On the eve of his army’s first battle with the fearsome Roman legions, Hannibal somehow had to bring his worn-out men alive. He decided to put on a show: he brought in a group of prisoners and told them that if they fought one another to the death in a gladiatorial contest, the victors would win freedom and a place in the Carthaginian army. The prisoners agreed, and Hannibal’s soldiers were treated to hours of bloody entertainment. When the fighting was over, Hannibal addressed his men. You soldiers, said Hannibal, are in exactly the same position as the prisoners. You are many miles from home, on hostile territory, and you have nowhere to go. It is either freedom or slavery, victory or death. But fight as these men fought today and you will prevail. The contest and speech got hold of Hannibal’s soldiers, and the next day they fought with deadly ferocity and defeated the Romans. Hannibal was a master motivator of a rare kind. Where others would harangue their soldiers with speeches, he knew that to depend on words was to be in a sorry state: words only hit the surface of a soldier, and a leader must grab his men’s hearts, make their blood boil, get into their minds, alter their moods.
Hannibal reached his soldiers’ emotions indirectly, by relaxing them, calming them, taking them outside their problems, and getting them to bond. Only then did he hit them with a speech that brought home their precarious reality and swayed their emotions.
Daily Law: Motivating people is a subtle art. You must aim indirectly at people’s emotions.
By setting up your emotional appeal, you will get inside instead of just scratching the surface. The 33 Strategies of War, Strategy 7: Transform Your War into a Crusade—Morale Strategies
We humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions. As social animals we cannot avoid constantly playing the game, whether we are conscious of this or not. Most people do not want to expend the effort that goes into thinking about others and figuring out a strategic entry past their defenses. They are lazy. They want to simply be themselves, speak honestly, or do nothing, and justify this to themselves as stemming from some great moral choice. Since the game is unavoidable, better to be skillful at it than in denial or merely improvising in the moment. In the end, being good at influence is actually more socially beneficial than the moral stance.
Becoming proficient at persuasion requires that we immerse ourselves in the perspective of others, exercising our empathy. The month of August will teach you the maneuvers and strategies that will instruct you on how to create a spell, break down people’s resistance, give movement and force to your persuasion, and induce surrender in your target.
I’m often asked why I talk to the reader through stories.
I’m very focused on the reader. I’m always thinking when I’m writing, how are they going to absorb this information? There’s a problem that psychologists have noted. If you’re a teacher, you assume that your students have the same knowledge you have. This makes them bad teachers. I know that my readers don’t necessarily know what I’m talking about. If I’m talking about Carl Jung, for instance, and I just throw out jargon, the reader is not going to get it. So I have to make it understandable to the average person.
In The Art of Seduction, I talk about how telling a story lowers people’s resistance. Stories make the mind open up.
From the time we’re kids—being carried by our parents or playing peek-aboo— the sense of not knowing what comes next is very deeply ingrained in human psychology.
So if I tell a story about Rockefeller to illustrate aggression, I know that as the reader is being pulled into this story, they don’t know where I’m going, or who the aggressor is in this story, or the lesson that I’m trying to derive. So they’re going to want to read. They’re going to want to go further and further and further. I’ve tricked them into coming to page eight. Whereas if I immediately hit them with Jung and this or that study and some sociology jargon, their minds close off. They’re falling asleep.
That’s the mistake 98 percent of people who write books out there make.
They don’t think about the reader. They assume that the reader is as interested in the material as they are. You have to seduce the reader. You have to persuade them that what you have to say is worth the time. That’s why I tell stories.
People make the same mistake in the social realm, in trying to persuade or influence others. If you want someone to do you’re bidding, to help you, to finance your film or whatever it is—if you come at it only thinking about what you want or deserve, it has no effect. But if you think in terms of how they think, the stories they want to hear, what will please them, what will interest them—the game changes. You have the power to influence them.
Just as I have the power to influence the reader when I start thinking about what the reader wants, you have the power to influence people when you start thinking about what they want.