A troubling statement makes us want to think of exceptions to it that would prove that statement to be wrong.

“Outliers are interesting, but they rarely matter,” is a troubling statement, and you may already be thinking of exceptions to it. But it remains true nonetheless.

This second statement is also true. “If there were no outliers, there would be no new inventions, no innovations, no progress. We would be trapped forever in the status quo.”

These seemingly contradictory statements can both be true because there are two kinds of outliers.

Leonardo da Vinci made marvelous art and filled fabulous sketchbooks with his insightful ideas, but he didn’t really change anything. He was just an interesting outlier whose mind was ahead of his time.

Rare is the outlier who throws a pebble into the ocean of time and shifts the world off its axis. Electricity is harnessed. Computers are invented. Someone connects them and now everyone knows everything all the time.

“What distinguishes the past from the present is not biology, nor psychology, but rather technology. If the world has changed, it is because we have changed the world.”

– Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson in their new book, Abundance

Technology changes the world, but persuasion changes hearts and minds.

I am an ad writer.

When I was in my 20s, I was told,

“People never change their mind. If you give a person the same information they were given in the past, they will make the same decision they made in the past. When a person appears to have ‘changed their mind,’ what they have really done is made a new decision based on new information.*”

Ten years later I realized that those people were trying to use logic to create “persuasion technology.” Their mistake was assuming that people make their decisions logically. But people do not trust new information when it disagrees with their belief system.

New information may allow you to win the argument, but it rarely wins the heart.

And a person convinced against their will, remains unconvinced, still.

Wash away the opinions, bravado, and fluff, and you will find that most people are NOT seeking new information. They are seeking identity reinforcement.

Bertrand Russell was a mathematician and a logician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature eight years before I was born.

He said,

“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.”

When your goal is persuasion, don’t begin with new information. Begin by agreeing with what they already believe. Meet them where they are. Only then can you hope to lead them to where you want them to go.

Abraham Lincoln knew that persuasion is easier when you begin at a point of mutual agreement.

“If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what you will, is the greatest high-road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the...