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June 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
16:16
Episode 74 - A Lesson in Positive Persuasion and Strategy
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Yes, I'm back for the second time today with a valuable lesson on persuasion by audience demand.
So I'll be talking today about my tweet recently in which I said that bad persuasion is where you say stop being a victim and And good persuasion is be strategic.
I'll talk about that in a minute.
But I want to revise something I said on a Periscope.
I think I tweeted it a while ago.
And I was saying that it was bad persuasion.
To say that the Democrats who are African Americans should try to leave the, quote, democratic plantation.
And I encourage you to stop using those words because, first of all, it puts your mind in the past and it puts it in the negative past.
So it presuades you in all the wrong ways.
It just puts your mind in a combative, us-against-them past that we're trying to get past.
And I had suggested that free yourself from your mental prison and bring it to today is better persuasion.
But you may have noticed that both Candace Owens and Kanye used the plantation word for their message.
When I heard them use it, it sounded different.
And so the lesson here is that the message and the messenger can never be separated.
I think it is a mistake for me to use that kind of imagery because I'm not black.
It was not a mistake for Candace and Kanye to use it because it just comes across differently if you're speaking from the in-group versus an outsider presuming to give any kind of advice, which is always problematic.
So I revise my opinion.
The plantation imagery is great if you happen to be African American.
You can use it all you want and it just sounds different.
It's probably good persuasion.
But if you're as white as I am, just stay away from that.
It's offensive just by feeling.
And you don't persuade people just by offending them by your choice of words.
It's just a bad place to start.
So let's get to my point of the day.
Yes, we're going to the whiteboard.
Here we are. It's a persuasion lesson.
Here's an example of bad persuasion.
Stop being a victim.
Get out of your victim mentality.
It's a good idea in terms of the concept.
It's terrific.
In terms of a way to communicate the concept, it's a total failure.
I'll explain more in a moment.
The better way would be be strategic.
I'll give you some examples of that.
Stop being a victim has the problem of putting you in the victim mindset.
It also makes you argumentative and it tells you to stop doing things.
These are all bad persuasion.
What is easier? Stop doing drugs.
If you're trying to persuade somebody, what's an easier thing to do?
Stop doing what you're doing, whatever that is, doing drugs or whatever.
Stop doing it. Or, hey, how would you like to have a cookie?
Which is easier to persuade?
It's very hard to get somebody to stop doing anything.
It's easy to get people to start doing something that sounds like something they wanted to do anyway.
So stop being a victim gets you to the same place as be strategic.
Because thinking about yourself as a victim and being mired in that mindset is just a bad strategy.
But don't say you've got a bad strategy.
Don't say stop being a victim because it's very much like telling somebody to stop thinking about an elephant.
It's the most famous example of bad persuasion that people know.
You've probably heard it before.
If I try to persuade you and say, hey, don't think of an elephant, it's a famous example.
Most of you have heard of it, but you can't.
Your brain just sees an elephant.
As soon as you say, stop seeing an elephant, all I think of is an elephant.
What do you think of when somebody says, stop being a victim?
Boom! Puts you into the victim mindset.
Terrible place to be.
And, if you're already there, telling anybody to stop doing what they're doing is a hard persuasion task.
Compared to, be strategic.
Let me give you an example. Let's say you are a young African-American person and you just want to...
I was going to say male or female, but that part didn't matter.
But you're just a young African-American and you have these choices in your environment.
You could go try to get a job where you know there will be a lot of bias.
Let's say it's a private company that's just all white people.
You don't know if they're biased, but they might be.
Sort of looks like that, right?
Or you could go to a Fortune 500 company who have incentives and a great desire to improve diversity.
So if you have a strategy, you go where your strategy makes sense.
You go where the bias works in your favor.
Those places do exist.
They may be far fewer than these places, but there's still plenty of them.
If you went to college, you've got to get an education, or if you've developed a skill that a big company wants, they really want you.
If you get in with a big company, you have two choices.
I'm just oversimplifying this to show you what I mean by strategy.
Once you're in a big company, you can either network, primarily with people who are not in your ethnic group, because you might not be in the majority there.
Or you could not network and just stick with your friends.
One of these will lead to success, one of those won't.
Again, oversimplifying, there are lots of variables.
But one of them looks like a strategy.
And one of them doesn't.
Now let's say you say to yourself, yeah, but the world is unfair.
I need to fix the unfairness in the world.
I don't just want to get a job.
I'd like a job too.
But I want to fix inequality.
What's a good strategy for doing it?
Get a job. The best way you can fix inequality is by doing a good job.
Now it takes a while, but you will develop your own resources, you'll have money, you can then hire people yourself, you can be influential, you can make a difference.
But first you've got to get a job, make some money, do some networking, gain some power.
So it's going to take a while to get rid of the victim stuff because there are real constraints in the world that do victimize real people.
But this is another example of separating the problem from the solution.
The problem might be slavery.
You know, the legacy of slavery.
The problem might be white people.
The problem might be racist.
The problem might be any number of things.
But the solution can be completely unrelated to the problem.
So let's say if the problem is white people and racists, they're not the ones who are going to solve the problem.
They're the cause of the problem.
So forget about them.
Just go to where you're strategic and And you have a solution.
Build a good life.
Raise a good family. Create assets.
Create power. Gives you political power.
You can donate to causes.
You know, you become a more capable, powerful person if you have a strategy.
Now, I've suggested that strategy should be a course I don't know if this word quite fits.
And if it doesn't, it's even better because it's more provocative that way.
But when you talk about, let's say, institutional racism, that plays out in all kinds of subtle ways that people probably disagree about what's in and what's not in the definition.
I'm going to invite Hawk Newsome back on soon to talk about that very topic, institutional racism.
But it seems to me that if you were born into a family that, let's say, is running a small business, people are entrepreneurs in your family, you're picking up a lot of strategy just by osmosis.
You're just seeing people do it, seeing people talk about it, you're living, maybe you're working for your uncle or your dad, your mother or something, and you're picking up strategy.
You don't think of it that way, but you're absorbing it.
But there are a lot of people who, let's say, they come from a single-parent household.
They're just scraping by.
They're lucky their mom or their dad even has a job.
They're not seeing anything that looks like strategy.
They're just seeing people just trying to survive the best they can in that day.
Strategy would help some people who just didn't get it through the environment.
So I think strategy should be almost a beginning class, almost something you learn in third grade sort of thing.
Yeah, no, somebody's saying, don't blame white people for the problems of black people.
Blame black people. This is somebody saying this on the comments.
And I'm saying that as soon as you get into any kind of a blame, You've lost your strategy.
So if you stay in the strategy level, you've got something to work with.
I think this is also pretty compatible with what Kanye is saying.
He's saying to think differently.
Well, this is one way to think differently.
It's not necessarily the only way, but it's an example of moving from a less productive mindset to a more productive one.
What's your strategy?
Alright, that's all I wanted to add to this for today.
So don't identify the causation, somebody's saying.
I think it's good and useful to identify the source of problems.
Because in many cases that will help you with a solution.
But in the case of, let's say racism, it's just a lot of things and it's baked into the institutional racism and everybody's seeing it differently.
You see Yanni, I see Laurel.
And none of that helps you too much compared to just having a good strategy.
If you have a good strategy, a lot of that noise is not going to matter to you.
It might matter to other people who have bad strategies.
So separate the problem from the solution.
The solution can be the thing you do.
The problem can be just somebody else doing something they shouldn't have done.
But you can't change that.
You can't change the past.
You can't change other people too much.
But you can certainly change your own strategy.
Alright. Did you save good stuff for the end of this Periscope?
Alright, I'll give you one little Easter egg at the end here.
I just tweeted that apparently the intelligence agency or intelligence heads in Great Britain have issued a denial That they were involved in wiretapping President Trump's campaign.
And as I noted in my tweet that I just did before this, when you see these oddly specific denials, you can usually read them as an admission of guilt.
Not always.
You could be wrong.
But when you deny things in an oddly specific way, when it would be very easy to just deny everything in a clear way, it's usually a tell for deceit.
So for example, If Great Britain wanted to say that they had done nothing in this area, they could have said something like, we want to be very clear, we had no involvement with the election, and we did not do any surveillance, and we were not involved with any surveillance, either directly or indirectly, nor did we help anybody to surveil the Trump administration.
That's a frickin' denial.
Now that could still be a lie, but that's what an honest denial at least looks like.
A dishonest denial says, in fact, they didn't even deny it.
They didn't use deny words.
They said it's nonsense and ridiculous that we would wiretap the Trump campaign.
It's nonsense and ridiculous that we would do that one specific thing that is even the wrong word to describe it and very, very narrowly defined.
Looks like an admission of guilt to me.
I'm going to say as many times as I need to say this.
The fact that it looks...
To me, and a lot of you, exactly like Great Britain and Brennan and some of the deep state people colluded to change the government in the United States in some way.
Just because it looks exactly like that, that actually doesn't mean it's true.
Sometimes it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and it's a robot duck.
Somebody built a little robot that walks and talks like a duck.
So the fact that it looks exactly like that's what happened does not mean that it happened.
However, at some point the weight of evidence might tip us one way or the other, but when you see Great Britain issue the worst, totally non-credible denial you've ever seen, you have to put that on one side of the evidence.
But it doesn't prove anything.
Sometimes people just word things inappropriately.
All right, so I'm just looking at your comments for a moment.
Alright, I think that's all I've got for today.
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