Influencer: The Power to Change Anything

The average human being is actually quite bad at predicting what he or she should do in order to be happier, and this inability to predict keeps people from, well, being happier. In fact, psychologist Daniel Gilbert has made a career out of demonstrating that human beings are downright awful at predicting their own likes and dislikes. For example, most research subjects strongly believe that another $30,000 a year in income would make them much happier. And they feel equally strongly that adding a 30-minute walk to their daily routine would be of trivial import. And yet Dr. Gilbert’s research suggests that the added income is far less likely to produce an increase in happiness than the addition of a regular walk.

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best. —W. Edwards Deming

You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success—or are they holding you back? —Clement Stone

people who climb to the top of just about any field eclipse their peers through something as basic as deliberate practice.

Influencers use four tactics to help people love what they hate: 1. Allow for choice. 2. Create direct experiences. 3. Tell meaningful stories. 4. Make it a game.

At the end of the day, what qualifies people to be called “leaders” is their capacity to influence others to change their behavior in order to achieve important results.

So, what’s the first step to changing norms? It’s breaking the code of silence around the problem that always sustains the status quo.

You can talk about results all you want, but they remain nothing more than ideas until you decide exactly how you’re going to measure them.

Instead, success relies on the capacity to systematically create rapid, profound, and sustainable changes in a handful of key behaviors.

Instead, they count on three keys to success—keys that all influencers adhere to and that you can use to your own benefit: 1. Focus and measure. Influencers are crystal clear about the result they are trying to achieve and are zealous about measuring it. 2. Find vital behaviors. Influencers focus on high-leverage behaviors that drive results. More specifically, they focus on the two or three vital actions that produce the greatest amount of change. 3. Engage all six sources of influence. Finally, influencers break from the pack by overdetermining change. Where most of us apply a favorite influence tool or two to our important challenges, influencers identify all of the varied forces that are shaping the behavior they want to change and then get them working for rather than against them. And now for the really good news. According to our research, by getting six different sources of influence to work in their favor, influencers increase their odds of success tenfold.

I haven’t got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out. —David Sedaris

Not everyone forgets to take measures and to do so frequently, but people still fail to create measures that generate the right kind of influence. They do so by measuring the wrong variable.

look vigilantly for one or two actions that create a cascade of change.

With simple tasks such as typing, driving, or playing golf and tennis, we reach our highest level of proficiency after about 50 hours of practice; then our performance skills become automated. We’re able to execute them smoothly and with minimal effort, but further development stops. We assume we’ve reached our highest performance level, and we don’t think to learn new and better methods.

most professionals progress until they reach an “acceptable” level, and then they plateau. Software engineers, for instance, usually stop progressing somewhere around five years after entering the workforce. Beyond this level of mediocrity, further improvements are not correlated to years of work in the field.

Every time you try to convince others through verbal persuasion, you suffer from your inability to select and share language in a way that reproduces in the mind of the listener exactly the same thoughts you are having. You say your words, but others hear their words, which in turn stimulate their images, their past histories, and their overall meaning—all of which may be very different from what you intended.

So, start every change project with a clear and compelling statement of the goal you’re trying to achieve. Measure your progress. Don’t leave it to intuition or hunches. Measure your measures by the behavior they influence. And finally, measure the right thing, and measure it frequently.

At the end of the day, what qualifies people to be called “leaders” is their capacity to influence others to change their behavior in order to achieve important results. Now,

The lion’s share of the problems that really bother us don’t call for additional technology, theory, philosophy, or data (we’re up to our necks in that); instead, the problems call for the ability to change what people do. And when it comes to this particular skill, demand far exceeds supply. Given