— 1 —
One of the most powerful skills you can learn is persuasion. Persuasion is how you convince people to join your team, give you what you want, and so on. You can do this in a way that’s not only non-threatening, non-coercive, but actually fun and compelling. It’s very strange to me that people don’t spend more time and energy on this, because being able to persuade people of things is quite literally a wealth generator. And I’m not just talking about money, I’m talking about wealth as in options. Persuasion is power.
“You just need to do X” is possibly the most ineffective way I can think of to try and persuade someone to do X, whether that X is “eat healthy”, “go to therapy”, “do weed”, “find Jesus”, “get laid”, etc.
As a marketing guy and as a person who has successfully convinced lots of people of lots of things, there are broadly 2 strategies to convince people to do X:
- talk about the sexy, fun, interesting, cool parts of X that you’ve loved
- be so cool yourself that they want to know what you did
— 2 —
In my experience, it almost always makes more sense to persuade individuals than to try to change big-picture narratives or “the zeitgeist”. In fact, I believe that doing the former is the only way to properly do the latter.
My take is that narrative and meta-narrative discussion is only really useful to the degree that it changes your behavior at the ground level. It’s hideously easy to get carried away tilting at windmills and feel like you’re doing something “meaningful” and “significant”.
This is not a criticism of any individual player so much as it is a reflection on my own (limited) experience and relative successes and failures at being an agent of influence.
This is also very much shaped by the limitations of my circumstances – ie, it’s the perspective of someone who can reach several thousand loosely and a few hundred intimately. It does seems plausible and likely that the game changes with scale, with totally different “physics” that I am not yet personally familiar with.
I realise this view is also shaped by my experience working next to
my ex-boss @dineshraju for 5+ years – easily one of the smartest, highest-functioning, optimistic people I know, who seemed to conclude very early on that the only thing that really matters is the actual dent you’re making.
The cool and interesting thing about making dents is that you don’t need to persuade everybody. First you need to persuade yourself. Then a partner. Then a small crew. The thing that matters is not widespread consensus, but depth of alignment. All your effort, at a single point.
Leaning on my musician’s background: if you want to sell out stadiums, 99% of the time, 1st you have to sell out bars. (I guess in 2019 first you need a hit YouTube video. Then another.) There are some exceptions, but those tend to crash-and-burn from a lack of sound fundamentals.
Every few years in Singapore, some artist writes a really long, heartfelt essay about how SG is a bad place to do art. There’s not enough support, not enough venues, the public doesn’t value it, the culture is wrong. It always bums me out, because I feel it’s so… mistaken?
It’s mistaken because you can’t chide and shame and scold people into being interested in you. You can only win people’s attention by being interesting.
You can’t get people to read books by telling them that literature is important. You get them to read books by being excited about books. And “books are so exciting!!!” doesn’t cut it, you have to get into precisely what you’re excited about. This is how interest spreads.
Every 2-3 years when my Facebook get into this stupid discussion about “oh no Singaporeans don’t care about literature, what shall we do,” I always have just one simple question: What was the last great book that you loved so much you had to *insist* that other people read it?
I know firsthand that I have gotten dozens of people to buy and read good books – not by me preaching at them, or guilt-tripping them, or showing off – but by being a sincerely passionate book nerd, in public. Seriously, just talk about what you love!!
Be a nerd about what you love, publicly, in an inviting and nourishing way, over a long period of time. Make friends in the process who love and support what you do. It really works, I promise!