Transcript
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All right, we're going to get straight into it. Persuasion is the greatest skill of the 21st century. No, persuasion is not manipulation. They're two separate words. No, persuasion is not unethical. If it were, then you would be the most unethical person on the planet because you persuade every day, but it's unconscious to you. So at that point, it's considered manipulation. What I mean by that really quick is that you are selling everyone on your worldview, your identity, your beliefs, everyone, every single day. And you feel threatened when people challenge your beliefs. And then you have the emotional response that makes you want to defend yourself. So you are persuading, but if it's unconscious to you, then you're manipulating. So we're here to learn how to persuade consciously. That way you can benefit yourself to get what you want, and you can benefit others by giving them what they want. It's mutual benefit versus selfish benefit. When you're trying to convince your friends to do something with you, you're using persuasion. When you're presenting an argument for why people should work with you are using persuasion. You are trying to get what you want out of life. You are playing the game of life. If you weren't, you probably wouldn't be alive. You don't have a choice to get what you want. You need to persuade people to give you attention, resources, money, and most of all, power. The only people who did well and do well in society are those who had power and influence. They are the people who work to acquire the resources necessary to achieve their goals, become valuable, and generate wealth. There has never been a time in history when weak, average or mindless people weren't treated like cattle. Be careful of your mind trying to hijack your thoughts right now and make you a slave to the ideas others that don't have the life you want to live programmed into your head. Status, power and influence are not bad. Everyone has them. You have some degree of status, power or influence right now, and everyone is trying to get those things. They become bad things when done for unconscious reasons. Why? What that means is that they become bad. If you don't understand the big picture overarching impact of your pursuit for power and persuasion. This entire video could be completely negative. But if it has a positive impact on your life because of that, does that make it a bad thing? On that point, here's a side lesson for just making better decisions in general. Because your entire life is determined by the decisions you make right now. The decisions you made in the past that got you to where you are it's all decisions. You will probably have to do things throughout your life that others perceive as bad, shallow or superficial because they don't understand the big picture. They can't see what you see. They criticize you now and praise you later. If you're deciding whether or not you should make a decision, zoom out and attempt to think through all possible scenarios it could create. As I've said before, one stock can be down while the index fund is up. You can have a cheat meal and still be healthy. Most just get neurotic over the cheat meal, especially if they're super healthy and that just makes them even more unhealthy than just having the cheat. And even if that decision turns out to be a mistake, welcome to being human. That's the only way you can make a better decision the next time. Indecision, stagnation, and not pursuing something greater is the most bad decision of them all. Back to the point. If you want to be perceived as valuable, you need to generate power. You need to have power, you need to have influence. You need to have some form of status. If your strategy for success is being nice and noble and spiritual, you you will be pushed aside by mean people and they will have more of an impact than you. And if you let yourself get pushed aside and the mean people take over, you aren't as spiritual as you think you are. Because spirituality is being a part of something greater than yourself and in a sense, taking responsibility for that thing and the outcome of that thing, then going off to the woods and meditating and finding God could be a good thing for a short period of time, or however long it takes to actually get there. But then when you come back and reintegrate with society or just choose to do that from the very beginning, you can see where I'm going with this. The people who virtue signal that power games are bad are playing their own power game. One that is selfish, one that lacks contribution to humanity when that self deceives into doing nothing but preaching about how others should change, distracting them from looking in the mirror. After talking with a lot of you recently in DMS or just emails, I've started to narrow down why you're actually here. I talk about business. I talk about lifestyle design and productivity and writing and all these different things. But what separates me. It's weird to talk about myself this way, but what separates me, what makes people want to watch these videos over someone else's is that I do try to make them a bit deeper, less.
