We mentioned in one of our posts a few months back that you should never react to what people say but rather make decisions based on what they do. This is a whole lot easier said than done as people can be incredibly convincing. They yell, voice anger, complain, and jump up and down, and it takes a combination of skill in reading behavior combined with prior interaction with a person to make an accurate judgment of his/her intentions. On a positive note, you will acquire the skill of accurately reading people by simply sitting in on meetings and being involved in more F2F interactions. This is inevitable if you are in any sort of sales or revenue-generating role.
In this post we will highlight some of the key strategies for avoiding the noise and interpreting the actions and hidden messages behind common everyday exchanges.
People Are Sold On Shortcuts: Ask 100 people if they consider themselves hardworking and the overwhelming majority will answer in the affirmative. But observe any one of these people for an extended period of time and 95% of all their behaviors will suggest the opposite. This will be the case across any country/city/neighborhood irrespective of demographics. Everyone wants to get better at something, but almost no one wants to go through the struggles needed to get there. Instead, they hope that they will get lucky and some big prize will drop from the sky straight into their arms. This is a horrible approach as hoping to get lucky is nothing but an admission of laziness and lacking a preexisting track record of success.
This is an important point to understand whether it comes to making money or building your network of connections. Most of the time you will not get anywhere by telling people the truth and trying to sell them based on this truth. This is the case even if they insist on getting your honest opinion. You are far better off assisting the average person in validating their shortcomings even though this will keep them going down a dismal and fruitless path. Always sell and convince people by drawing on emotions, in most cases the more extreme the better. Appealing to logic barely works even with people in the top 5% of intelligence and is guaranteed to fail when selling to the masses.
The overwhelming majority do not have any consistent semblance of internal drive. They are more concerned with immediate gratification in the form of easily accessible entertainment and hanging with other like-minded people with no drive. As a result, they are always on the lookout for shortcuts and want it to be sold to them in a fun and stimulating way. This is why appealing to logic usually won’t work when selling to the average person; you will incur rejection after rejection until you learn to pull their emotional strings. Notice how movies and video games are far more popular than books? If your pitch sounds challenging and arduous and involves a substantial exertion of effort, then you have done a terrible job at trying to close the sale.
Complaining Versus Taking Action: This is probably the most obvious behavioral trait to read. Anybody that routinely complains about how unfair it is that someone they know gets paid XXX for such an “easy job” or how they got a low grade in a multiple choice exam because the professor is racist is basically saying that they think they are not treated equally and deserve more.
The only type of person who believes that he deserves more and makes a habit out of complaining routinely about it is a person that isn’t performing at a high level. Just think about it. If you are already performing at a high level then you will be generating a large amount of income for yourself and will have a logical understanding of how results are directly correlated to performance, so you won’t get upset about any sort of perceived disparity.
Frequent complaining is a behavioral trait that doesn’t lie- you can be 100% sure that you are dealing with a loser who won’t get anywhere. Just watch if a person takes any action to grow his income. There are two paths you can take: 1) Build one or more additional revenue streams, 2) Generate more revenue in your current career. There will be many instances when the second option is no longer possible or isn’t feasible when you consider the return on time, but there is no scenario where #1 becomes impossible. So if someone complains about pay disparity or unfairness in treatment then ask him what his approach will be to fix this. If he doesn’t give you any viable course of action (i.e. start a part-time job fixing mobile phones, build an online consulting business) then you know he is lazy and bitter and will never take any meaningful steps to improve. If there were any genuine desire on his part for improvement, he would focus on finding tangible strategies/solutions rather than resorting to emotional responses that lead nowhere.
The Union of Like-Minded Individuals: There will be plenty of instances when successful people and unsuccessful people end up in the same group, but this is always an artificial and temporary arrangement that never lasts for long. Look no further than joining a company. When you first come out of college and into the workforce, it can be very challenging to secure the ideal role on the ideal team at the ideal firm. This is because even with an extremely impressive resume you are largely unproven as a fresh grad when it comes to hands-on experience, so the odds of securing that no. 1 target job are heavily stacked against you. You will probably end up in a less-than-ideal role for your first gig, but as soon as you position yourself as a top performer other more attractive opportunities will open up and draw you away. Yes, even assuming you don’t actively apply to any external job openings, news of your accomplishments will spread in the industry and headhunters will come to you.
This rule is true in every type of grouping- the individuals who are heads and shoulders above the rest of the group will end up moving on until they become part of a group where their skills and talent are more comparable to the other group members. That fourteen-year-old kid at your local high school might have only made it onto the JV basketball team because he is just a short and scrawny freshman, but as soon as he drops a series of 20+ point games he will end up getting delegated to varsity. Likewise, a natural discrepancy in social value is inevitable in a relationship, but a couple won’t last as soon as this discrepancy expands beyond a certain threshold.
So how does all of this apply to you? Again, it all comes down to observing behavior. Before you decide to invest a substantial amount of time in someone, find out who they hang out with and what they do with their free time. If you are looking to partner with someone in a new business venture but find out that this guy is spending his time around the wrong groups, that is enough to tell you that both his motivations and network of connections are not aligned with what you need. The last thing you want is to get pulled down by hanging around with low-quality people, or in this case risking your business venture dying out due to a bad choice of partner. It’s no coincidence here that people who succeed despite coming from destitute backgrounds do so due to a high-level of independent decision-making when it comes to behavioral choices. They realized early on from a young age that they wanted to make it out of their bad surroundings and made the conscious decision to insulate themselves from all the negative influences. This is an extremely effective way to observe the quality of a person by their behavior- whether or not they have the capability to cut and move on from strong established ties if they contain negative influences.
Opinion Polls: These are almost never a good indicator of what people really think as people will always answer based off how they feel in the moment. For example, if you poll the average person 95% of the time he or she will complain about how their income is not enough to cover their basic expenses, yet they will go out and buy a new Tesla a few weeks later even though they already have a car that is less than three years old. If you were an entrepreneur with a revolutionary product selling at a market price of $5K, you would overlook all these people who could be part of your potential customer base if you took the poll results too literally.
The most unreliable polls are usually the ones that touch upon social issues linked to controversy. Ask a thousand random passersby if they are racist and you’d be lucky to get two or three responses in the affirmative. Likewise, if you go up to Arnold Schwarzenegger and ask him if he cares about climate change he will give you a resounding yes… then fly off for a two-week vacation in Austria the following day in his private jet. Once again, words don’t align with actions.
Concluding Notes: It is a certainty that you already draw comparisons between peoples’ words and their actions at a subconscious level from time to time, but the key is to do so consciously as much as possible. Your people-reading ability will improve drastically, although inevitably you will still get duped by the more resolute personalities from time to time. Trust us, it has happened to us, it will certainly happen to you, and we are confident it will happen to us again in the future. No one makes 100% of their free throws.
So on a closing note, always compare peoples’ initial words with their subsequent actions. Their actions speak the truth 95% of the time. Beware of anyone who likes to ramble a lot. If someone has a propensity to use a lot of detailed language and extravagant words then they are likely hoodwinking you. Genuine and happy high-achievers are almost always also the more direct and concise type with the capability of organizing their thoughts as efficiently as they organize their day. They recognize that words are cheap and require no effort at all.