Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the art of persuasion, influence, and success

by Jordan Belfort

In essence, everything you’ve seen or heard has been neatly filed away there, no matter how insignificant it may have seemed at the time or whether you remember it now or not. Your unconscious mind recorded the experience, compared and contrasted it with similar past experiences, and then used the results to refine and augment your internal “map of the world,” as the phrase goes, which serves as your internal barometer for formulating snap decisions, instant judgments, and first impressions, your internal model of how you perceive your environment, how you believe it should operate, and how you believe you should operate within it, which types of behaviors lie inside your comfort zone and which ones don’t. Then, to help you navigate the map—and to ensure that your snap decisions, instant judgments, and first impressions remain consistent with the beliefs in your map—your unconscious mind also creates “patterns of behavior,” allowing you to instantly respond to situations that have been previously “mapped out,” in a way that’s fluid and elegant, consistent with your beliefs about yourself and the world, and that requires no conscious thought whatsoever. In essence, this three-step process of generalization, map-making, and the creation of patterns is what allows you to move through an unfamiliar environment without having to treat everything you see as if it were the first time you’ve seen it.