Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions - Guy Kawasaki

“In a perfect world, you are so enchanting that your cause doesn’t matter, and your cause is so enchanting that you don’t matter. My goal is to help you achieve both.”

Guy Kawasaki, Enchanting: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

Another gem via Faram Street:


  • The core of enchantment is that you have to be likable, trustworthy, and have a great product or service. Likeability starts from your physical appearance, that you have a smile and it called Duchenne smile that incorporates both your eyes and your mouth.
  • The second part of likeability in this initial impression is that your dress…you’re not dressed above the crowd, you’re not dressed below the crowd. You should dress for a tie – no pun intended – and then the next thing is your physical contact of a handshake. 
  • People that you trust default to a yes or positive attitude. They’re looking for ways to help you as opposed to ways that you can help them. So the next time you go to a party, and you meet new people, you should always be thinking: how can I help this person, how can I help this person—as opposed to how can this person help me.
  • The final analogy I would use is that trustworthy people are bakers not eaters. An eater looks at a pie and says: I want to get as big a slice of the pie as possible. A baker says: I will bake more pies or bigger pies so everybody gets more pie. And trustworthy people are bakers not eaters.
  • In an online situation, if you want to accelerate and optimize your reputation and your image, then the first thing you should do, is you should respond to people quickly, within 24 hours. Anybody who is responses within 24 hours already has a big, big plus that this person answers his or her email, or Direct messages, or Facebook messages.
  • Second—you should respond to everyone. You know, not just the A-listers, not just the powerful, famous people, but to everybody, because anybody could help you tip…this is a flattened or, if not, inverted world where lonely Joe may be the person who makes your book successful, not necessarily The New York Times book review editor. So respond to everybody.
  • The other thing is that you need to respond and engage constantly.
  • First of all, you could make a case that from time to time, as a person who is trying to enchant people you will offend some people. In fact, I might make a case that—if you haven’t offended some people you’re probably not trying hard enough. So let’s not have a zero tolerance for enchantment. Or zero tolerance to the resistance to enchantment, it may be. In particular with Twitter—on Twitter if you’re not pissing somebody off you’re not using Twitter right.

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