that if two situations have anything in common, perhaps they have lots in common.
Now watch me summarize this point by using an analogy, because analogies are good at explaining new concepts: If your analogy includes a strong negative association (such as Hitler), you could think of the analogy as a holster and the negative association as a gun. The gun is persuasive. The holster is not.
PERSUASION TIP 15 Studies say humans more easily get addicted to unpredictable rewards than they do predictable rewards.
But you can improve the power of your persuasion by grafting your story onto people’s existing aspirations. You see this a lot in product marketing. For example, Apple tells you that its products will help you be creative. For many people, being more creative is an aspiration. And some financial services companies tell you they will help you be financially independent. That too is an aspiration for most people.
Fear can be deeply persuasive. But not all fear-related persuasion is equal. To maximize your fear persuasion, follow these guidelines. A big fear is more persuasive than a small one. A personal fear is more persuasive than a generic national problem. A fear that you think about most often is stronger than one you rarely think about. A fear with a visual component is scarier than one without. A fear you have experienced firsthand (such as a crime) is scarier than a statistic.
We saw President Obama win over 90 percent of the African American vote. We saw most women prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. And so on. People like to back their “tribe” as they see it. And all of us are in multiple tribes if you consider our genders, ethnicities, ages, wealth, religions, political parties, and all the rest. Humans reflexively support their own tribe. No thinking is involved.
The next time someone is doing something you find objectionable, don’t attack that person’s actions. Instead, ask if this is who the person wants to be. Most people think they are good people, even if they sometimes do bad things. If you remind them of their identity, and their aspirations for their identity, you will usually be met with cognitive dissonance and an implied promise to change. That might look like this: Other person: “I like defacing the political signs on the other side. Ha-ha! It’s hilarious.” You: “Is that the person you want to be?” Other person (now with cognitive
...more
it is easier to persuade people when they expect to be persuaded.
Credibility, of any sort, is persuasive. That’s why doctors and lawyers post their degrees on the wall where everyone can see them. That’s why high-end consultants wear expensive business suits. When you signal your credentials, people expect you to have more influence over them. That’s how we’re wired. We defer to experts almost automatically.
PERSUASION TIP 16 It is easier to persuade a person who believes you are persuasive.
Pre-suading, or setting the table, is about creating mental and emotional associations that carry over. If you get the mood right, and your credibility is high, you’re halfway done with your persuasion before anyone knows you started. Here’s a checklist you can use to see how well you set the table for your own future persuasion. Make sure you . . . Dress for the part. If you dress like a knowledgeable professional, people will assume your opinions and advice are credible. That makes it easier to persuade. Improve your physical appearance via diet, exercise, hair care, etc. Attractive people
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Whenever there is mass confusion and complexity, people automatically gravitate to the strongest, most confident voice. We humans don’t like uncertainty, so we are attracted to those who offer clarity and simple answers, even if the answers are wrong or incomplete. Master Persuaders can thrive in chaotic environments by offering the clarity people crave.
PERSUASION TIP 17 People prefer certainty over uncertainty, even when the certainty is wrong.
PERSUASION TIP 18 Visual persuasion is more powerful than nonvisual persuasion, all else being equal. And the difference is large.
PERSUASION TIP 19 In the context of persuasion, you don’t need a physical picture if you can make someone imagine the scene.
That’s one of a persuader’s most basic and well-known tricks: People automatically gravitate toward the future they are imagining most vividly, even if they don’t want the future they are seeing.
Every decision is a comparison of alternatives. If you control how people see the alternatives, you can sell anything.
You can use the power of contrast to improve every part of your professional and personal life. Here are some suggestions to get you started. Participate in activities at which you excel compared with others. People’s impression of you as talented and capable compared with the average participant will spill over to the rest of your personal brand. In business, always present your ideas in the context of alternatives that are clearly worse. Don’t just sell your proposed solution; slime all the other options with badness. If someone you know is treating a small issue as a big one, remind them
...more
PERSUASION TIP 20 People are more persuaded by contrast than by facts or reason. Choose your contrasts wisely.
One of the easiest forms of persuasion involves associating one image or idea with another in a way that makes some of the goodness (or badness) of one rub off on the other. That’s the idea behind celebrity endorsements, labeling political opponents Nazis, and marketing in general. But you already knew that. What you might not know is that each of us is “marketing” all the time. If you want to be liked and respected, you have to watch your accidental associations. For example, I know people who think bathroom humor is hilarious. I’m not here to judge their sense of humor, as that is
...more
As a general rule, I try to fill my brain with optimistic thoughts in order to crowd out the bad ones that sometimes slip in. This is a form of self-hypnosis, using the power of association. The positive thoughts lift my energy, which in turn lifts my mood, and even my immune system. If you are trying to get past a negative thought or memory, try distracting yourself with positive images and ideas. Or change your scenery to something that has a positive vibe. You can program yourself all the way from a funk to a good mood if you change the inputs. And best of all, you can do the same to
...more
people won’t always remember what you said, but they almost always remember how you made them feel.
Another easy way to influence yourself by association is to decorate your living space in a way that you find emotionally pleasing. You can train yourself to enjoy a room so much that you become happy just by walking into it.
PERSUASION TIP 21 When you associate any two ideas or images, people’s emotional reaction to them will start to merge over time.
Persuaders know that humans put more importance on the first part of a sentence than the second part.
PERSUASION TIP 22 People automatically get used to minor annoyances over time.
Humans quickly adapt to just about anything that doesn’t kill them. That’s good news for people who have annoying habits. If you can’t change your habits, acknowledge them with humor and wait for people to get used to you. If your intentions are good, sometimes that’s all you need.
PERSUASION TIP 23 What you say is important, but it is never as important as what people think you are thinking.
if you are playing the odds, always look for situations that give you two ways to win and almost no way to lose. I sometimes describe this situation in a more generic sense as having a system instead of a goal. A goal is, by definition, one way to win and infinite ways to lose. A good system gives you lots of ways to win and far fewer ways to fail. An example of a good system is going to college and getting an engineering degree. You don’t yet know what your ultimate career will be, but the engineering degree gives you lots of ways to win while vastly reducing the number of ways to lose.
PERSUASION TIP 24 If you can frame your preferred strategy as two ways to win and no way to lose, almost no one will disagree with your suggested path because it is a natural High-Ground Maneuver.
The next time you are in a discussion about strategy, either in business or in your personal life, listen to everyone else’s suggestions and then top them with a “two ways to win, no way to lose” play, assuming your situation allows for that. You’ll find that it ends every strategy discussion.
I call it the “High-Ground Maneuver.” I first noticed an executive using it years ago, and I’ve since used it a number of times when the situation called for it. The move involves taking an argument up to a level where you can say something that is absolutely true while changing the context at the same time. Once the move has been executed, the other participants will fear appearing small-minded if they drag the argument back to the detail level. It’s an instant game changer.
SOCIAL PROOF (“MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING . . .”) Trump likes to tell us that many people agree with whatever he’s telling us at the moment. That’s an example of “social proof” persuasion. Humans are wired to assume that if lots of people are saying the same thing, it must be true.
PERSUASION TIP 25 If you are selling, ask your potential customer to buy. Direct requests are persuasive.
One of the rules of selling is that at some point in the pitch you have to directly ask for what you want. Trump wants you to believe him. So he asks directly. That seems like no big deal until you realize how easy it would be for him to not ask people to believe him. That’s how most politicians operate.
PERSUASION TIP 26 Repetition is persuasion. Also, repetition is persuasion. And have I mentioned that repetition is persuasion?
PERSUASION TIP 27 Match the speaking style of your audience. Once they see you as one of their own, it will be easier to lead them.
Our minds are wired to believe that the simplest explanation for events is probably the correct one. This belief even has a name: Occam’s razor.
PERSUASION TIP 28 Simple explanations look more credible than complicated ones.
PERSUASION TIP 29 Simplicity makes your ideas easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to spread. You can be persuasive only when you are also memorable.
As I mentioned earlier in the book, Trump branded his opponents with easy-to-remember labels including “crooked,” “low-energy,” “lying,” “little,” and “goofy.” Had he chosen more complex criticisms, we wouldn’t quote him, and the ideas would stay walled off in the garden of intellectual thinkers.
Trump intentionally gives opposing sides reasons to like him, or at least not disqualify him. And as ridiculous as it seems for a strategy, it works like a charm because of confirmation bias. People see whatever they want to see.
PERSUASION TIP 30 “Strategic ambiguity” refers to a deliberate choice of words that allows people to read into your message whatever they want to hear. Or to put it another way, the message intentionally leaves out any part that would be objectionable to anyone. People fill in the gaps with their imagination, and their imagination can be more persuasive than anything you say.
With Trump, you get to fill in the blanks with your most potent self-hypnosis.
Once you join a side—for anything—it kicks your confirmation bias into overdrive.
To be super clear, I am completely in favor of my government brainwashing its citizens, including me. The alternative would involve eventual conquest by a nation that did a better job of brainwashing its citizens.
When I was younger, I believed I could predict who would do a great job as president. But when I compare all my past expectations of new presidents with their actual performance, it is clear that I didn’t have any predictive powers. Neither do you. But you might think you do. That’s where we differ. If you have not studied persuasion in any detail, you probably hold a higher opinion of your so-called common sense than trained persuaders do.
As a trained persuader, I prefer not to join any kind of tribe. Doing so triggers an automatic bias toward tribe opinion and blinds one to better thinking.
PERSUASION TIP 31 If you are trying to get a decision from someone who is on the fence but leaning in your direction, try a “fake because” to give them “permission” to agree with you. The reason you offer doesn’t need to be a good one. Any “fake because” will work when people are looking for a reason to move your way.
