INTRODUCTION

Only in folklore does the world beat a path to the inventor of a better mousetrap.

—RANDALL STROSS

When I was 34 years old, with a newborn baby at home, I decided I was going to ditch my cushy corporate career to make it on my own as a freelance writer.

Here’s what I was thinking: Ever since I had circulated my hit story “WrestleMania 2230” in the second grade, people had been telling me I had talent. And when I left college, I really had tried to do something with my writing or at least in the arts: I interned at a television production company, wrote short stories, and started a band that built a following. But despite selling out a popular club on a weeknight, securing a residence there, and appearing on national TV (it was Showtime at the Apollo and we were booed offstage, but it still counts), I ultimately couldn’t figure out how to support myself through my art.

So I got a job. The company that hired me operated customer service call centers. I told myself it was a temporary measure to provide some cash flow until I figured out what to do next.

I ended up working at that company for eight years—the better part of a decade. I learned a thing or two while I was there, but if I’m being honest with myself, the reasons I stayed for so long were the comfort my steadily increasing salary provided and my fear that I’d end up in a cardboard box if I left.

But then something happened that shook me out of my bubble-wrapped sleepwalk to the grave.

My wife got pregnant.

About three weeks after we got the news, I was lying in bed, and I had a vision. I saw my future child taking me to school for a Career Day event. I watched myself stand up and walk to the front of the class. I saw myself open my mouth and say the following words:

“Hi kids, I’m Michael Schein, and I’m Vice President of Solution Development at a business process outsourcing organization.”

I quit my job three months later.

Fortunately I had a plan. I had read that big companies paid a few thousand dollars a pop for sales and marketing material written by good writers. I was a good writer. The way I saw it, if I could produce one of these bad boys a week, I could make the same amount of money I made at my job.

As you’ve probably guessed, my plan didn’t work out as expected. I discovered pretty quick that being good at what you do isn’t enough to get people to buy what you’re selling. Our savings began to evaporate, and my wife began to ask questions about whether any of the handful of clients I managed to get were offering full-time work.

Instead of brushing up my résumé, I accelerated my hustle. I made cold calls all day. I went to networking events every evening. I wrote late into the night with my newborn perched on my chest. But when I looked at the numbers, we still weren’t going to be able to keep this going for more than another six months.

I got depressed.

This was not how the major motion picture of my life was supposed to turn out. I had taken a risk. I had followed my dreams. I had pursued my gift. Why wasn’t the promised worldly bounty following?

Then one afternoon I was walking to the subway after another unsuccessful sales meeting, and I passed that club my band had sold out years earlier. At first, the sight filled me with a new wave of self-loathing. Was my whole life one giant exercise in deluding myself? Even back then, what business did I have thinking I could make it as a musician? No one had ever said I was a good singer. I could barely play guitar. I had been a fool then, and I was a fool now. It was time to face the reality of mediocrity that I was destined to embody for the rest of my days.

But as I drew closer to the front door, I experienced a strange shift in my thinking. In my mind’s eye, I saw that line of fans snaking around the building and through the front door—every one of them there to see us. And we had made that happen despite a lead singer with a nonexistent range and songs that everyone agreed would never get on the radio.

For the first time, it occurred to me that whatever success we had achieved was in spite of musical talent. I remembered how in our earliest days, we drummed up attention by posting flyers all over town that read, “Dave Matthews Must Die!” (sorry, Dave). How I built a following for us by walking the streets and taking the stage dressed as a nun. How we got press coverage by positioning ourselves as the “party band for the coming apocalypse.”

Excitement began to well up in me for the first time in months. Maybe my real talent wasn’t music—or even writing. Maybe I had more in common with the early rock managers who behaved more like outlaws than businesspeople than I did with the bands they represented.

Thinking back on it, I had always been enamored of those legendary promoters—poring over their stories in my younger days so I could apply the lessons I learned. There was Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren who got England so agitated about the group that MPs brought it up in Parliament. There was Andrew Loog Oldham who came up with the saying, “Would you let your daughter go with a Rolling Stone?” There was Shep Gordon who turned the members of the original Alice Cooper Band into superstars by arranging for a truck to “accidentally” break down in the middle of London’s Piccadilly Circus during rush hour while carrying a massive billboard of Alice himself, naked but for a boa constrictor draped over his nether regions.

Now facing failure, I once again thought back to this cavalcade of miscreants and what they represented.

There have always been people who operate on the fringes of respectable society. Rock bands and their managers, of course. But also medicine show men and circus hucksters and mentalists. Cult leaders and spiritual gurus. Propagandists and political agitators.

Since the standard wisdom about letting good work speak for itself, hustling hard, and implementing sales funnels wasn’t doing me any good, I began to wonder whether there was anything in the strategies and techniques of these more unconventional operators that I could apply to my latest endeavor without losing my soul in the process.

THE STUDENT BECOMES A MASTER

It was at this point that I got a little obsessed. I read every biography I could find of history’s most notoriously shameless self-promoters. Then I moved on to obscure sociology texts, books about crowd psychology, and esoteric tomes from past centuries. Next I uncovered the modern-day equivalents of these masters and interviewed them. I observed them in their natural habitat.

Then I decided to conduct an experiment.

One of the strategies I saw these characters using time and again in my research was what I now call “picking fights and making enemies.” In short, they identify a person or a status quo idea and position themselves and their ideas in opposition to it. I had become convinced the tactic was effective.

And I already had the perfect target.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, he’s an internet marketer who made his name by preaching the gospel of hustle. In his books, videos, and talks, he constantly tells aspiring entrepreneurs that the only way to succeed is to spend the majority of every day talking about yourself online. For example, he talks about his habit of shooting tweets from the toilet at three in the morning as a healthy lifestyle choice.

His point of view had struck me as misguided for a long time—especially after I tried to put it into practice for myself and failed miserably. Now I finally screwed up the courage to say something about it. In an article I wrote on the subject, I publicly wondered why the only person who really seemed to be getting rich from the Vaynerchuk approach was Vaynerchuk himself. I posed the possibility that his advice was best suited for bolstering his own career rather than helping his followers bolster theirs. I presented the idea that a better strategy would be to stop paying attention to what he says to do and start modeling the mass psychology tactics he actually uses to turn young people into slavish acolytes.

My finger hovered over the mouse for a full 30 seconds before I clicked “Publish.” Within an hour of posting the article, Gary Vaynerchuk himself recorded a video chewing me out by name. Vaynerchuk’s horde of worshipful fans immediately began to berate me, calling me lazy, stupid, and jealous.

I got extremely nervous. I had really done it now. I had pissed off one of the biggest figures in the digital marketing space, and now I was paying the price. This was obviously my biggest blunder yet in the midst of a sea of whoppers.

But later that night I took a wayward look at my phone and saw something that blew me away. Over a period of 20 minutes, I gained a hundred new Twitter followers. I opened my email. My inbox was full of messages from people thanking me for saying what I had said because they had always felt the same way.

Within a week of publishing that article, I got my biggest client to date.

THE ART OF MORAL MANIPULATION

My initial experiment in benevolent mischief set off a snowball effect. Word got out about me beyond the initial fans of my contentious article, and potential clients started taking notice. Then potential clients became actual clients. Encouraged by the results, I ramped up my new approach. Before long, I had an unbroken flow of high-paying work. After a while, people began asking me how I had managed to do what I had done. Within a year of my big insight, my freelance writing practice had turned into a marketing agency.

It was the happy ending I had been looking for all along, and I should have felt unqualified joy. But I didn’t. Something still bugged me about the secret knowledge I had uncovered. And I knew I had to do something to set my mind at ease.

Even though I had cracked some sort of code and was doing everything I could to apply my newfound knowledge to help make people’s lives better, I was aware I was an unusual case. I understood that, on balance, the most malicious people among us tend to have the most intuitive understanding of these principles. At the same time, most well-meaning people fail to understand—or reject outright—these psychological realities.

As a result, harmful products, ideas, and ideologies tend to gain the most traction, while those that have the most potential to help people and move society forward often flounder.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I had left my well-paying corporate job to try to make a difference in the world, but I knew that using my newfound understanding solely to grow my own client base was not enough. These principles had the potential to give an audience to the world’s best ideas. To this end, I committed myself to spreading them wherever and whenever I could.

I grew up surrounded by opportunity, and the brush with financial instability I’ve described here is a fraction of the real long-term poverty so many in the world live with every day. That said, the experience did give me some small insight into what it really takes to break out and “make it” when you have limited resources.

It occurred to me that doing things the straightforward way is a privilege reserved for those with obvious options. It is no accident that the promoters, propagandists, and various mischief makers I studied were so often outsiders when they started out—whether by dint of poverty, class, or inclination. Driven by the need to operate under the radar, they invented ingenious workarounds that were designed to get the biggest results. These people were, in essence, the original hackers.

It is a tradition that moves and mutates as time goes on and surface-level details change but whose fundamentals remain relatively constant. Half a century after the heyday of the rock managers who inspired me, we see this dynamic play out in the dominant cultural form of the twenty-first century.

Hip-hop is an art form that was originally created by young people in some of the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in America. Today its biggest star has a net worth of more than a billion dollars. It should come as no surprise that the kind of boundary-breaking self-promotion that conventional society looks down on is celebrated in hip-hop in the form of the hype man—a figure that exists for the sole purpose of drumming up attention and excitement from the audience and on the streets.

It occurred to me that there is nothing inherently negative about hype at all. In fact, during those times when life inevitably backs us into a corner, perhaps hype is the secret door that could provide the only way out.

WHAT IS HYPE, REALLY?

When people say that something is all hype, they usually mean it’s devoid of substance—a phenomenon that owes any attention it gets to a crafty manipulator working behind the scenes to make it look far more attractive than it really is. Hype is trivial. Hype is distracting. Hype is empty. At its worst, hype is downright sinister.

But in reality, when handled with care, hype can be one of the most beneficial forces in existence. Hype is the practice of generating an intense emotional reaction from a large number of people to achieve a specific outcome. Cult leaders, propagandists, and other shameless self-promoters are naturals at this because they see human behavior more clearly than the rest of us. However, hype is not an inherently immoral force—it is simply a set of strategies, skills, and techniques. Throughout history it has been used to enable both creation and destruction.

According to common myths about success, making things happen requires iron will, single-minded vision, and tireless persistence. The truth is far more complicated. There have been many strong-willed, visionary go-getters whose ideas never made it past the walls of their huts. Bringing an idea to life requires hype. While the great inventors, engineers, scientists, and builders who worked on connecting the American coasts by locomotive and putting human beings on the moon should certainly get some credit, it was the hype artists who got people to show up and buy in that were truly indispensable.

With all of that said, there is a good reason hype has acquired such a bad reputation over the years. Sociopaths, narcissists, con artists, and other Machiavellian types are the most natural hype artists. They see the world through clearer eyes than the rest of us. However, this does not mean hype is innately immoral. Much like a gene seeking to reproduce, hype is amoral—a phenomenon altogether indifferent to societal notions of good and bad. And like biological evolution, hype is a creative force. Hype is not a mystical power, and it’s not mass hypnosis or brainwashing. At the same time, it is not just another word for persuasion or sales. To be a hype artist is to interact with people based on how they really act rather than how they say—or think—they do.

For those of us who want to do right by people, and do what we can to make the world a little better, the trick is to selectively borrow those tactics and stunts from history’s most effective attention-getters while leaving the unethical parts aside. Is this difficult? Sure it is. Is it worth it? Without a doubt.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched so many people with great ideas—ideas that could truly make the world a better place—fall short or get left behind because they didn’t recognize the truth about what it takes to get the word out about what they were doing and get people whipped up into a frenzy about it. At my agency, MicroFame Media, our express purpose is to apply the principles of hype to draw attention to projects with big ideas we believe are improving people’s lives. At a certain point, however, it began to dawn on me that even though I was proud of what my agency had accomplished for our clients, these strategies were too powerful to remain restricted to only those who happen to hire us.

Today success has become more dependent than ever before on the ability to mold perception. It became my mission to make sure those committed to making real contributions to the world have the same shot as those who are driven only by ruthless self-interest.

Setting this balance right is the reason I wrote the book you’re holding in your hands.

The purpose of The Hype Handbook is to allow well-meaning people to achieve their personal and professional ambitions. The book provides a success template that readers can use no matter their temperament, budget, or background or even their level of natural ability. I’ve read hundreds of books, studied stacks of academic papers, and conducted countless interviews and experiments to get to the heart of what hype is all about and how it works. From this intensive study of the world’s most effective boundary breakers and mischief makers, I have distilled 12 fundamental strategies that readers can use to bring into existence the reality they desire most.

A SNEAK PREVIEW

In the following pages, you’ll hear stories of behind-the-scenes Svengalis who turned nobodies into superstars; obscure crackpots who got millions of people to buy into their ideas; and unknowns, freaks, and weirdos who garnered around-the-clock media attention without spending a penny. This book will serve as the bible for people who want to get known, get what they want, and get paid, and it is for everyone. At the same time, the lessons found in The Hype Handbook have particular relevance for Millennials and Generation Z readers. Members of these cohorts have learned the hard way that playing by society’s rules doesn’t work. Many of them watched their parents invest dutifully into retirement accounts only to have their savings wiped out by unscrupulous investment schemes. The straight-line path of college to job seems increasingly absurd to them in the face of crushing student debt. And their heroes have been, at various points, hackers like Steve Jobs, dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg, and former criminals like Jay-Z. They are looking for a realistic path to success and are unprecedented in their willingness to promote themselves.

Each chapter focuses on a principle of hype that I have drawn from the promoters and persuaders I have spent years studying and interacting with. It will be the go-to resource for anyone looking to get unstuck by generating excitement and moving people to action.

What you will discover is that all successful hype efforts share a finite number of characteristics. While each master of hype tends to lean most heavily on one tactic, or sometimes a handful, they all rely in some part on the full array of strategies I will describe.

In a perfect world, the best work would attract the most attention on its own merits. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Instead, the single most important factor that determines whether something becomes a phenomenon or a flop is arguably the least understood—an ephemeral combination of manufactured drama, media manipulation, and behind-the-scenes maneuvering. By pinning down and organizing these principles, and presenting them in an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use format, I’ve attempted to make this magic formula accessible to the rest of us.

The human animal is not rational. We make decisions based on emotion and mental fallacies and then justify our choices afterward. So here’s my message to you: If you are a business owner, entrepreneur, executive, artist, activist, or thinker who can honestly say that you are truly trying to make the world a better place, it is your moral imperative to learn how to harness raw emotion and irrational thinking to your benefit. You must come to understand how people really make decisions, why they really get excited, and why they really choose to follow some people over others. Then you must use your understanding of these principles for good.

To make this happen, study the mischief makers, the propagandists, the con artists, the boundary breakers, the hype artists. Find the commonalities. Reverse-engineer how they do what they do.

If certain people are able to reliably attract so many to useless products and sinister causes through the power of mischief and mass manipulation, imagine what could be done if more and more of us learned how to use these skills in the service of good. That’s what this book is about. In an era where the line between spectacle and news is almost nonexistent, it is tempting to harken back to the myth of a golden age where reasoned discourse ruled the day and hype artists lurked shamefully in the shadows. The reality is far different. Hype is nothing new. It has, in fact—in one form or another—driven the course of human history since the time the first loinclothed scribe put reed to papyrus. Hype is as much a law of nature as natural selection. And like a gene seeking to reproduce, it is altogether indifferent to societal notions of good and evil.

It’s true that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was a master at reframing commonly accepted reality. But then again, so was Martin Luther King Jr. While notorious con man “Dr.” John R. Brinkley used spectacle to separate people from their hard-earned dollars, Richard Branson did the same. And while homicidal cult leader Jim Jones certainly knew how to foster feelings of transcendence, Mother Teresa made him look like an amateur. The book you hold in your hands takes the monopoly on hype away from the bad guys. It provides a blueprint the rest of us can use to move minds, get attention, and generate meaningful activity around our most cherished projects, businesses, causes, or works of art.

In short, The Hype Handbook shows you how to get everything you ever wanted without (necessarily) having to sell your soul. Read on to discover the secrets of how the human universe really works and how to use this newfound understanding to maximize the success of your business, your brand, or your bold new idea.