Only She Knows What's Really Up

Are They Stealing Your Future?

There’s a somewhat common scene in comedies.

Often it’s when one guy is trying to poison another guy.

The guy suspects he’s being poisoned, and switches glasses.

But then he wonders if the other guy knew he would do that, and put the poison in his own glass.

So the guy switches back.

But then he wonders if the other guy anticipated THAT as well, and switches them back again.

There are other ways of presenting this slapstick style comedy.

Out-anticipating the other guy who is also trying to out-out-anticipate the first guy.

I know you know, but do you know that I know you know I know?

Despite how goofy this over-used routine is, most people rarely plan ahead.

And unfortunately, the powers that be like it that way.

Politicians and advertisers don’t like it when we are capable of thinking into the future and making rational choices.

Often times short term choices will add up to long term detriments.

But if we carefully plan our short term choices, so they add up to long term benefits, we can live longer, happier, more resourceful lives.

However, if we choose wisely, instead of impulsively, idiot politicians won’t get our votes and manipulative advertisers won’t get our money.

Here’s an interesting mind experiment to do next time you are shopping.

Imagine two ways of buying stuff.

One way is you’re carrying around your life savings in cash.

And not just cash, but silver. Like in the old westerns.

And every time you decided to buy something, you could physically feel your life savings get a little bit lighter.

The second way is the way we commonly buy stuff.

Even when paying with cash, it doesn’t feel like it.

Everything’s direct deposited and debited.

But if you actually felt your savings decrease by spending silver, you might think twice before deciding to buy something.

Of course, it feels good to buy stuff.

Especially when the cost is minimized. Swiping a plastic card and then getting a real thing, especially when a cute sales clerk smiles and says, “Thanks!” is a good feeling.

But whatever choices you DO make, they add up.

The billion dollar question is WHO are they adding up for?

Your benefit, or somebody else’s?

Fortunately, making tiny shifts in your daily behaviors WILL add up to a MASSIVE future.

Paradoxically, to create a big future with healthy happy relationships, you don’t need to do extraordinary things.

Just do very simple, very small things.

Do them every day.

And slowly take back your future.

Get Started:

Seven Disciplines

Break Out Of Average Prison

The Collapse Of The Averages

If you study stock charts, there are a kajillion indicators.

Meaning there are a bunch of ways that try and predict what the stock will do next.

The two simplest are moving averages.

One a fifty day, one a two hundred day.

The fifty day is “short term” while the two hundred is “long term.”

If the fifty day crossed the two hundred day on the way down, that’s a bad sign.

It means the stock is not only going down, but it’s picking up momentum as it’s going down.

On the other hand, if the fifty day crosses the two hundred day on the way up, that’s considered a good sign.

Not only is it going up, but it’s picking up momentum as it’s going up.

If you look at any stock chart over the past couple years, and look at the two different moving averages (50 day and 200 day) it looks like a decent signal.

Buy when they cross on the way up, and sell as they cross on the way down.

This is just one of MANY such indicators.

Pick two, a short term and a long term, and when they cross it’s time to buy or sell, depending on HOW they cross.

Implied in all of these indicators is the idea of reversion to the mean.

They are ALL based on past performance.

And these calculations based on past performance will hopefully predict future performance.

But they are all based on the idea that when a price of a stock moves too far way from where it’s been, it’s going to move back.

Reversion to the mean.

It’s been said that humans are scared, lazy people.

And everything we do is designed to make life easier (cause we’re lazy) and safer (cause we’re scared).

But sometimes we can go too far.

We can make life TOO easy and TOO safe.

And we lose our natural abilities.

To think, be creative, and take action when we need to.

Only a couple hundred years ago (which is a nanosecond compared to how long we’ve been around) getting food was a chore.

You had to do a lot of work to get something to eat.

Now you can push a couple buttons on your device, all while watching TV, and have something delivered.

They only “work” you’ve got to do is get up and answer the door.

While this is pretty cool, it’s also pretty dangerous.

Being too safe for too long, and having things too easy for too long can take away our edge.

Which can make it very hard to think creatively, so you can live a life far above average.

Luckily, shifting your mind back to your naturally creative self isn’t difficult.

The sooner you start, the better off you’ll be.

Get Started:

Seven Disciplines

The Deeper Issues

Speak To Their Deeper Structure

There’s an interesting movie that came out a few years ago.

About a bunch of aliens that decided to come to Earth.

Only when they got here, communication was an issue.

(You might wonder why they didn’t think of that before they made the trip).

This is generally something that’s never really focused on in movies.

Even movies about history.

They have a couple of different cultures meet, and they can communicate perfectly.

Most of the time, they just have everybody speak English and hope nobody notices.

Of course, in movies, books and other stories this is acceptable.

But in real life, communication is essential.

If you’ve ever been anywhere where you don’t speak the language, it can be pretty terrifying.

Especially if you’re alone and lost.

If somebody comes up and starts speaking English, it’s a HUGE relief.

However, most people just assume since everybody’s speaking English (or whatever your native tongue is), that’s that.

But that’s just the beginning.

Sure, if you’re with your buddies and you have a long history, you don’t need to say much.

But when you’re meeting somebody new, a potential client or love interest, you need to do a lot more than just speak English.

Everybody has their own unique way of experiencing the world.

If you don’t take the time to learn about THEIR model of the world, you’re leaving a lot up to chance.

Luckily, underneath all of our individual model’s of the world, lies a structure that is consistent from person to person.

Which means once you understand this deeper structure, and more importantly how to make sure your message resonates with this deeper structure, nearly everything you say will be accepted.

And if you’re REALLY advanced, and take the time to learn THEIR model of the world, then you can become even more effective.

More effective than 99% of communicators out there who spit out jumbled up collections of words and hope for the best.

Most people have conversations with strangers and then scarcely remember them.

But when you speak to their deeper structure, they will NEVER forget you.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Magical Forest

How To Speak Magic Spells

History has a lot of cool examples illustrating the power of language.

One of the more famous is the love triangle between Marc Anthony, Cleopatra, and Caesar.

Cleopatra was allied with Anthony, against Caesar, back before Caesar took over Rome.

Caesar had them on the run, and chased them into Egypt.

It looked bad for the two, as Caesar was looking better and better.

While Marc Anthony’s soldiers weren’t a match for Caesar, Cleopatra didn’t accept defeat.

“I got this,” she told her people.

She had them sneak her into where Caesar was staying.

She slipped in, and in one of the most talked about conversations in the history of civilization, she convinced Caesar not kill her, and not destroy Egypt.

And she ended up having his kid.

At the time, she was only 21.

And it’s easy to discount this as a hot young princess talking her way into the brain of a 51 year old general.

But there’s much more to it to that.

For that reason, many believe Cleopatra had magical powers.

So much that plays, books and movies have been written about her, and about that fateful conversation that changed history.

But consider this idea.

A magic “spell” is a bunch of words said in the correct order, that have a profound impact on the receiver.

The same word, “spell” is used to describe how the right letters put in the right order, will have the same effect.

Powerful words like love, fortune, freedom, slavery, hate, can evoke powerful emotions.

But you jumble the letters around and they are meaningless.

Most people when they speak, don’t give ANY thought to the order of words.

But when you put your words in the right order, your “spell” will have as profound an effect.

Imagine that most people say, “vole and nuftore”

While thinking, “Love and fortune.”

People look at them and say, “Dude, what?”

But you say, “Love and fortune,” and they look at you and smile.

Take this to a sentence or paragraph level.

Most people jumble up words, so when they speak, it sounds like jumbled up nonsense.

But when you “spell” your words in the right order, you will have a magical effect on your listeners.

Able to move generals and change the course of history.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Bang My Head

How To Leverage Their Ego

In business you’ve got to make some tough choices.

A common metaphor is that you get something done inexpensively, quickly and high quality.

The rub is that you can ONLY pick two.

Meaning if it’s fast and cheap it’s not going to be high quality.

If it’s high quality and cheap it’s going to take a long time.

From inside our heads, we often have to make the same choices.

One thing we humans LOVE to do is be “right.”

That’s even a common expression.

“I know, right?”

But when it comes to persuasion, the need to be right can get in our way.

In fact, the less we need to be right, the more we can get done.

Plenty of famous people have been attributed with this quote:

“Humans can accomplish anything so long as it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.”

We KNOW this, but at the same time it’s our Achilles heel.

It’s REALLY DIFFICULT to see somebody else take credit for your idea.

People spend kajillion dollars on lawsuits for this very reason.

But if you CAN turn off your need to “be right,” just for a minute, you can get other people to do pretty much anything.

As an extreme example, if somebody REALLY WANTS to give you a sack of money, is it REALLY that important that they think it was THEIR idea?

If can manage to shut of our own “need to be right” just for a couple seconds, we can leverage the OTHER PERSON’s “need to be right” in our favor.

How?

Most everything we do is influenced by one of the seven laws.

Authority, social proof, scarcity, etc.

At the same time, while we are obediently following those seven laws, (following the crowd, doing or thinking whatever the authority on TV or Facebook tells us), we actually believe it’s OUR idea.

Nobody will explain their behaviors and beliefs as being put in their minds by social proof and authority.

Nobody will say, “I really don’t have any idea why I’m doing what I’m doing, but that guy has on a lab coat, and everybody is doing it, and that’s good enough for me!”

BECAUSE we have this “need to be right” we NEED to believe it’s OUR idea.

Which means if you can shut off your “need to be right” for just a little bit, you can leverage those seven laws like CRAZY.

Because when you combine them with conversational hypnosis, you don’t need anything but your words and the ideas they create.

And then just stand back and watch them “be right,” only they are “being right” in exactly the way you wanted them to.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Risk Reward Of Persuasion

How She Got Money From Her Parents

When I was a kid I loved reading Mad Magazine.

Once they got into trouble because they had a very realistic looking $3 bill.

And supposedly, some kids were using them in change machines.

There was one bit I remember reading as a kid.

It’s pretty popular, I’ve heard it in a lot of places.

It was a letter written from a student at college to her parents.

She went on for a few paragraphs about how her life had completely changed.

She’d dropped out of college.

Gotten a bunch of tattoos and piercings.

(This was back in the day when that was still pretty “out there.”)

She was living with her new boyfriend who had just gotten out of prison.

She was also pregnant.

And she was pretty sure it was his.

But then the letter ended with the following:

“Just kidding. School is fine, my GPA is still 4.0, but I need a couple hundred dollars. Could you send it?”

The idea being that the parents would be so relieved that their little angle wasn’t tatted up and pregnant by an ex-con, that they’d gladly send her the cash.

Whereas, if she started out saying, “Dear dad, can I have some money?” she wouldn’t have gotten the same result.

This clearly shows that when we frame our suggestion or recommendation, we can have a much better chance of getting it accepted.

Instead of just blurting out what we want, if we think a bit, and put it in the proper context, it will be much more likely to be accepted.

What context?

Think in terms of cost and benefits.

Everything we do has costs and benefits.

Everything we think about doing has costs and benefits.

So when we present our ideas to others, they are going to IMMEDIATELY and usually unconsciously think of our ideas terms of costs and benefits.

The idea is to make your suggestion have a much better cost-benefit ratio (many benefits per cost) compared to the alternative.

Just choose something similar to your suggestion, but make sure it is MUCH costlier (in terms of time, money, or inconvenience) and only has a little bit more benefits.

Compared to THAT, your choice will be the most logical.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to do this.

And the more you practice, the better you’ll get.

And this law, (Comparison and Contrast) is only ONE of the seven.

Learn Them ALL:

Seven Laws

The Eyeball Sees All

Reverse Polarity Stealing Pattern

Once upon a time there was a petrified forest.

A petrified forest is made up of really old plants that have fossilized.

Turned to stone.

Put a whole bunch of these old, fossilized plants together, and you’ve got a petrified forest.

There’s a national park in the United States.

You can go and check it out if you want.

Many people do.

But they had a problem.

A lot of the petrified wood was loose. Just laying around on the ground.

And people would look around, make sure nobody was looking, and pick up a piece.

Quite a lot of people did, in fact.

So the national park service had a problem.

Since the place was so big, they couldn’t really hire a bunch of petrified cops to make sure people don’t take anything.

That would be REALLY expensive.

So they decided to use a public education campaign.

They figured that if they let everybody know that people were stealing, the “stealers” would know that everybody else knew, and they wouldn’t steal.

So they put up signs (cheaper than hiring cops, right?) that said:

“Did you know that over ten percent of visitors of the petrified forest take home illegal souvenirs?”

The idea was people would be shocked, and voluntarily look out for the dastardly folks who were doing all the evil stealing.

Only it had the opposite effect.

As it turns out, PLENTY of people were thinking, “Hmm, I’d love to take a piece of this home, but I don’t want to get in trouble.”

Then they saw the sign, saying that ten percent of people steal souvenirs.

And that make it MORE likely they would steal something themselves.

It gave them SOCIAL PROOF.

The people would look around, not see anybody else stealing, and think, “If I steal this, I might be the only one, I’d better not.”

But they would still want to take a piece home.

Then they’d see the sign and think, “Wow, if ten percent of people are stealing, I may as well steal too!”

The geniuses who designed and put up the sign couldn’t understand why the signs INCREASED the amount of theft.

Until they hired a marketing genius (a real genius) who explained it to them.

All they had to do was to flip the numbers.

And do so in a general way.

“Most people want to steal but decide not to. What will you do?”

It made them feel like they were going to be in the evil minority if they picked up a piece.

This is what happens when you understand these ancient triggers that motivate us on deep levels.

You can speak the language of unconscious persuasion.

And get people to do whatever you want.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Super Genius Of All Time

The Sentence Shift That Made Millions

Most people know about the Pareto Principle, or the 80-20 rule.

Eighty percent of the “work” of any system is done by twenty percent of the system.

Twenty percent of your clothes you wear eighty percent of the time.

Publishers make eighty percent of their revenues from twenty percent of their books.

Twenty percent of sales people in any company make eighty percent of the sales.

Most of the time, this just happens naturally.

When you bought one of your twenty percent shirts, you probably felt the same as when you bought one of your eighty percent shirts.

“Hey, this looks cool!”

But one of them ended up in the 20-80, while the other ended in the 80-20.

Same with a lot of sales jobs.

They just hire people, and figure they’ll sort themselves out.

And when it comes to sales, some people are naturally “good” and some people are naturally “not so good.”

But if you start to understand human nature, human thinking, etc., you can EASILY catapult yourself into the top twenty.

Or the top twenty of the top twenty.

Because IN that top twenty, the Pareto Principle still applies.

Mathematically, it means that 4% of any given system is doing more than 60% of the work.

4% is twenty percent of twenty percent. 60% (or 64% to be specific) is eighty percent of eighty.

How do you do that?

Here’s a very famous case.

A company was selling things on TV.

This was way back before the Internet, or even cell phones.

But despite how well the product tested out in pre-release marketing, it was a dud on TV.

So they called in a Fixer.

A lady who was an expert in selling anything to anybody.

She looked at the entire system, the product, the commercial, all the people, even what they were wearing.

And she only made ONE small change.

And the sales went from ZERO to THROUGH THE ROOF.

What was the change?

The final call to action was, “Call now, operators are standing by!”

But what this did was create an image of a bunch of operators sitting around waiting for customers.

Not very enticing!

She (the super genius marketing lady) changed that one sentence to:

“Call now! If operators are busy, please be patient!”

This created a MUCH DIFFERENT image in the TV viewers mind.

It fired both scarcity AND social proof.

Social proof because it implied that tons of people were calling. That’s why the operators would be busy.

But scarcity also because if other people are calling, and you wait too long, by the time you call, they might run out of stuff!

(FOMO, or fear of missing out, is based on scarcity).

One small tweak made the company TONS of money.

How many tweaks can you make?

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Radiate Real Authority

How To Imply Massive Authority

One of the most groundbreaking studies in psychology is the famous Milgram experiment.

It’s been repeated several times, all with the same results.

There was a guy in a white lab coat, posing as a researcher.

There was a guy behind a class window, posing as a test subject.

Then there was the guy or gal who was supposed to give electric shocks to the guy behind the glass.

The supposed study, as told to the poor dude giving the shocks, was that it was some kind of new memory technique.

For every wrong answer, the guy behind the glass got a shock.

But the REAL study was to see HOW HIGH of a shock a person would deliver.

The shocks were actually fake.

And the guy screaming in pain was only pretending.

The results were horrifying.

Most people gave enough shocks to kill somebody, had they been real.

The guy behind the glass even pretended to have a heart attack.

But the test subjects kept shocking away.

All because lab-coat guy said it was OK.

The study was cooked up soon after WWII ended.

Everybody was curious how a country like Germany could go crazy and let a bunch of Nazis kill millions of people.

Turns out that we humans have a bunch of switches in our brains.

And if you know to flip those switches, you can get people to do ANYTHING.

In that particular study, they were leveraging the AUTHORITY switch.

Most people turn off their brains when a scientist in a lab coat tells them it’s OK to shock somebody.

Of course, these switches are neutral.

They are neither bad nor good.

They are like the proverbial driver who can either drive a getaway car or an ambulance.

If you use these switches for good, you can get people to do things that benefit EVERYBODY.

How many of these switches are there?

Seven.

Advertisers have been using them for a long time.

To get us to buy all kinds of stuff.

Many dating techniques are based on them.

But one thing most people DON’T know is how to COMBINE them with the Milton Model.

The patterns of conversational hypnosis.

It cost a lot of money to set up that experiment.

It’s kind of like a con in the movies.

You need a lot of actors (a guy playing a scientist, a guy playing the dude getting shocked, etc.) and you need to create the situation.

But with the Milton Model, you can hypnotically imply ALL of these switches.

Which means just by having a conversation, you can conjure up all kinds of authority.

Or any of the other seven laws.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Resonate With Her

Easy Secrets of Group Resonance

Resonance is a cool concept.

It’s also one of those words that sounds metaphysical, so a lot of people use it without really understanding it.

From a purely scientific standpoint, it refers to the natural frequency of any system.

Like a little kid on a swing.

When he swings his legs at the same “resonance frequency” as the swing, he can swing pretty high.

Singers that can break glass don’t have super powerful voices.

It’s that they can hold the perfect tone, without wavering.

And if that tone is the same vibrational frequency as the glass, then the glass will break.

Same deal when you rub your fingers around the rim of a wine goblet.

When the goblet starts to hum, it’s because the small vibrations of your finger along the top are the same frequency as the wine goblet.

Often times people talk about resonance among people.

Since there are WAY too many variables to even consider, this MUST only be a metaphor.

The resonance you share with your friends when you are all “vibing” is SORT OF like the resonance on a swing set.

But it’s only an approximation.

Thing is though, we understand that as a scientific concept, resonance can be repeated.

Wine glasses, swings, you can “resonate” with them any time you want.

But when we think of “resonating” with people, we assume it’s just one of those rare things.

It either happens or it doesn’t.

But us people, despite our goofy psychological makeup, are still made up of stuff, and although incredibly complicated, that stuff MUST follow the same laws of science that wine goblets and swings have to follow.

Which means if you understand the basic structure of human nature, and human thought, you can RESONATE with a great number of people.

Funny thing is when you are resonating with ONE person, it can be pretty difficult.

But resonating with a BUNCH of people is a lot easier.

See, we humans are PACK ANIMALS.

We naturally feel at home in a group of like minded people.

Which means in a lot of cases, it’s much easier to resonate with a GROUP of people than it is with any individual.

Learn How:

Cult Leader