The Day I Started Seeing the Strings

How studying marketing taught me to recognize influence without becoming cynical about people.

I didn’t start studying marketing because I wanted to understand human nature.

I started because I was trying to help Amy to build her service business.

She had spent years getting genuinely good at her craft. The way she cared about her work, the care she put into it, was something I admired and wanted to support.

But being excellent at the work and building a business that reliably delivers that work are two different skills.

That’s not a criticism of her.

It’s a pattern I’ve seen in the trades, professional services, and martial arts schools. People spend years mastering a craft, then discover that knowing how to do the thing doesn’t automatically teach you how to build the business that lets you do it for a living.

Attracting the right customers, communicating the value of your work, managing the money, and keeping the whole operation running require a different kind of learning.

And I wasn’t born knowing any of it either.

So I took classes. I read books. I studied business so I could actually help with the business side.

One of the best books that helped me organize all of it was Josh Kaufman’s The Personal MBA.

Sidenote: If you decide to but the book, I recommend the paperback print version because you will be flipping back and forth throughout the book and they didn't do a good job of putting in hyperlinks in the ebook and you can't flip around in the audiobook easily.

Kaufman lays out five interconnected parts of a business: value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance.

Marketing was one of the five.

Just one.

And it was something I needed to understand.

I didn’t expect it to change how I saw people.

But that’s exactly what happened.

A Business Is More Than Being Good at Your Trade

Take electrical work, since I know it best.

You can spend years mastering your tools, your materials, the code, and the practical judgment required to do the job safely and well.

That’s a real accomplishment, hard earned, the kind nobody hands you.

Then somebody promotes you to foreman.

Congratulations.

Now you’re responsible for planning, scheduling, coordinating, explaining, listening, resolving disagreements, and helping other people do their work well.

None of which involves your hands on the tools half the time.

Being a great electrician doesn’t automatically make you a great foreman.

The same truth applies to anyone with a skill they want to offer professionally.

You can pour years into becoming excellent at the service itself and still need to learn how the business around it works.

That recognition is one reason I’m building The Leader’s Dojo now.

I’ve watched martial arts school owners pour themselves into becoming capable teachers and practitioners, only to struggle with the systems that help a school attract and keep students.

None of that makes somebody a bad teacher or a bad practitioner.

It means there’s another skill set, sitting right beside the ones they already worked so hard to earn.

So I started studying marketing for practical reasons.

And then I discovered something I hadn’t gone looking for at all.

I Stopped Asking, “What’s Wrong With These People?”

The more I learned about persuasion, the more I started recognizing patterns in situations that used to leave me genuinely confused.

A person hears an impressive job title and accepts an argument without examining it.

A whole crowd moves toward something, so suddenly it feels safer to follow than to ask whether it’s any good.

An opportunity becomes irresistible the moment somebody says it won’t be there tomorrow.

A person trusts somebody almost instantly because they seem to be part of the same tribe.

I used to watch behavior I didn’t understand and think:

Sometimes I still do.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve transcended the instinct.

But more and more, I ask different questions:

• What are they responding to?
• What do they believe they’re protecting?
• What shortcut are they reaching for to make this decision right now?

And here’s the version that stings, because it points right back at me.

That’s a big part of why Robert Cialdini’s Influence landed on me the way it did.

His original book mapped six principles of persuasion: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.

The expanded edition adds unity, the pull of shared identity.

These aren’t magic commands, and they don’t explain every decision a human being makes.

What they are is a way to recognize why an appeal might work on us before we’ve actually stopped to examine it.

And that recognition changed me in a way I wasn’t expecting.

It didn’t make me cynical.

It made me curious.

We’re Still Tribal Creatures

We’re walking around with smartphones and electric cars and instant access to more information than any generation before us.

But underneath all that, we still care desperately about belonging.

We still notice authority and status.

We still respond when other people seem confident and certain.

We still feel the pull to return a favor, honor a commitment, and grab an opportunity that looks like it’s slipping away.

Those tendencies aren’t automatically bad.

Life would be exhausting if we had to investigate every small decision from scratch.

We lean on habits, experience, and social cues to get through the day, and often they serve us well.

But sometimes somebody learns how to press those buttons, deliberately or not.

The point isn’t that we’re secretly irrational fools.

It’s that the way we actually make decisions isn’t always as conscious or logical as we like to imagine.

I want to be careful here, because there’s a smug version of this lesson and I’ve seen it plenty.

It’s the version where the person who understands persuasion looks down at the poor rubes being manipulated, shaking their head at how easily people get swept up.

I don’t want to be that guy.

I’m one of the rubes, too.

Knowing how influence works doesn’t magically stop those same tendencies from working on me.

Learning about influence didn’t teach me that other people are gullible.

It taught me that being human comes with patterns of behavior that we share.

They’re human.

And so am I.

If It Bleeds, It Leads

There’s a saying associated with the news business.

Trouble gets attention.

Danger gets attention.

Conflict, fear, outrage, and catastrophe have a way of making it hard to look away.

And to be fair, some of those stories matter.

Real hazards deserve attention, and an honest warning can save somebody from serious harm.

There’s a difference between sensationalism and a legitimate alarm.

But while I was studying marketing, I was introduced to a pattern that shows up in most kinds of persuasive messages.

• Problem
• Agitate
• Solution

PAS.

You identify a problem.

You turn up the emotional stakes.

Then you offer a solution.

Used responsibly, that can genuinely help people.

A person may not realize how serious a problem really is until somebody walks them through what could happen.

A clear, honest picture of the risk, followed by a real answer, can make it easier to act when acting is the right call.

But there’s a darker version of the same structure.

Keep people worried.

Make the problem feel bigger, closer, more catastrophic than it is.

Keep them fixed on everything that might go wrong.

Then present your answer as the way out.

​At that point, the person may have stopped evaluating whether the answer is actually any good.

They’re just trying to make the fear stop.

And fear is a hell of a thing to make a decision through.

You see versions of that pattern in advertising, political messaging, commentary, and even in the stories you tell yourself about your own life.

I don’t believe every alarming headline is a trick.

I don’t believe every person describing a problem has a hidden agenda.

Life really does contain real problems, and naming them can be an act of service.

But I do want to know two things before I hand over my attention or my money.

Is this message helping me understand reality, or just keeping me agitated?

And does the proposed solution actually address the problem, or just the feeling the problem created?

Solving Problems Doesn’t End the Problem of Living

Here’s another lesson I keep having to relearn, because I keep hoping it isn’t true.

The solution to one problem often reveals a new set of problems.

You get your money under control.

Great.

Now you have decisions about protecting it, growing it, and figuring out what the freedom it buys is actually for.

You get promoted to foreman.

Great.

Now the hard part isn’t just the installation anymore. It’s also the people, the schedule, the coordination.

You escape a bad position in jiu-jitsu.

Great.

Your partner adjusts, and now you’ve got a different problem to solve.

None of that means you shouldn’t solve problems.

Obviously you should.

What it means is that the promise of a life free of difficulty, if someone sells you one, is a promise they can’t keep.

And that’s worth remembering, because it’s one of the most tempting promises anybody can make.

Buddhist teaching uses the word dukkha, often translated as suffering or dissatisfaction.

I don’t read that as meaning life has no joy.

I read it as meaning change, uncertainty, and unmet expectations are built into being alive.

They don’t go away once you hit some magical milestone.

So I’m not hunting for a life with no more challenges.

I don’t think one’s on offer.

I’d like a healthier relationship with the challenges that keep arriving.

Recognize the problem.

Understand it.

Decide what actually matters.

Take action.

Learn from what happens.

Then deal with whatever comes next.

You don’t have to turn every new challenge into a crisis.

Some of them are just the weather of being alive.

The Tightrope I’m Learning to Walk

Now here’s the uncomfortable part, because the story turns around and aims at me.

I’m building my own skills as a content creator, an entrepreneur, and a service provider.

I write articles.

I work on headlines.

I pay attention to what catches people’s eyes and makes them want to read.

And the better I get at marketing, the more carefully I have to watch the line between persuasion and manipulation.

Because I can use these exact same skills to help you recognize something useful, or to work you up into an emotional state where you’ll click without thinking.

So how do I tell which one I’m doing?

The best test I’ve found so far is to ask what I’m really after.

Am I trying to help the reader, or am I treating the reader like an ATM?

One of those comes from a place of service.

The other comes from self-service wearing service’s clothes.

But I don’t think that test is enough on its own, and I’ll be honest about why.

Somebody can genuinely believe they’re helping and still oversell, exaggerate, or pressure a person into a decision that wasn’t right for them.

Good intentions don’t make a bad promise true.

So the intent matters, but so do the outcomes.

And so does the truthfulness of the claim, whether the offer actually fits the person’s need, whether the thing I wrote delivers what the headline promised, and whether the person can freely say no without being punished for it.

That’s a heavier bar than “I meant well.”

I think it has to be.

Here’s the promise I’ll try to hold myself to.

I don’t want to be the guy who writes a sensational headline, grabs your attention, and then fails to give you something real on the other side of it.

If I’m asking you to spend your time reading something, I owe you a genuine idea, a useful story, or a question worth thinking about.

I won’t always get that right.

I’m still learning, and I’ll keep learning.

Which is why I’d genuinely appreciate you telling me when I do it well, and especially when I don’t.

If a headline pulled you in but the article didn’t deliver, tell me.

If something actually made you think, tell me that too.

If I’m drifting toward clickbait and telling myself it’s fine, call it out.

That’s how I get better without losing sight of why I started doing this in the first place.

Curious, Not Cynical

I don’t want to live assuming every salesperson is a crook, every expert is a fraud, every headline is a lie, and everyone who disagrees with me has lost their mind.

That sounds exhausting.

And it isn’t the lesson I carried out of Influence.

I want to stay curious instead.

Why did that message catch my attention?

Why do I trust this person?

Why does the crowd suddenly make me feel safer?

Why does the deadline make the thing look more valuable than it did yesterday?

Who benefits from the choice I’m about to make?

And what would I actually decide if I had a little more space to think?

I don’t expect to become immune to influence.

I’m not, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of self-deception.

But I can get better at noticing it.

And the moment I notice it, I get something back that the pattern wants to take from me:

A pause.

A beat.

A little room between the trigger and the reaction.

In that room I can ask another question instead of grabbing the first answer.

I can be a little less judgmental about the person whose behavior I don’t understand.

And I can be a little more honest about the shortcuts quietly steering my own decisions.

That’s not immunity.

It’s awareness.

And for a guy who used to just see people acting strangely and file them under “what’s wrong with them,” awareness feels like a pretty good place to land.

⚔️ The Dojo Drill: Notice the Tug

The next time a headline, an offer, a conversation, or a very confident expert makes you feel like you have to act right now, pause and ask three questions.

1. What’s the actual problem?

What do I actually know, and what am I being encouraged to fear?

2. What’s pulling on me?

Is it scarcity, authority, belonging, obligation, or the fact that everyone else seems to agree?

3. Does the proposed solution deserve my trust?

What evidence supports it?

Whose interests does it serve?

Would I still choose it if I weren’t emotionally worked up?

Sometimes the right decision really is to act quickly.

Some problems are real and time-sensitive, and delaying has its own cost.

But make it a decision, not a reflex.

Over the next week, we’re going to walk through Cialdini’s principles one at a time.

Not so we can get better at pushing other people’s buttons, but so we can get better at noticing our own.

Because most people aren’t crazy.

They’re human.

And so am I.

📚 From the Leader’s Library

​Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — Robert Cialdini​

Why?

What if some of the decisions you believe you’re making freely are being influenced by things you don’t even notice?

In Influence, Robert Cialdini explores the psychological principles that shape why people say yes, whom they trust, and how they make decisions—sometimes without consciously recognizing what’s influencing them.

I’m not recommending this book so you can learn to manipulate people.

I’m recommending it so you can recognize when someone might be manipulating you.

Whether it’s advertising, sales, social media, politics, or everyday relationships, understanding what motivates people helps you recognize the invisible pressures behind your decisions.

And it can help you communicate more effectively, honestly, and respectfully with others.

The goal isn’t to become better at controlling people. It’s to become harder to manipulate—and more deliberate about the choices you make.