Today I’m summarizing an ebook called The One Sentence Persuasion Course. I picked it up because Expert Secrets, the well known marketing book, mentioned it. There’s no Korean translation. It’s a short book, but it covers everything about moving people. If you’ve taken my negotiation and writing class, this is your kind of material.
Everybody spends their life persuading someone. Work, dating, business, interviews. Get good at persuasion and life gets easy.
But everyone finds it hard. Not because they lack the ability. Because nobody knows the principle behind it. And nobody teaches the principle. The material out there is vague.
This book laid the principle out.
In one sentence, no less. Let’s take the problem that’s been bothering us all this time and solve it with a single sentence.
The One Sentence Persuasion Course cover
Here’s the sentence.
People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams,
justify their failures, allay their fears,
confirm their suspicions,
and help them throw rocks at their enemies.
I’ll take it one piece at a time.
- Encourage their dreams
Everyone dreams about relationships, money, health. Tell them it’s fine to want it, and that they can get there. People like anyone who takes their dream seriously and cheers for it.
- Justify their failures
Plenty of people find responsibility heavy. They want their own failures to be someone else’s fault. So we can put the failure somewhere else. Blame the circumstances, or say they just never knew the trick. People like anyone who lifts that weight off them.
- Allay their fears
Their fear has to settle before they can concentrate on what we’re saying. Settle it with stories, examples, evidence. People like anyone who makes them feel safe.
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Confirm their suspicions When we fail, some part of us suspects it was someone else’s doing. Agree with that suspicion and assure them it wasn’t their fault. Hitler confirmed the German suspicion that the Jews were the cause of their problems. People like anyone who confirms the suspicion and takes the worry away.
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Help them throw rocks at their enemies Tell the reader you’ll fight their enemy alongside them. The enemy is anything standing between them and what they want. Say you’ll stay with them until they get it. People like anyone who stands with them against the enemy.
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their ~ All five conditions above are set from the other person’s side. They move when you tend to their worries and their dreams. Our own dreams and wishes don’t matter to them.
A good example is The Secret, the book everyone was reading ten years ago.
It sold 35 million copies worldwide.
The Secret got its fanatical following out of the same principle.
So how did it do that?
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<The logic of The Secret>
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Encourage the dream: there’s a way for anyone to reach what they dream about.
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Justify the failure: people couldn’t reach their dreams because they didn’t know how to use the subconscious.
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Allay the fear: here are people who used the subconscious to cure cancer and get rich.
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Confirm the suspicion: the way to use the subconscious was kept hidden all this time.
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Throw rocks together: now I’ll show you how to use the subconscious to reach every dream.
It used all five conditions from above.
People had no choice but to follow.
The passage that introduced the book up top, the one running from “Everybody spends their life persuading someone” to “solve it with a single sentence,” used the five conditions too. Read it again and you’ll see the principle applied.
So the principle of persuasion is a way of handling the other person’s dreams, which is to say their desires.
Encouraging the dream, soothing the hurt, promising they won’t fail this time, saying you’ll fight beside them: that opens someone up. It makes them listen to us. They now understand what they want, why they’ve failed so far, and that we’re about to show them the fix. All that’s left is to hand them a method that can’t miss.
That’s the first half of the book.
In the second half, the author boils the principle down to two words.
I’ll show you the two words in the next post.
Read the next post:
<How to persuade in two words>
How to persuade in two words - The One Sentence Persuasion Course summary 2
Book image source
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