What Persuasion Means to Me
Jason sent me a nice email in which he said that he had just signed up for our mailing list and was new to persuasion but that he had a question. He asked if I would write about what persuasion has meant to me.
Here you go. I hope it is meaningful to you.
My answer could fill volumes but I’ll keep it short today.
One way to answer the question is to ask myself, if it were possible for someone to pay me X amount and I could transfer the skills to them but I would lose them, how much would it be worth to me?
The answer is, I can not imagine a price for which I’d be willing to lose all my skills. My fear would be that if I accepted a huge price, I’d soon be parted with the money when someone came along that knows how to persuade and simply talks me into giving it to them.
These skills have meant being able to earn money when I was young and just starting out by selling more than anyone around me could do. That enabled me to negotiate my way into businesses that would not have looked twice at me otherwise. On the other hand, earning money so easily was a bit of a problem in hindsight. It got me started on a bad habit of not saving money. As a result, I could have gotten ahead much faster if I had learned that lesson younger.
These skills enabled me to extract a degree of revenge when in situations that I felt were undeserved. More than that, I won’t say. But if I had it to do over again, I would probably have made different choices.
These skills taught me to think and reason beyond what most people around me could do. Even just using them inside my head to process the real intent of those around me enabled me to see through a screen of BS that others fell for.
These skills helped me to persuade myself to shed 150 pounds of fat. Sadly, an operation came along and I now have to shed a few of those pounds again. The great thing is, it is happening – and the operation has made me better than new so it is progressing wonderfully.
These skills have given me a window into the best and worst of human desires and motivation. Not much surprises me anymore. This is both amazing and sad. It’s a little hard to explain.
These skills have allowed me to move through life with much less stress and the ability to predict what others will do in most every situation.
These skills have allowed me to buy and sell things far more favorably over the years than had I not known them.
In fact, I can not think of an area of my life where these skills have not helped me more than considerably.
These skills are tried and true friends. I encourage all to make them a part of your life too. After all, where would you not like an advantage?
So, what does persuasion mean to you?
Kenrick