Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen

Along with saying no, the easiest thing you can do to become more influential is just ask. Ask more often, ask more directly, and ask for more. People who ask for what they want get better grades, more raises and promotions, and bigger job opportunities and even more orgasm. This might seem obvious but apparently it isn't. Most people do not realize how often they are not asking until they start asking more often. Whenever our MBA course ends and students share the biggest thing they have learned - after we have done so much together - the most common answer is “just ask”. The full realization comes from practice. What if you’re not sure how to ask? Just ask the other person. Seriously. One of the simplest and most surprising influence hacks is that if you ask people how to influence them, they will often tell you. Most of us are reluctant to ask because we fundamentally misunderstand the psychology of asking and we underestimate our likelihood of success. In one series of experiments, employees were more likely to turn in mediocre work than to ask for deadline extension, fearing their supervisor, would think them incompetent if they asked for extra time. But they had it backward: Managers saw extension requests as a good sign of capability and motivation. Pg 64, 65

The best salespeople are great relationship builders whose clients want to do business with them again and again. If you say no, they’ll ask your permission to check back with you in the future. If you say no to that, they won’t bother you again. They’re people who treat you with respect, people you’re happy to interact with even if it doesn’t make sense to say yes this time. The reason they don’t come to mind when you think of the archetypical salesperson is that interacting with a master salesperson doesn’t feel transactional. It just feels like a friendly conversation. And it is.

The Gator doesn’t take requests. You can’t reason yourself into falling in love, despising ice cream, or enjoying parsnips (which are clearly odious). It’s possible to override gut reactions, but it’s not easy. When disgust researcher Paul Rozin asked adults to eat a piece of chocolate shaped like dog doo, 40 percent couldn’t do it. (Toddlers, however, had no Gator conflict and happily ate poo-shaped food.)

Framing is how spellcasting works in the real world. Just by describing something or giving it a name, you called it into being. Well chosen frame can determine what’s relevant, what’s important, or what’s good. When you frame someone’s experience in a compelling way, you shape their expectations as well as their interpretation of events.

Framing is magical stuff. It determines people’s experiences and even shapes how they think. An effective frame can be so sticky that it becomes hard to see things from a different perspective. Once that frame helped transition a small tech start up into the worlds most valuable company. A frame doesn’t say “Pay attention to this and ignore everything else!” But it creates this effect by putting an idea at the center of our attention and giving as a reason to force on it

The Bedrock principle of influencing behavior is this: People tend to take the path of least resistance. Ease is the single best predictor of behavior, intentions, price, quality, or satisfaction. There's a little-known marketing metric for measuring ease called the Customer Effort Score that comes down to a simple question: how easy was it? How customers answer that one question explains one-third of their willingness to buy again, to increase their business with the company, or to rave about it to other people. While one-third may not sound like much, it's actually huge; the Customer Effort Score is 12% more predictive of customer loyalty than customer satisfaction is. Ease makes people happy and effort can really piss people off. Pg. 41

As you release your fear of hearing no, you gain the freedom to ask for things. Pg 58

No matter how often I see it happens, I'm still surprised by the lengths to which strangers will go to be helpful just to because they are asked Pg 59

When Jia Jiang graduated with an MBA from Duke, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Like so many of us, however, his fear of hearing no was holding him back. To face this fear head-on, he started a video blog called 100 Days of Rejection Therapy. His endearing, perplexing, and absurd videos document what happened as he approached complete strangers, day after day, with off-the-wall requests: to speak over Costco’s intercom, to become a live mannequin at Abercrombie and Fitch, or to borrow a dog from the Humane Society. I love his rejections so much that I challenge my students to replicate them. Jia’s tolerance for rejection and vulnerability reveal the delight and playfulness that can emerge out of the most awkward situations.

El caimán puede tomar decisiones sin la participación del juez, pero el juez no puede tomar decisiones sin la participación del caimán. Esta asimetría es una de las claves de la influencia.

This mental process leads us to caricature the views of people who disagree with us, and to imagine them to be far more extreme than they actually are. These distortions play out in every realm—personal, professional, and political. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans both believe that members of the other party hold more extreme views than they themselves do. When it comes to the contentious issue of immigration, for example, Democrats assume Republican voters want to close

These distortions play out in every realm—personal, professional, and political. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans both believe that members of the other party hold more extreme views than they themselves do. When it comes to the contentious issue of immigration, for example, Democrats assume Republican voters want to close