HYPE STRATEGY #4

The bull gets inured to the plough by slow degrees.

—OVID

Life was hard in Paradise Valley.

Many of the residents of the Detroit neighborhood were African Americans who had migrated from the South in hopes of a better life courtesy of Ford Motors. However, by the 1930s it had already become clear to most who had made the move that an unofficial combination of inflated interest rates, discriminatory housing policies, and racial violence made social mobility every bit as difficult as it was in the land of sharecropping. It was Jim Crow with different packaging.

It was into this environment that Wallace D. Fard first emerged.

The first thing people noticed about him was how he dressed. In addition to his fine suits—a rarity in the impoverished neighborhood—he wore a Turkish-style fez perched upon his head. This, combined with his regal carriage, turned him into a walking conversation piece. It wasn’t long before everyone in the neighborhood was wondering aloud what this mysterious stranger was all about. He was a splash of color in the middle of gray monotony.

Soon people started inviting Fard into their homes to attempt to satisfy their curiosity. It turned out he made his living as a salesman—one who trafficked in silk scarves imported from the East. Once a bit of small talk had ensued, Fard would spread the scarves before him on a table to discuss their quality and provenance.

The folks of Paradise Valley were a hospitable bunch, and at some point during their time together, someone would inevitably offer the merchant something to eat. It was at this point that Fard would proclaim that he followed strict dietary restrictions. In particular, he ate no pork and drank no alcohol.

In any African American community in the 1930s, this would have been considered very unusual. Even more than now, pork was a culinary staple. Yet as Fard talked about the benefits his lifestyle had bestowed upon him, his listeners’ curiosity would grow. By the time the trim, dapper Fard left their home, many of the people he spoke with decided to give his strange diet a shot.

As in so many poor communities, the Detroit slums were characterized by poor health. Fatty pork products and excessive alcohol consumption led to problems like obesity, energy loss, and diabetes. So without fail, his customers’ weight would drop, and their energy would increase. They came back to him amazed and excited.

It was only then that Fard would emphasize that these teachings came from his religion.

Wallace D. Fard was the founder of a new faith called the Nation of Islam (NOI). Its central doctrine was that an evil scientist named Yakub had created white people through genetic engineering. These pale-skinned beings were literal devils whose sole purpose was to destroy the utopia created by the original dark-skinned humans. Fard would inform his new associates that he practiced the purest form of Islam—a religion few African Americans in that period had ever encountered. In reality, the doctrine he preached had little to do with the ancient Middle Eastern faith from which Fard’s religion derived its name.

Despite his apparent polish and cultivation, Fard had an extensive criminal record. Over the course of his life, he had taken on a wide variety of identities and had lived in many different locales. During his travels, he spent time dabbling in Freemasonry, the Theosophical Society, and the Moorish Science Temple of America. When he finally decided to make up his own religion, he picked out the most dazzling pieces of each of these philosophies, spiritual systems, and fraternal societies and cobbled them together.

Fard had no credentials or connections when he arrived in Paradise Valley. Yet a few months after coming to Detroit, he was regularly filling basements with excited people who wanted to hear him preach about his new religion.

Eventually the movement Fard wrought became a major cultural and political force. Much of this growth would ultimately take place under the subsequent leadership of his protégé Elijah Muhammad. And Muhammad’s most effective evangelist was Malcolm Little—a charismatic ex-convict upon whom he bestowed the name Malcolm X.

When Muhammad first met Malcolm, he was impressed by the young man’s passion. He also recognized that the flip side of this passion was that it caused Malcolm to fervently try to convince everyone he met of the righteousness of their cause with an intensity that often put people off.

After observing Malcolm’s approach for some time, he called for the promising acolyte. Their meeting was short. The leader of the NOI sat Malcolm down and said only these simple words: “Give the little babies their milk before you give them their meat.”

Malcolm understood. From that point on, he rarely mentioned the tenets of the Nation of Islam’s theology—at least in his public talks. Instead, he spoke of the injustices African Americans had to deal with every day, along with the need for a new social and cultural structure that didn’t position them as inherently less worthy than white people. It is probably no coincidence that the ministry of Malcolm X resulted in a 5,000 percent increase in conversions to the Nation of Islam within a few years.

The civil rights icon would abandon the Nation of Islam before his death, inspired by a pilgrimage to Mecca where he prayed side by side with people of all races. Other prominent figures like boxer Muhammad Ali and basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar eventually left the NOI as well in order to adopt mainstream Islam.

Yet Fard’s original vision lives on in some corners. When Elijah Muhammad’s son disavowed the divisive elements of the NOI after his father’s death and reestablished the group as the American Society of Muslims, a former calypso singer known as Louis Farrakhan broke from the parent organization and reestablished it under its original name. Relatively few people belong to his splinter sect, which many have pegged as a hate group. That said, Farrakhan is a master of the hype techniques pioneered by Wallace D. Fard. As a result, he continues to get himself in the headlines year after year.

WHY MILK BEFORE MEAT WORKS

The founders of the Nation of Islam were not the first religious leaders to use the saying “Milk before meat” to explain the process of getting people to open up to, buy into, and then wholeheartedly embrace ideas that may have at one time seemed completely foreign or even truly distasteful to them.

In the Mormon Church’s Book of Doctrine and Covenants, Jesus says to his followers that before they bring people news of his suffering on the cross, they should introduce them to simpler matters. “For they cannot bear meat now,” he says, “but milk they must receive; wherefore, they must not know about these things, lest they perish.”

When nineteenth-century celebrity preacher Henry Ward Beecher admitted to the feminist, free love advocate, and spiritualist Victoria Woodhull that he too aimed to help effect a change in the laws of marriage, she asked why he didn’t preach those beliefs. His response was, “Milk for babies, meat for strong men.”

Founders and early evangelists of new religions are faced with a formidable task. Even though we often come to accept the convoluted doctrines of world faiths once they become mainstream, almost all of them strike people as bizarre, even dangerous, when they first emerge. Yet some founders of new religions do manage to build massive followings around their belief systems, spawning legions of followers who transform the founders’ beliefs into the new status quo.

What distinguishes these success stories from all the cults that (sometimes literally) go up in flames is how gradually the founders introduce their doctrines.

Kathleen Taylor, a cognitive scientist who studies the physiological basis of persuasion, writes that “Human brains are tuned for detecting changes, mismatches between their stored experiences and the information they are currently receiving . . . too big a gap between the ideas [influence technicians] hope to impose and those in present occupation of the target brain will lessen the chance of new ideas being accepted. Small steps, on the other hand, will be easier to swallow.”

Stage magicians take advantage of this neurological quirk all the time. They will often distract members of the audience through onstage patter and visual deflection while slowly manipulating an object. Then when they redirect attention back to the original area, the change in position appears miraculous.

As a businessperson, you can take advantage of this aspect of our wiring to work magic of a different kind. New sales are the lifeblood of every business. The revenue they generate keeps a company running. For this reason, many of us push to get to the end of the sales process in as short a time as possible. The irony is that it is precisely this rush to close deals that often causes us to lose them.

The decision to part with a big chunk of money is the kind of change that terrified our prehistoric ancestors. To counteract this programming, focus on collecting small yeses instead.

In the old days when door-to-door salesmen prowled the land, the best of the herd concentrated on getting people to invite them into their homes rather than immediately getting them to open their wallets. In our own time, savvy online marketers concentrate the bulk of their efforts on getting prospects to download a piece of content in exchange for an email address rather than immediately asking for a credit card.

Follow their example. When you give your prospects a few sips of milk, it is only a matter time before they will be clamoring for the whole meal.

HOW TO DECIDE WHERE TO BEGIN

Hype, as we defined it earlier, is made up of two parts. To practice it effectively, you must engender an emotional reaction in people and get them to take action. Often, sparking emotion requires speed and suddenness. To get people to pay attention to you, you often have to set yourself apart like a diamond necklace against black felt. However, generating initial attraction does not inherently translate into influence. Lasting influence occurs in increments.

To determine which increment to introduce first, consider which piece of your message bears the most similarity to what people already understand, believe, or feel comfortable with.

A few decades after Jesus of Nazareth was crucified for preaching his radical new beliefs in Jerusalem, the movement he founded had plateaued. Followers of the Way (which is what Christianity was called back then) numbered in the dozens. But then, as every good Sunday school student knows, a zealous young Christian-hater named Saul of Tarsus, while on the road to Damascus, had a vision of the risen Jesus. Saul of Tarsus changed his name to Paul and became the most effective advocate for the new religion the world has ever known.

What is often not emphasized in the official version of this story is how entirely different the nascent Christian faith was when he encountered it from what it would become in his hands. The earliest Christians—including the first apostles—thought of themselves as Jewish. They just happened to believe in the teachings of a new messiah. They kept kosher. They circumcised their sons. They didn’t shave their faces. Most notably, they were only interested in spreading the teachings of their crucified leader to other Jewish people.

The soon-to-be Saint Paul changed all this. He alone got that there was a great deal of potential appeal in Jesus’s teachings for the wider population of the Roman Empire. At the same time, he saw that very few people in the broader gladiator-loving population would be able to digest a comprehensive new spiritual system that contained ideas like “turning the other cheek” and the “meek inheriting the earth.”

Paul solved this problem by packaging this radically new set of ideas in familiar wrapping paper and then introducing it to newcomers in gradual stages. For example, there is ample evidence that the original followers of Jesus did not emphasize the idea of salvation through Christ’s blood on the cross. However, Paul had grown up in Tarsus—a city that was far more traditionally Roman than where Jesus and his followers were from.

It was in Tarsus that Paul undoubtedly experienced the popular ritual of the Mithraic cult, in which initiates drank wine to symbolize the blood of a sacred bull in order to gain admittance into its spiritual mysteries. It was also in Tarsus that he most likely encountered the story of Dionysus—a god who temporarily sheds his divinity so he can live among humanity.

The reason Paul was so successful in spreading his radical new faith in a way that would ultimately spread to every part of the planet is that he gave people what their culture and values could digest before he introduced everything else. It is also how the greatest civil rights legend in American history got two groups whose relations had always been characterized by distrust to come together to right one of history’s great wrongs.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, African Americans had every reason to hate the United States. A century after the Civil War, a war that was supposed to have freed them from servitude, they still lived under a system that enforced their status as decidedly inferior citizens.

It would have probably surprised nobody if Martin Luther King Jr. had used his speaking ability to disparage the nation, its system of government, and society as a whole.

Fortunately, King was too savvy for that. Instead, he co-opted the language of the institutions most dearly cherished by mainstream America. For example, in a notable sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1965, King quoted entire passages of the Declaration of Independence. During the March on Washington, he referred to our “sweet land of liberty.” And in the last speech of his life, he quoted the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” lyric: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

In an age where “disruption” is among the most common business buzzwords, many entrepreneurs lose sight of the fact that not everyone finds it so exhilarating to plunge into the great unknown. In fact, evolution has programmed most members of our species to fear large-scale change, even if that change would be good for us or for society.

Martin Luther King Jr. got around this by wrapping his message of intense change with the language and concepts of the trusted and familiar.

You should do the same.

In our professional lives, we often speak using the jargon of our own industries. We do this out of habit, and because it is efficient—at least when we’re working with others in our own fields. However, when we default to speaking in these terms to people we want to influence outside our fields—like potential customers—we often lose them. The way to combat this natural human tendency is to embark on the following exercise. It will only take a few minutes.

Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the center of the page. On the left, write down every technical term, acronym, and buzzword you and your colleagues regularly use. Then, on the right, next to each one of these terms, come up with a substitute that relates as directly as possible to the world the people in your intended audience inhabit.

Use this as your cheat sheet. Whenever the opportunity arises, practice communicating with the terms from the second column instead of the first. If you can train yourself to adopt the habit of cloaking the new ideas you wish people to adopt in the language they already use, your ability to influence them will dramatically increase.

MAKING IT THEIR IDEA

Question: What do Warren Buffett and Charles Manson have in common?

Answer: They were both star students of the Dale Carnegie training program.

The widely respected billionaire, sage, and investor Warren Buffett has famously claimed on multiple occasions that despite having attended Columbia Business School and the University of Nebraska, the only diploma he received that he was so proud of that he displayed it prominently on his wall was that from a Dale Carnegie Institute course, which he completed in 1952. To this day, Buffett maintains that the hundred-dollar fee he paid was the most valuable investment he ever made.

Only five years later, in 1957, a car thief and pimp named Charles Manson was doing a stint in a federal prison in California when he happened across a class the penitentiary was offering to inmates. The class was based on the book How to Win Friends and Influence People and lectures by the self-help author Dale Carnegie. The high school dropout dove into the coursework with a frenzy, becoming the top student in the program.

Dale Carnegie’s work is all about communicating in a nonconfrontational way in order to massage people into seeing reality the way you want them to. One of his most powerful concepts is that of “letting the other fellow feel the idea is his.” The central idea here is that one of the most effective ways of easing people into a desired course of action is to use words and framing that make it seem as if whatever you want them to do is originating from their own minds.

While Carnegie came to his insights largely through trial and error, subsequent science has confirmed many of his findings. In the mid-1960s, the husband and wife team of social psychologists Jack and Sharon Brehm demonstrated in a variety of experimental conditions that people would significantly alter their behavior, even to their own detriment, if they perceive that someone else is forcing them into undertaking that behavior.

Warren Buffett used his soft-handed approach to become one of the wealthiest people in history. Beneath the genial public persona for which he has become known is a shrewd player of interpersonal chess who almost always gets what he wants. As for Charles Manson, he used what he learned to infinitely more sinister ends.

It is often remarked upon with amazement that Manson was able to transform a group of nice middle-class kids into a cult of vicious murderers. It was the strain of the “milk before meat” strategy he first learned from Dale Carnegie that gave him this power.

When he spoke to Manson Family members, the leader would rarely tell them what to do—especially in the beginning of his relationship with them. Instead, he would regularly solicit his followers’ advice, seizing on those instances when one of their partially formed ideas lined up with where he wanted them to go. Then he would subtly maneuver them—usually through questions—until the members of the Family were completely on board with the idea he favored.

Directly telling people what to do is the opposite of giving them milk before meat. The kind of slow and subtle questioning that Carnegie suggested is a far more powerful way to ease them into a point of view you want them to adopt—whether your aim in doing so is to create or to destroy.

In business, this is a strategy that extends far beyond sales—it is effective in leadership of all kinds. More times than not, when we tell people what we think they should do, they push back even if what you are recommending is in their best interest.

Whether you are trying to get a customer or client to buy something from you or get your team to go along with an idea you have that might be difficult or would require a great deal of work, replace every statement you would normally give as a command with a question.

Start by asking questions to get people to admit the challenges they are wrestling with. After that, ask questions to get them to unearth proposed solutions.

Those listening to you will inevitably propose a wide range of different ideas—many of which you don’t really want them to land on. That’s fine. When people propose solutions that don’t get you to your desired end point, encourage them to give more ideas. However, when they finally land on a solution that is closer to where you want them to end up (and they inevitably will), seize on it and say, “That’s a good idea! What else?”

Walk them through that journey, and eventually they’ll come up with the idea you wanted them to come up with all along.

Often, we feel that in order to get people to do what we want, to take the actions we want them to take, we need to impose our will ever more strongly on them. If they don’t listen to us, don’t follow us, that’s simply because we’re not making our case forcefully enough. The best hype artists understand how foolish this is. They realize that once you’ve sparked attraction, the best way to get people to do what you want them to do is to have them get themselves there in steps so small that they don’t even know it is happening.

Putting It into Practice