The Rawness

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One of the things I like to encourage people to do when analyzing human nature is to avoid compartmentalizing their insights. To compartmentalize an insight means that you have learned a specific insight but are only able to understand and apply it in the original context in which it was taught to you.

For example, let’s take a guy who is good at his career and knows how to advance. He may understand how to knock out job interviews perfectly. He takes care in his presentation. He researches the company thoroughly before approaching it. He anticipates every question he’s likely to hear and has a prepared response. He projects confidence, tries not to seem too eager to please, knows and communicates his value and shows just enough of his fun side to seem enjoyable but not so much as to communicate that he’s a clown. This is a result of specific job interview advice he’s solicited and received. This exact same guy may go to a club or bar that night and try to pick up a woman by doing all the exact opposite behaviors: approaching meekly, showing eagerness by offering to buy things, displaying low value and messing up the humor by joking too hard (thereby becoming an entertainment monkey) or too little (boring).

Why does he do all the right social techniques in one setting, the job interview, yet doesn’t transfer the same social techniques into the other setting, the bar pickup? Because he’s a compartmentalized thinker and need someone to explicitly tell him to use those same social techniques in the new setting. On his own, he can’t pull back, see the bigger picture and notice the general, transferable principles that link seemingly different scenarios. He needs every specific scenario and piece of advice specifically laid out for him. He may be great at memorizing, but he’s horrible as improvising and innovating because his mind is lazy or untrained. He is incapable of great leaps in logic.

You need to be a big picture thinker and not a compartmentalizer. I think that is my great gift, actually. Not the amount that I know, which really isn’t that much, but rather the common threads that I see in seemingly unrelated things and my ability to find unifying principles behind them. I see connections.

Which leads to this post about compliance. I see tons of articles about getting compliance in different areas of one’s life: getting cooperative kids, winning over a mate, motivating employees, etc. Instead of being compartmentalized and focusing on teaching how to get compliance in one specific situation, I’m going to show the basic elements of building compliance that apply to every situation one may encounter.

The ultimate recipe for compliance comes down to just three ingredients:

1. Believable Authority
2. Earn-Reward Method
3. Intermittent Rewards

I’ll break down each element in the next two parts. Click here to move on to part 2.

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