The latest issue of Interesting Times Magazine just came out.
http://interestingtimesmagazine.com/download.html
In it, you can read my review of The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.
http://interestingtimesmagazine.com/download.html
Enjoy the lifestyle you deserve!
Malcolm Gladwell is the writer of ‘Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink’. His latest book, ‘Outliers’, looks at the story of success – why some people are more successful than others. An outlier here is an exceptional person who stands outside the usual range of human achievement. They don’t fit the norm, for example due to their intelligence, creativity, money-making success and so on.
Gladwell acknowledges the part genetics plays in these successes. Some people are born smart and can program computers relatively easily; others are born tall and athletic and do well at basketball. But not every able person rises to become a Bill Gates or Michael Jordan.
In answering why such people become successful, Gladwell looks beyond genetic inheritance, and looks at other factors such as when they were born, their upbringing, their family background and other chance occurrences that made it possible for their natural talent to be recognized and nurtured.
In discussing The Beatles, he recognizes that they were gifted songwriters and good musicians but also emphasizes their thousands of hours playing live in Hamburg which helped shape them into the top band they later became. In a number of other fields e.g. law, business and sport Gladwell discusses how very successful people share similar family backgrounds, upbringings and formative experiences. It is these, alongside the natural talent many outliers have, that make the difference.
Gladwell reminds us that it’s common for us to put Mozart’s, Jobs’s and Lennon’s success down to their innate natural brilliance while the external factors that allow these natural talents to be noticed and to flourish are overlooked. He mentions, for instance, how putting in around 10,000 hours of practice in one’s field is generally needed to reach the pinnacle of one’s potential.
‘Outliers’, is a very interesting book and worth a look. It reminds me of Freakomonics, but for the subject of personal achievement. Some of the information was new to me e.g. the role of birthdays in sporting success, while other information I had heard before having read the original studies he draws upon e.g. the northern/southern USA difference in protecting one’s honour when provoked.
Relating this to sarging and influence, I see a correlation in many areas.
Once you get have a certain level of social skill, being naturally super-smooth does not always convert into lays. I know plenty of high achieving, confident people at work who can communicate well and know what they are about but who are not turning that into solid game sexcess because they lack the sarging field experience. They haven’t put the hours in and while they might do ok, they are not reaching their potential because they are not in the field enough, talking to people in the necessary context.
Similarly, in terms of family background there are people who’ve had a head start. These people have grown up in a social environment, have lived in a large extended family and grew up always meeting people, talking with them and learning to build rapport naturally. I think about my large extended family in rural Ireland and the benefits it gave me in seeing how people interacted socially, which was quite different from urban England.
I wonder also, if being born say in 1995 would be more of a disadvantage to someone born, say, in 1975 because of the increased social isolation in some cultures in more modern times. When I was growing up in the 1980s, there was no internet and you had to go out there and find things yourself, ask people for information and generally interact a lot more in person than you do nowadays. People born in the 1990s grew up with the internet at their fingertips and were more likely to chat online whereas previously they would be forced to interact in person. They had more information, sure, but information about sarging only takes you so far.
There are a lot of stimulating ideas in ‘Outliers’. I especially liked the list of the 75 richest people in history – who’d have guessed Henry Ford was richer than Queen Cleopatra? Gladwell’s book is a recommended read.
How we talk to ourselves and to other people influences how we process the world FAR more than most people realise. I learned this years ago when studying Ericksonian hypnosis and Speed Seduction. Major Mark Cunningham once said ‘Naming something makes it real. Describing it brings it to life’. By discussing emotional states with a target (having first established value in her eyes), an accomplished seducer can begin to take control of his target’s internal representations. Decisions are state-based, so if you want to influence someone’s decision making, first influence their state.
My SS training awakened my mind to languaging in wider fields of influence than just seduction e.g. using language skills in job interviews, training people, giving presentations and writing. It also tweaked my perception when it comes to listening to other people. I am, due to my language training, constantly running analysis programs in my sub-conscious to find the hidden meaning of communication. It happens automatically now.
Typically, this will be noticing what a person says, how it ties to their body language (congruence), their tone, their background (country, region, class, probabilistic social milieu etc) their current state and so on. Having this ‘insider’ information can be vital in gaining leverage over someone when it comes to persuasion, influence, rapport-building, and seduction.
As I mentioned, this linguistic analysing is something I am always doing, and it extends beyond the particular to the ordinary – from seduction situations to more general communication. Recently I heard the following interesting linguistic constructions:
What they seem to mean is DELAYED. But ‘retimed’ sounds so much more positive and blame free. This is frame-setting. Think of a watch being set to the correct time. It’s now become a service they are doing for you and me, and no longer a fuck up on their part (thanks Huddersfield Mark for your spin on this!).
I heard this at the cinema. Releasing WHAT? They mean ‘being released’, but using a passive seems to lack impact or energy, perhaps. No one is doing the action. Better to suggest the film is doing the releasing all itself. Then, if it fails to recoup its investment, no one knows which company did the releasing? Also, ‘releasing’ makes it sound imminent and, thus, more powerful – like it is happening right now (thanks Mark, again). Linguistically weird but it might catch on in our non-blame culture.
Don’t they mean WITHDRAWN, but want to keep it positive? It amounts to the same thing – goodbye lots of troops, time to come home. I am willing to bet there will come a time when ‘drawn down’ will, itself, have gained a negative connotation and it will need to be replaced as a phrase with another one, less pejoratively tainted one for future war troop withdrawals.
The same thing happened with words for describing black people – n**ger, Negro, black, coloured, African American and on it goes. Each time a word gets a negative association, a new term comes along. Will I be starring out ‘negro’ in a few decade’s time? The same happens with swear words. ‘Bloody’ used to be very strong. Now, you’d get away with it in parliament without a bit of trouble.
The moral of the story? Realise that WORDS can influence people, that their connotations change and it pays to be aware of how words affect the listener. This lends to mastery of reality-based linguistic communication.
Deborahass1
Originally uploaded by stevie_pua
I want to say thank you to Deborah the Dancer for volunteering her ass for this test of my Flickr account. Cheers Debs. Stevie.