Szymon's Zettelkasten

Powered by 🌱Roam Garden

P: To persuade change the environment, not the person


To persuade someone successfully you have two main choices. You can either talk to their elephant which is their intuitive, emotional, automatic, quick, system I type of thinking or you can change the path that the elephant (and the rider) is traveling on by tweaking the environment.

The environment has a powerful impact on how people behave. Other people's ideas make us more creative, we tend to become like the people we spend the most time with, [pictures of winners make us more likely to succeed](TK PN: How to use the environment for your goals). One of the reasons for that is that the environment contains different cues that trigger powerful associations which then influence our choices and actions.

Furthermore, we are obsessively concerned about what others think of us, although much of the concern is unconscious and invisible to us. "Glaucon’s said that people are only virtuous because they fear the consequences of getting caught - especially the damage to their reputations."