by Pat Flynn
That’s one little secret of mine. When you speak about something, when you voice your beliefs, if those beliefs are held by people in addition to yourself, all the better. So much of persuasion is finding people who already agree with you and getting them to follow along because you’ve found some new, cool way of doing that thing they already agree with. I’m not sure how many specialists’ minds I’ve changed. There may have been a few. But mostly I’ve built my audience by attracting the attention of people who were already generalists or wanted to be. Think of political talk shows. They’re not necessarily persuasive to the other side—who on the right was ever brought to the left by watching The View, and who on the left was ever brought to the right by listening to Rush Limbaugh?—but they’re attractive to people who already assume that position. It’s only because those talk shows are so assertive and bold that people tune in and are “persuaded” by them. Either people pay attention and they agree, or people pay attention and they can’t stand a single word of what they’re hearing. This is called the Howard Stern effect—you either love him or hate him—but almost nobody is indifferent about him.
* * *
TWO-STEP NETWORKING AND PERSUASION PLAN
* * *
Step 1
Reach out and introduce yourself to at least one new person every day. (Form connections.)
Step 2
Reach out and ask how you can help someone already in your network. Better yet, just do something to help them. (Build reciprocity.)
Ideas
Share something with your connections online, comment meaningfully on their work, or send them something you think they’d enjoy reading about. Even better, introduce them to someone they might benefit from.
Recommended Additional Reading
How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships (Leil Lowndes).
* * *
At this point I’d like to add a measure of subtlety to this approach. Although I’ve used examples like Donald Trump and Howard Stern, I don’t want you to think being polemic is the same as being persuasive. These are merely illustrations to bring out a particular element of persuasion, which is polarization. You can be persuasive without being polemic, without causing people to want to twist your bratty little nose off. But I’m not sure how persuasive you can be without being polarizing—and that’s what I’m trying to get at. To be polarizing is to make people choose one way or another. It’s about marking your territory and saying, “Here’s what I believe and I want to be as clear as I can about it.” You don’t need to be rude or offensive to be polarizing, but you do need to be up-front about where you stand. People don’t need to hate you, but some will strongly disagree with you or see your way, your style, your product or service, as simply not for them. And that’s fine. Because the more people you push away, the more you attract from the other side.
The problem is that people are afraid of pushing away. They’re afraid of not being liked by someone, and the tradeoff is that they wind up being ignored by everyone. There’s a saying in marketing that if you’re not upsetting at least one person with every advertisement you write, then you’re not really marketing. I think this is true for everything. If you’re not upsetting at least one person every day by taking a stand on something, voicing your opinion, or being clear about who you are, then you’re not really living. Think of the apostles. Those guys really knew how to piss people off, since many were put to death because they just wouldn’t shut up about that Jesus guy. And now look. People remember them, even though they weren’t all that well liked at the time. Talk about polarizing. They weren’t polemic or rude. They just said everybody else was wrong about, well, pretty much everything. And that was enough.
You can tell people they’re wrong, and I think you should, but only if you’ve reasoned out your point of view. Once you’ve got your life figured out—your religion, your politics, your great, good service to the world—talk about it. You’ll pull some people in and push others away, but I promise you this: you’ll certainly be persuasive. Boldness is a lost attribute in today’s society. People are so afraid to speak up about things. Even just a mild act of courage goes a long way toward getting attention. That’s what persuasion is—it’s having the courage to speak candidly about something people already think is true. Good writing is the same way, and that’s why good writing is persuasive.
People want to be happy. That’s the first thing to understand. Any action people take will be aimed at happiness—there are no exceptions to this. But different people believe different things will make them happy, which is why we can have valuable exchanges in which both parties emerge better than before. Thus, if you want to be persuasive, your job is to find the people who think the thing you offer is what brings happiness, whether that’s a diet plan, a skateboard, or a political ideology. Persuasion, I repeat, is not about flipping a person’s opinion. It’s about confirming it.
I hope you weren’t looking for any psychological tricks or clichés you could use to close the deal on a used-car sale. Because that isn’t what persuasion is about. Persuasion is finding points of common interest and connecting over them. It’s having the audacity to speak up. That’s why persuasion, marketing, sales—whatever you want to call it—is inherently magnetic. The more it pulls some people in, the more strongly it repels others.
You may ask: How do you even practice this? Well, you practice it by (again) getting into arguments and writing advertisements and sharing your beliefs with people. Also, by networking. By reaching out. By being friendly and offering help.
I’d like us to turn our attention to those last few points. Most people suck at networking. They suck at reaching out and making friends. This is absolutely a skill, and it is one you need to practice.
Let’s talk for just another minute about persuasion through argument. Remember, an argument isn’t about exploding your emotions; it’s about giving someone reasons to believe in a particular point of view. The purpose of the argument might be not to convince the person you’re arguing against but to impress whoever’s in the audience. Let’s face it, almost every argument these days is a public event, because almost every argument is happening online. So if you’re debating on a forum with some person who’s adamantly against everything you do and represent, I doubt you’re going to make much progress with them. You never know who’s watching the engagement, though, even if they’re not engaging themselves.
Again, when I was just getting started with my business, I would incite arguments on internet fitness forums. When I say “arguments,” I don’t mean I went into every thread and told everybody how wrong I thought they were. Don’t be that person—that person is annoying and rude. Rather, I would try to be helpful by being clear. I would say what I think a person should do to reach a particular goal, and I would explain why. Obviously—because it was the internet, after all—people would sometimes disagree with me. Then I would have to argue with them because you don’t just let somebody disagree with you—again, this is the internet. You’re allowed to defend yourself, and you should, especially if you have good reasons for what you believe. But it should be done respectfully. This is where one of your fundamental skills (logic) can form the foundation of another fundamental skill (persuasion).
Remember my definition of argument, which is no more than giving people reasons to believe in a certain point of view. And when I say you should start arguments, I mean you should try to be helpful by giving your perspective on something—on social media, in an advertisement, throughout the pages of a book. Because that, my little parakeet, is the secret to persuasion: meeting people where they are and trying not to change their beliefs but rather to enhance their beliefs. I don’t think I ever sold somebody on a kettlebell program who wasn’t already into kettlebells. My business was built on people already using kettlebells who wanted a cooler, better plan for doing so.
Now, it’s one thing to stand up for what you believe and it’s quite another to tur
n those beliefs into helpful vehicles. Combine the two and your powers of persuasion really blossom. Because when you confirm a bias (like a love for kettlebells) and then say how that bias can further a person in some meaningful, productive way, you’ll probably have that person begging to do business with you. Maybe you’re not even in business—maybe you just write books and want people to talk about your stories. Well, same thing. Being persuasive means appealing to people like yourself—people with similar beliefs and ideas and views of the world—and offering them a special experience. Novels can certainly do that. So can music.
Not to overuse my example, but that’s pretty much what I’ve done with generalism. I’ve told people it’s OK if you’re not the best in the world and, hey, don’t worry if you’re not, because with the right approach, it’s actually better if you’re not. So people who are like me—that is, not the best at anything—will want to hear more. I’m not trying to persuade specialists; I’m only trying to get the attention of people who already believe in the position I’m promoting, even if they’ve never thought of it the same way I have. I’m helping people who are already hot on the idea that they don’t need or want to be the best in the world; I’m only trying to show how that idea can be developed. That is persuasion.
FAITH
You might be wondering why in the world I would say faith is a skill, and, of all things, a foundational skill. Well, I think for a lot of people, faith doesn’t come as naturally as it does to others. It’s something you have to practice, because if existence can do anything, it can make you jaded—it can make you angry and upset and cause you to call into question the point of being here. There’s a lot of—go ahead, call it what it is—bullshit that goes on in our lives, a lot of stuff that none of us particularly like or can make sense of. For example, deer ticks. But also the nuclear arms race, polio, and smog. All of these are seriously awful situations, and sometimes such things make you wonder whether this is all just one big put-up job. It’s no wonder nihilism is growing. I spent a few years in that department myself. It was certainly an experience.
So, yes, I would say faith is a skill, and I think it’s a necessary one.
I think people sometimes equate faith with credulity: “Oh, you just believe things without evidence.” But that isn’t what faith is—at least that isn’t what faith should be. This is why I like Saint Thomas Aquinas with his “preambles to faith” or what we would call “philosophy.” Essentially, he says, Here are the reasons we have for believing the world isn’t just some random, pitiless accident, and why we can trust in God’s plan. Now, let’s figure out what to do about it. Aquinas’s whole point, though, was to show that faith was meant to be not infra-rational but rather supra-rational—that is, on the far, not near, side of reason. Faith, in other words, is simply trusting in that which you have good reason to believe. Many subsequent philosophers agreed. This was a turning point for me. Because for most of my life, I was anything but a person of faith—I was, indeed, a person of science, of facts, and of reason. Faith just seemed like unnecessary woo-woo. If it couldn’t be measured empirically, then what was the point? Or so I thought.
Then one day I got into an argument with a religious person (as I called people of belief at the time), and straightaway we quarreled over the existence of God. I accused him of believing in things with no evidence, and he responded by asking what sort of evidence I required to change my mind. I said something scientific would be nice, don’t you think? He replied that I had simply made a categorical mistake and that no clear-thinking religious person sees God as just another entity within the universe—some big, bearded warlock in the sky twirling his beard or twisting his ring—so to expect to detect him empirically is to have a fundamental misunderstanding about who God is, to be arguing against something that God is almost certainly not. He said if God is anything, he is the ultimate, sole reality—timeless, spaceless, possessed of intellect and will, and so on—an extremely simple, but extremely powerful mind, in other words. God, in principle, is not some “thing” to be found under a microscope. And there went my spaghetti-monster argument, before I could even present it. He then trotted out a series of logical arguments for the existence of God that I had never heard before—arguments that were altogether convincing, arguments that I didn’t even know existed. Now, I don’t recall how particularly convincing I found them at the time, but they did cause me to see there was another side of the story, one I had somehow successfully avoided, maybe because I just never wanted to believe in something like God.
Long story short, I studied the other side, and after many years of doing so, reached the conclusion that there was, in fact, good reason for believing in something greater than myself. That’s where faith comes in. We can’t “prove” the transcendent (whatever that may be)—at least not scientifically, because the transcendent is by definition beyond the purview of science. But we can at least make it reasonably acceptable and likely, or, as philosophers like to put it, more plausibly true than not. And that’s all a good argument is for.
All of this, of course, is a return to logic. It’s important once again to note that faith is not below reason, but rather above it. Again, faith is on the far, not the near, side of logic. And that’s why it’s a skill. Anything less is credulity, maybe even gullibility.
In trying to figure out what faith is, I’ve decided it can be nothing more (and certainly nothing less) than trusting in that which you have good reason to believe. But you still have to take that wee bit of a leap. You still have to trust in that which you have good reason to believe. It’s like being married. I can’t verify that my wife loves me, at least not empirically, and to even suggest conducting such an experiment would cause me a considerable amount of grief. But I have good reason to believe that she does, in fact, love me. I’m trusting in that which I have good reason to believe.
There is one problem with having faith that I forgot to mention, and that problem is this: as soon as you believe in something greater than yourself, you must accept there’s a reason for being here that transcends your selfish, little ego. That means it can no longer be just about you, you, you all the time. It now must be about something else and something more. Life probably isn’t about how much money you can make or how famous you get or how many awards you acquire. Faith takes not only practice to have but practice to live out, since true faith—true belief—means turning yourself over to some greater plan, becoming an instrument, if you will, of divine intercession.
While I was writing this book, there came a point when I was extremely annoyed. Resistance was high. Deadlines were tight. Patience was short. So I was a bit snippy with people and not quite as polite as I should have been. I decided to take a break that day to visit a local church to see if I could pray it out, a practice I wasn’t particularly sold on at the time. On my way to the church, I nonetheless asked God if he wouldn’t mind sending a spiritual pick-me-up. I requested something nice, something cheerful. Like the sighting of a dove, say. I told God things were a little stressful right now, so if he could work this one small favor for me, well, that would be nice. And how did God respond to this? I’ll tell you: by putting a kid with cancer in the very front pew.
Now, before my, I guess you could call it, conversion to faith, I struggled as so many do with the problem of evil. Why, I would always wonder, if there is a loving God, would he allow such horrible things to happen in the world, particularly things like childhood cancer, which I think we might all agree is at the very top of the list of things that suck and make absolutely no sense. Eventually I concluded there is at least no logical contradiction between the two. That is, so long as God may have morally sufficient reasons beyond our grasp for allowing such atrocities to occur, then such atrocities are not at conflict with God’s existence—Saint Thomas Aquinas taught me that. Solving a problem logically is not the same as solving a problem emotionally. That day, I came a great deal closer to solving that problem emotionally.
As I walked into t
he church, we were handed a copy of a song we would be singing to Ben: “This Little Light of Mine.” Throughout the service, various groups of people came to offer prayers and support for this young boy and his family. The church was packed with people of all ages and types, each giving whatever they could—some flowers, other Legos, and all of us a lot of love. The priest eventually presented his homily. He told everybody in the congregation that Ben’s presence was indeed a miracle in the sense that one particular, catastrophic illness had given so many people the opportunity to show just how much they love one another and offer such profound kindness to a family most of them had never met. I just so happened to agree and began to see a point in something I might otherwise have written off as utterly barbaric and gross. I began to see how suffering in some ways might very well be the necessary means for us to build character traits that would be impossible in a world free of calamity and sin. This made sense to me, a little bit. I then began to think: if heaven is real and if we are free agents, then certain incentives ought to be provided for us to become the kinds of people others wouldn’t mind spending an eternity with. Without sickness, there can be no caring for the sick, no compassion. Without wrongdoing, there can be no justice or mercy. But still. Childhood cancer? Do we really need that? Maybe, in fact, we do. Maybe it’s because we get so darn lost in the noise, as Flannery O’Connor once proposed, that God needs to shout. Maybe? I don’t know.