How To Persuade Your Piñatas

The world looks the way it does today, full of anger and craziness and whatever, because people have given up on persuading each other.

Sure, we fight. We whack our opponents with sticks until the candy comes out, and our followers cheer.

But no one persuades the piñata!

We don’t remember how.

I aim to change that.

Persuasion is the art of turning useless political fights into productive win-win conversations.

Its purpose is to change actions, not just ideas.

(Otherwise, what’s the point?)

We measure persuasion success by real-world results:

Solved problems.

Technique-wise, all persuasion has three interlocking parts.

Sherlock Holmes called them “Motive, Means, and Opportunity.”

• Motive is obvious. You want to know how to persuade other people. Well, what makes them decide you’re worth listening to? Nobody knows anymore, because the internet trashed the rules. So that’s our first problem.

• The Means of persuasion is “knowing which decision-making levers to press, and when.” But the internet floods our senses with wave after wave of irrationality, each one worse than the last. The old controls are scrambled. That’s problem number two.

• The Opportunity to persuade? That’s good-old-fashioned argument. Win on the battlefield of ideas! But the internet trashed that too. How do you win a battle of ideas, when no one agrees which ideas are even real, let alone relevant?

By now, the scope of the problem should be clear.

Huge changes (made by the internet) in how you and I receive information have trashed our ability to persuade each other.

The technique is broken at all three levels: Motive, Means, and Opportunity.

And unless we fix them fast,

We can’t solve this case.

[image of sad Sherlock Holmes kicking a piñata]

Next up?

a brief Road Map.

Subscribe now, and follow along as the course unfolds.