When a product is used by the ‘most popular stars’ / ‘most popular websites’ etc, what does that tell you?
That it’s good?
Or that their marketing team did a great job of snagging the most popular people?
25.8.08 - What do they want?
Sorry, it doesn’t matter what ‘you’ want. What matters is this:
- People usually DON’T want what you want
- ‘Want’ means what they’re working towards subconsciously, not what they claim to want
- If people DO want what you want, they want it for themselves first
So how do you find out what people want?
24.8.08 - Spotlight
Think of ‘attention’ (one person’s focus of view or that of a group of people) as a spotlight. It moves in seemingly (but not actually) random ways, and is strongest when directed on one thing (and loses intensity and focus when shared between two or more things).
The bigger the number of people, the more powerful the spotlight (more focused attention) and the harder it becomes to manipulate it’s direction (inertia).
The point?
It’s much easier to move yourself to be in front of the spotlight than it is to move the spotlight to focus on you.
23.8.08 - Should you sell or should you hold?
You have a business that’s making you good money. It’s growing, people envy you and things are rocking.
Then someone comes along and offers you a lot of money for everything – more money than you could get if you sold the business today – and makes it clear that it’s now or never (the longer you resist, the more time they have to develop far enough to move forward without you). Do you sell out?
22.8.08 - Five Minutes…
You have 5 minutes to change the world, one person at a time.
What’s your first reaction to that sentence? Did you think “that’s impossible” or did you think “how does he suggest we do that”? If it’s the former, you’re probably going to disagree with the rest.
21.8.08 - Future Proof Your Business
When you’re building your business, planning your next house, thinking of your new website or writing the specs for software, think of how it will be used an year, two years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years in the future.
20.8.08 - Are you asking the right questions?
You already know what you need to know in order to do what you want to do.
It’s just a matter of asking yourself the right questions…and doing what you should be doing.
19.8.08 - I guess I’ll keep walking…
18.8.08 - Pervez Musharraf resigns, what now, dear politicians?
Pervez Musharraf is on TV right now, giving a speech in which he’s resigned from office. I won’t go into details of what he’s saying because it’s not important. However, what’s important is where Pakistan will go from here, and the signs have been very discouraging.
18.8.08 - Rage Against The Machine
If you understand how people tick – how they respond to certain ideas, how they act in certain environments – if you understand the basics, you can, theoretically speaking, affect the way people think around you in a deliberate, pre-determined fashion.
And if you do this in a specific way, you can get people to buy from you.
The system for influencing people is a tool, just like you’d call a knife a tool or a screwdriver a tool. Just like you can use a screwdriver to help you build something or hit someone on the head (might need a big screwdriver if you want that one to be effective), you can influence people to do a variety of things, some that your internal moral compass will consider good and others that it will consider bad.
