3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Influencing People
3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Influencing People
Making Friends, Perception vs. Perspective & the Four-Step-Refutation
I. Making Friends
As early as 1936, Dale Carnegie wrote his bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People. Arguably one of his most popular quotes is as simple as it is hard to accomplish:
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
―Dale Carnegie
In other words, those who are curious about how others perceive the world have an advantage over those who are only interested in promoting their own views.
II. Perception vs. Perspective
Fast forward almost a hundred years. Here’s former intelligence officer Andrew Bustamante making a very similar distinction between perception and perspective.
The way that you win any argument, the way that you get ahead in your career, the way that you outsell or outrace anybody is when you move off of perception and move into perspective.
Perspective is the act, or the art, of observing the world from outside of yourself. […] You sit in the seat of the person opposite of you. And you think to yourself: What is their life like? What do they feel right now? Are they comfortable? Are they uncomfortable? Are they afraid? Are they scared? What’s the stressor that they woke up to this morning? What’s the stressor they gonna get to sleep with tonight?
When you shift places and get out of your own perception and into someone else’s perspective, now you’re thinking like them, which is giving you an information advantage.
—Andrew Bustamante, Lex Fridman Podcast #310
III. Four-Step-Refutation
Facts and logic are a great way to destroy your opponents’ viewpoints — alongside any chance to win them over. That is not to say there isn’t merit to methods of disagreement such as the Four-Step-Refutation:
Identify the claim you’re trying to refute. (You say that cats are better than dogs.)
Make your counterclaim. (But we think that dogs are superior to cats.)
Provide supporting evidence for your claim. (Because dogs have a better sense of smell. No cat has ever rescued someone from an avalanche.)
Sum up why the argument is important. (This is why we should not subsidise the Royal Society of Avalanche Cats.)
Techniques such as the Four-Step-Refutation are a great way to practice logical reasoning. But when it comes to influencing our counterpart, the whole thing often falls apart in step one.
If you really want to get someone to abandon their cat, check out my latest bonus piece about Rapoport’s Rules. 🐘
Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com
