Tonight while poop scooping the yard I was listening to Robert Cialdini’s Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. My nose was not enjoying the experience, but my ears and my mind were in pure bliss. I love learning and improving, and tonight I learned an absolute gem that will help me as a writer produce more work.
At one point in the book Cialdini is talking how if you want to an effective persuader, you need to not only grab attention, but you need to hold on to it as well. And during that discussion, he talks about the human need for closure. He gives a couple of examples.
He talked about that nagging feeling we have if we are multi-tasking and put down one project mid project in order to focus our attention elsewhere. For example, if I’m watching highlights of an NBA game from last night, and a friend calls me during the middle of those highlights, I’ll pause the highlights and start talking to my friend, but I’ll have that nagging feeling that I want to know how the game ended, and I’ll find myself focusing on the game instead of what my friend is saying.
Another example he gave was of a study that was something to the effect of men rating women on attractiveness, and then the people doing the study trying to see if who women wanted to go out with was dependent on how high their raters rated them in terms of attractiveness. But the surprising find from the study was the women actually wanted to go out the most with men whose ratings of them they were not able to see. The need for closure and finding out what someone rated them was stronger than the more straightforward desire to go out with men who thought they were attractive.
Then Cialdini talks about a friend of his who had always impressed him in terms of how much written content she produced. She is prolific. One day he asked her how she does it and her trick, which Cialdini says he now uses, is to never end a writing session on a complete thought. Even if she knows how the thought ends and can complete it, she doesn’t. This exploits her human need for closure and helps bring her back to her desk for her next writing session to continue her thought and complete that part of her writing.
This is a genius idea, beautiful in its simplicity, and I can instantly see how well this is going to work. The human need for closure is going to pull me back to my desk, time after time, and help me get more written work completed. Every time I finish an article and publish it, I’m always going to start a new one, stop my work mid-thought, and I’ll be drawn back to get closure, and this will lead to more articles being produced. Thank you Cialdini!
Okay, off to write a little bit about PEDEVCO, and then stop mid-thought.