Evil and conniving people manipulate, right? Wrong. Everyone manipulates. Manipulation simply means that you are attempting to influence other people’s behavior toward your ends.

—MICHELE WEINER-DAVIS

Nobles and peasants. Kings and subjects. Fat cats and workers. Trust fund kids and kids from the projects.

A lot has changed since the bulk of Homo sapiens stopped roaming the savannah, but one thing has remained remarkably constant. There has never been a civilization on earth that has been truly fair. It’s an unpleasant feature of our species, and one that many people have tried to explain over the years.

They tend to fall into two camps. Some place all the blame on the inherent awfulness of whatever culture happens to be dominant at any given time. According to this version of reality, history is simply a series of episodes of exploitation, theft, and oppression in which the powerful dominate the powerless. One day, the story goes, we’ll finally have a revolution that will end this state of affairs. On the other side is the idea that all people have an equal opportunity to better themselves, achieve all their dreams, and become multimillionaires. If you aren’t doing as well as others, it’s your own fault. As long as you stay on the straight and narrow, you’ll ultimately get everything you ever wanted.

Really, neither of these viewpoints is accurate. One government gets overthrown, and the replacement creates a society more unequal than the last. People work hard their whole lives and die broke anyway. Wishing the world was different does not change the circumstances. Playing the game of life according to a set of rules put in place by the people who already have all the power is the best way to get nowhere.

Fortunately, there is a tool that allows for an escape route from this predicament. Hype.

It is easy for those who sit at the center of power in a society to follow the traditional methods of getting what they want. When you grow up with the right educational opportunities, right background, right interests, right personality, and right race, it is relatively easy to make your way in the world using tried-and-true channels. But for those who exist on the fringes of that world—those without resources or connections—creating a life full of opportunity requires more unconventional methods.

Hype allows those without power to gain access to it. It provides those on the bottom the ability to leapfrog over those at the top, or at least to get where they want to go through a side door. It gives the ignored a chance to grab attention and the unconnected a chance to penetrate inner circles.

Remember back in Strategy #8 when I mentioned C Bin and Zeyu Zheng—the two young guys I interviewed for my Forbes column? Well, there is an interesting coda to that story. In the wake of our interview, I told them about my work on hype, and it was right up their alley. They offered to fly me over to China to speak to a group of entrepreneurs they would be training.

I agreed, but I have to admit I was nervous. At the time, I had only spoken on the subject of hype a few times before in a formal setting. While those few stateside speeches had gone relatively well, there was always one person who would start debating with me during the Q&A portion about the morality and wisdom of what I was teaching.

“I get this stuff you’re telling us about how manipulating people can be effective. But isn’t it better to just put your message out there and let the cream rise to the top?”

Or . . .

“What if I don’t want to be the kind of person who uses these kinds of tactics?”

Or . . .

“Why do you call it hype? Doesn’t that have, like, a negative connotation?”

I’d always get into a bit of a back-and-forth with these naysayers, and they would usually nod their heads politely. But I could always tell they didn’t buy it. And this was in the United States of America—a country literally founded on the belief that you should do whatever you need to do in the “pursuit of happiness.”

Now I was going to deliver the same message to an audience in a country that was known for its collective spirit. I had always heard that people in China prized rules over rebellion, solidarity over standing out, and selflessness over self-promotion. If Americans had trouble understanding what I was getting at, what was a Chinese audience going to think?

When the day of my talk arrived, I got up in front of a packed ballroom in the St. Regis Hotel in Shenzhen to address the gathered business owners who filled every seat. Bolstered by a talented interpreter, my confidence grew as I watched audience members scribbling furiously in their notebooks. With each point I made, people nodded and leaned forward.

Then, at the end of my allotted 45 minutes, I closed with a statement that I had used a number of times before.

“The thing about hype,” I told them, “is that it’s too powerful a tool to be left in the hands of the bad guys alone. That’s why I’ve made it my life’s work to teach it to incredible entrepreneurs like you, people who are creating products and services that are designed to make the world better. If I can do my part in getting us to a place where the best people making the best stuff are armed with the strategies to most effectively—and ethically—attract attention to what they’re doing, I will have had a life worth living.”

The crowd exploded—a full-fledged standing ovation.

As I basked in the applause, happy and stunned, I happened to lock eyes with a young woman in the front row.

She was crying.

When it comes to entrepreneurship, China still exists on the margins—at least in regard to how the people see themselves. Every conversation I had during my trip made it clear that even the most successful Chinese entrepreneurs have an inferiority complex. They still see themselves as running behind the Western world, especially the US.

Despite China’s trending toward free enterprise over the last couple of decades, overt self-promotion still stands in complete contrast to thousands of years of Chinese cultural history. Even now, dedicating your life to the pursuit of the kind of nonconformity and individualistic decision-making it takes to be an entrepreneur makes you a bit of a misfit.

The American businesspeople in my audience at home had the societal structure and support that put them directly in the center of the mainstream. They had the luxury of speaking about how the world should be.

On the other hand, the Chinese entrepreneurs I spoke to have had to see the world as it really is. It was what made them successful in a culture that didn’t naturally support their aspirations. So to hear someone like me come out and tell them that it was not just all right, but flat-out desirable, to view the world the way they always had, and to do what they had always done, really touched them. It touched me too. The experience made me realize that as far as life’s work goes, this is pretty good stuff.

Imagine a world where the best ideas, the greatest products, the most interesting art, and the most meaningful causes don’t get swallowed up and forgotten. Imagine a world where the best people understand the best methods for getting attention and for building the biggest, most energetic audiences.

This is what hype can give us.

NOW FOR SOME RANDOM TIDBITS

Since this is my epilogue, I get to use it however I want to. And the way I want to use the rest of it is to give you a few additional closing tips and techniques that didn’t fit in any of the other chapters.

All of what follows is a set of metastrategies for the advanced hype artist. You should keep all of them in mind while you practice any of the hype strategies we’ve discussed, alone or in combination.

Engage in Relentless Experimentation

In reading about the previous strategies, one might get the impression that as long as you follow the strategies as laid out, you’ll get the same results as the masters I got them from.

Not exactly.

While there are universal principles of hype, details matter a lot, as they do in any other area of human interaction. When people apply the same strategies the same way, regardless of time period or specific circumstances, it always falls short in the long run.

To truly learn something—anything—it must be practiced in the arena of real life. Book learning is important, but it is never sufficient. Some degree of trial and error will always be necessary to adapt what you know in the abstract to the specifics of your time, your personality, and your audience.

When it comes to sales, people skip this step all the time. They read every sales book and take every sales course and then bet their entire fortunes on the step-by-step system they memorized. Then they’re shocked when it doesn’t work out.

Remember our old friends Mystery and Style? Like you, they were students of human psychology. They began their road to becoming master seducers by educating themselves through books, audio programs, and seminars. But they quickly realized that while this education was essential to their success, it wasn’t enough. 

Mystery and Style became successful with women because they took the theory into the bars and clubs. They approached hundreds of women and got rejected hundreds of times. They said hundreds of stupid things. But every time they did so, they studied the data and adjusted their approach. If you want to become a master of hype, you must do the same. 

Become a Lifelong Student of Hype

You should be convinced by now that throughout the course of history, certain people have had an uncanny ability to get large numbers of other people to believe what they wanted them to believe and do what they wanted them to do. These people have gone by many names and plied many trades. Magicians. Prophets. Soothsayers. Spiritualists. Shamans. Gurus. Consultants.

Hype artists, every one of them.

This book should be nothing more than a starting point for you. If you’re truly serious about building an audience for whatever you are selling that will stick with you wherever you go and whatever you do, you need to continue to seek out new hype artists to learn from.

Put down the marketing and sales books. Forget about the Build-a-Nine-Figure-Online-Business courses. Instead, seek out and study the real masters. When you learn from the true artists of mass manipulation, then you can build the business or company or following or movement you want and name your price for whatever it is you’re selling.

Engage in Benevolent Mischief (Not Harmful Hucksterism)

While the core principles of hype hold constant whether they are being deployed by the most devious of demagogues or the most altruistic of activists, the actual content on whose behalf they are being applied really does make all the difference.

We’ve talked about managers like Shep Gordon who used hype to pack an arena for Alice Cooper—a band whose songs were once praised by Bob Dylan. When Thomas Edison used hype to bring attention to his work, the world got electric light, recorded sound, and motion pictures. Richard Branson uses hype to deliver top-flight entertainment and luxury travel experiences at affordable prices.

On the other hand, Bernie Madoff used hype to get some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people to invest in his Ponzi scheme for years. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes hyped her way into a multibillion-dollar valuation without ever having created a working product. And Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland used it to sell 5,000 tickets at an average of a thousand dollars a pop to an event that was plagued by filth and chaos.

If you have an awesome product or service but its newness and your lack of visibility are keeping you from success, faking it until you make it makes sense as a strategy. But if you haven’t created anything valuable, work on that first. Learn your craft. Become an expert. Build something solid. Once you’re confident that you’ll have the ability to deliver on your promises, a little bit of hype won’t hurt you—or your customers. In fact, it might add the splash of color and excitement people crave.

Whichever way you end up using this powerful set of strategies drawn from the assorted cult leaders, propagandists, and hucksters we’ve spent time with, it is my sincerest wish that you will apply them to projects and causes that improve people’s lives.

While there are already plenty of people who understand how to use the ideas in this book to sell garbage, I have a lot of hope. If these strategies can be used to push that which deceives and degrades, imagine what can happen if more and more people apply them to work that enhances and enriches. Hype artists may see the world as it really is, but the best of them use that knowledge to make it better. Now that you know their secrets, I hope you’ll join their ranks.