Flip the Script Read online

  The next three minutes were silent and stressful, and I finally drank the warm vodka that had been poured for me an hour earlier. The silence grew uncomfortable for Viktor, and I let him be uncomfortable. He scratched some numbers on a notepad only because he wanted to end our staring contest. No matter the pressure and risk, I was not going to chase him. He had to chase me, if only a little bit. And then, at last, the ice broke. “Can we see the data again, please?” he said politely. My method had worked. He was chasing me, ever so slightly. Did I jump with excitement at this moment, or pull out a bunch of charts and graphs and race to a close? No I did not. Instead, I pulled out my phone and began looking for an Uber. And while I did, I casually explained my Buyer’s Formula to him, just to be helpful.

  “I do these kinds of medical software deals all the time,” I said nonchalantly, like I’m in an oligarch’s office every day. “The tricky part is handling patient data.” And then I explained how I would choose to invest or not invest in the deal I was offering him. “Anyway, from doing this so many times, that’s just how I would look at it.”

  This was it—the moment it all comes down to. It was time to ask Viktor if he was “in.” It was time to push him for a yes.

  Except it wasn’t.

  With the Inception scripts, you never tell the buyer what you want them to do—you never pressure them for a yes. You let them tell you they want to buy. I looked Viktor in the eye and said, “I need to head out for another meeting across town.”

  And then I heard the magic words that come when you successfully take a buyer through the six steps of Inception. “I like this deal. We can work together, so thank you please, now stay,” he said thoughtfully, this time in very good English.

  An hour later I had a $10 million deal on fair terms, a plan to hire the needed mathematicians, and the endorsement of a Russian oligarch.

  WHERE THE “OLD SCRIPT” CAME FROM

  In ancient times, life was short and dangerous; survival from sunrise to sunset was not a sure thing. For much of early civilization, at least a quarter of all human males on the planet were killed every year by war, famine, tribal infighting, and things that bite, sting, inject poison, or stomp.

  Everywhere you turned, there was something that could easily kill you. Moving too slow or in the wrong direction meant the difference between life and death; there was no time to second-guess yourself. Nobody else could be trusted. To survive, you needed to trust your own judgment above that of all others, no matter what, acting on your own ideas without hesitating, and resisting the influence of risky outside ideas. Anything new and foreign is untested and, therefore, not to be trusted. The human brain is thus wired by evolution to distrust any information from the outside world and to greatly favor that which originates inside us.

  Since childhood, others have been trying to smuggle their ideas into your mind. So naturally your mental defenses have gotten really good. It’s as if you have a small team of cognitive security guards and bouncers who are trained to keep unfamiliar and confusing ideas away.

  But salespeople are well trained too. The typical sales script tries to push past this resistance by exploiting your survival instincts, or the patterns of thinking you use when you’re stressed and need to move quick, without time to think. Consider these sales scripts: “I have another buyer on the line who wants it.” “This is the last one we have in stock.” “It’s thirty percent off!” These statements may sound innocent enough, but they are actually carefully constructed mental manipulations designed to stress your natural decision-making system.

  In the past, buyers accepted a high-pressure sales script as an unwanted but necessary part of the buying process because they genuinely needed the information that only an experienced sales rep could provide. But today, everyone can find, research, and buy anything online—so high-pressure sales scripts are not just unwelcome, they are hated.

  In fact, these tactics are so outdated that even car manufacturers are abandoning them. In their studies, car companies found that the high-pressure scripts do more harm than good, often causing people to do the opposite of what you’re asking, just to prove that you aren’t controlling them—a phenomenon known as psychological reactance.

  The way most people think of it, the act of selling is defined by psychological pressure. Salespeople always end up at this uncomfortable moment when they need to “close” and get the buyer to commit. But the buyer always responds in the same way:

  First, by pacifying the seller: “Yes, yes, this looks terrific, you really have a great product.”

  Second, by backing away: “I just need to look a little more closely at the numbers.”

  Finally, by deferring the decision to an unavailable third party: “I will need to talk to my partner; he needs to approve an important decision like this.”

  If you’ve ever tried to sell anything to anyone, you’ve heard all this before, and you already know this is where deals go to die. Yet most salespeople feel pretty good when they get to the end of their pitch and the buyer says, “Yes, yes, this looks terrific, I just need to look a little more closely and talk to my partner; please write up everything you mentioned in a proposal, send it over, and we will discuss it and get back to you.” In fact, you shouldn’t feel good at all, because that deal is as good as dead.

  THE SCIENCE OF INCEPTION

  If you’ve ever bought a product you didn’t even know you wanted, or made choices that seemed a little out of character, then it’s likely you’ve had an idea implanted in your mind.

  Inception is the allegedly impossible implantation of an idea in someone’s mind so that they think it’s their own. It involves the ability to introduce parts of an idea to someone and create the perfect conditions for the whole idea to “surface” as if it were theirs, not yours.

  You may have seen this in the movie of the same name. Inception is a 2010 Academy Award–winning sci-fi-action thriller written and directed by Christopher Nolan. In the film, an industrious neurological spy steals inaccessible, secret information from the mind of a rival businessman. The character’s mission is to plant certain ideas within his rival’s subconscious mind.

  Like many good science fiction stories, the movie invented some of its own science. But it is seeded with a kernel of truth. Creating ideas for other people, however unlikely it may sound, is not only possible, it happens every day at the highest levels of business and government.

  Have you ever seen a sign that reads ONE PER CUSTOMER and immediately thought, “I’m going to figure out how to get two”? This is a classic form of Inception. You simply forbid an action in order to encourage it, creating a kind of universal Do Not Push button that everyone wants to press. The reason? None of us want to be told what to do.

  But this example is just a hint of the full power of Inception, as I’m about to show you.

  Certainly I did not invent the Inception method. It was always there in plain sight. I just uncovered it and explained how it works best in business situations. After all, writers for detective shows such as CSI and Law & Order have been implanting ideas in our minds for years. Consider how watching one of these shows always leads you to a moment when you as the viewer are able to put the pieces of the crime together and figure out who did it. You might say something like “I know what’s going on here! It has to be the cop—he stole the drugs and set the whole thing up!” This moment is predetermined, inevitable.

  You feel a rush of excitement when you identify the culprit before the big reveal happens on-screen, but that was always the writers’ plan. You’re meant to discover the answer on your own and feel good about it. That eureka moment has been carefully planned and programmed to deliver an insight at exactly the right time. When you put the pieces together before the detectives do, you feel smart, happy, powerful, and in control (exactly the emotions needed to motivate you to buy some canned beer, frozen pizza, and extra-soft toilet t
issue). And you tune in next week so you can feel that way again.

  Even if you don’t watch crime procedurals, you’ve probably experienced a moment like this, when a solution to the problem you’re working on suddenly materializes in your mind. Something just clicks and you see the answer. It feels almost like divine inspiration. You don’t doubt it. You don’t second-guess it. You trust it, believe in it, and act on it immediately—because it was your idea. And we are certain about our own ideas.

  We don’t just find it satisfying when our brain comes up with ideas on its own, we also value those ideas more highly. If you handed someone an origami swan folded out of plain printer paper and asked the person how much they would pay for it, they might say they’d pay nothing, or just twenty-five cents. Almost never a dollar. But if instead you taught them step-by-step how to fold the same swan out of plain paper themselves, then asked them to estimate the value of the paper bird they’d just folded, you would get a much higher number. Maybe three dollars or even four. Researchers have proven this many times in multiple settings.

  The same is true with an idea. Make people feel like the idea is coming from them and they will place more value on it, believe it more deeply, adopt it more quickly, and remember it more easily.

  This book will reveal the Inception script to you. In the pages that follow, I will show you exactly how to target the part of the brain that produces the feeling of Ding! I’ve got it! When you present an idea like this, everyone who is listening will trust and believe in it because the idea will feel like it originated in the depths of their own minds.

  So how do you plant an idea in someone’s head in a way that makes them feel like it was theirs (especially if you’re not the head writer for a long-running crime drama)? Researchers have found that Inception moments arrive suddenly, in a burst; there is no gradual buildup in the brain. We sit there, pondering all the pieces of the puzzle, and at some point, out of the blue, there is a huge spike of activity in the superior temporal gyrus, a tiny bundle of neurons on the right side of the brain, just below the temple, that’s tied to the feeling of certainty we get when an idea is our own. And then, a short while later, we consciously know the answer.

  When you can reliably re-create this exact sequence of events in the mind of the person you are trying to influence, you will be able to trigger Inception.

  Does that sound impossible? Or like science fiction? In truth, it’s neither. It starts by throwing out the old scripts. I’m going to teach you a new one. Master these six techniques and you’ll never have to ask someone to do what you want again; they will come up with the idea all by themselves.

  CHAPTER 2

  The New Dominance Hierarchy

  Who gets what, and why?

  It’s tempting to think you should get financial rewards in a fair way, according to your effort, sacrifice, and contribution, and while this might sound great in the gospels, it is not how we as a species operate. Humans operate, and have always operated, within a rigid power framework that I call the dominance hierarchy, where the few who exist at the top get more of the best of everything, and those at the bottom get the scraps.

  For the last million years it was nearly impossible to change your social position in society without an army behind you, because status was based purely on physical strength. Life was a simple system where the biggest, toughest, most aggressive members of a social group would get anything and everything they wanted until they were eventually challenged and killed by an up-and-comer in a never-ending cycle of life and death.

  Something changed around the first millennium. As human tribes got bigger and more complex it was no longer possible to challenge everyone to fight in order to establish your place in the social layer cake. A new dominance hierarchy emerged in which social status surpassed physical size as the means to influence others.

  But we never truly mastered this new dominance hierarchy. Even today, improving your social ranking rarely happens easily, quickly, or even at all because your ranking is one of the most difficult things to change unless you have been trained to do so. Social mobility for most people is fixed at birth. Unless you are very lucky and get picked out of a fast-food restaurant while wearing a chicken suit like Brad Pitt or can throw a 99-mile-per-hour fastball like Max Scherzer to earn $200 million, social mobility is limited.

  While those on top ultimately fall, and those on the bottom eventually rise, this typically occurs across a span of several generations. The hard truth is that you inherit your underlying social ranking from your parents the same way you inherit your height. In other words, your birth is your fate unless you master the tools that will allow you to change your position in the social layer cake. The problem is that most people have misunderstood the process of how to do this.

  But it can be done.

  After spending many years studying the science of power and dominance, my team and I have discovered a way for you to match status and power with anyone, in any business or social situation. And it takes only about thirty seconds to pull off when you understand how it works. In order to explain the process, and why it is so effective, I need to introduce you to Ötzi the Iceman.

  Ötzi excited the scientific community when he was found frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991 in near-perfect condition. Finally, archaeologists would be able to study the daily routines and social structures of a 70,000-year-old man. An analysis of Ötzi’s stomach’s contents revealed that his last meal was ibex (a horrible-tasting kind of deer) and poison fern.

  Ötzi didn’t have a very good last couple of days, and it’s doubtful he had many good days at all during his short nomadic life. His toes were mangled from years of frostbite, half his teeth were gone, parasitic worm eggs filled his intestines, and he was partially blind from repeated doses of fern toxin. But it wasn’t the poison that killed him—it was an arrow in the back of his head from some locals whose territory he walked into. That area must have been “locals only.”

  The day he was killed, Ötzi either had the wrong kind of tattoos or was wearing the wrong color of clothing or didn’t have the right amulet on his arm. What scientists have discovered after studying Ötzi’s remains, and the remains of others like him, is that early humans relied on visual cues to determine social status and tribal affiliation. As tribes got bigger and the social layer cake expanded, we had to start responding to external cues of power such as uniforms, tattoos, clothing, family crests, and titles. It soon became second nature for us to recognize and act on these indicators of position and power.

  Today, a mix of subtle visual and verbal cues help you instantly recognize the social status of people around you. The way you dress, the precise words you use in conversation, the tone of your voice, and your behavior in specific situations will all telegraph your status within a group or society at large.

  When you learn to recognize and control these words and symbols, you can change your position in the social layer cake at will. You can enter a completely unfamiliar social group in just a few seconds and create enormous influence in the process. During the past few years I have worked with the high-status ultra-rich on some very large deals, and I’ve seen the power of simple cues to rapidly create wealth or leave behind missed opportunities. In the process, I’ve mastered a new set of tools that will allow you to change your position in the dominance hierarchy by simply uttering a few sentences. That’s how I closed one of the craziest deals of my career.

  IN SEARCH OF $25 MILLION

  I was speeding down Rexford Drive in Los Angeles, past heirloom hedges and giant wrought-iron gates that concealed some of the most legendary real estate in Beverly Hills. During the next two hours I was going to have one shot to make a $25 million deal, which was not an ideal situation because this deal looked manageable when I started, but now nothing about it was going my way and at this point there was only one man who could help.

  John King is a very wealthy but very off-the-grid
loner with no attachments who was unreachable by phone and popped up only for the occasional hit-and-run media appearance. Think of him as the billionaire business version of Jason Bourne. Since 1999 his website had only two words, “coming soon.” His receptionist was an answering machine. Nobody in my Rolodex could connect us, either. For two weeks I’d been searching for him, because this was the man I needed to pitch my deal to. It’s not that he was avoiding me; he just didn’t know I existed and hadn’t been around to hear my offer. But that’s something I knew how to fix. Let me explain:

  My business model is pretty simple. People hire me to do three basic things:

  Get meetings with wealthy investors.

  Pitch them an irresistible offer.

  Close the deal and get the money.

  I charge a lot for this kind of work, so nobody ever hands me the easy jobs, and over time I’ve become the patron saint of tough deals. If no one else can get it done, Just give it to Oren, people would say.

  My client on this deal was a successful solar company with plans to buy a large plot of land in Arizona and build a lucrative energy farm. I had promised to find and deliver $25 million, which should have been a manageable task. Except it wasn’t. One problem had led to another and every investor I’d lined up had evaporated before their wire transfer came through. It was starting to feel like this deal was cursed.

  With time running out, I now had no choice but to focus on a single investor who could snap up the whole deal. That put me on a collision course with John King, one of the top energy investors in the world. For a guy like John, this deal was just the right size for a quick yes. A guy on his level could do it with a handshake and two sheets of paper, if he loved it. But, of course, he wasn’t going to be easy to persuade because he wasn’t easy to find.