You want the short answer? Appeal to a person’s wants.

We’re all human. Everyone has a huge list of wants. Some of them might be more immediate than others. Some of you may want to new customers, some of you want help on homework, or maybe you want help moving with a friend’s help.

Let’s take the business example. Say you run a credit card company and are looking to get new customers. What should you do? You’ve seen it a thousand times. Send “pre-approved” credit cards to potential customers appealing to them with lower interest rates than competitors. But what’s special about this? The credit cards are literally a signature away from being your new customer.

You have to appeal to people’s wants. In this case, you’re appealing to not only to the financial side of a person’s intuition but you’re also subtly telling them that you’re going to make things easy as a customer. You didn’t force them to do hardly anything to sign up, so they get the reassurance that the rest of their experience with you will be the same.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Get them excited about helping you and they will come willingly.

If a customer is unsure of your service, offer a free trial. You can allow them to use your product for free, invest time into using it, and when they reach a limit all they’ve got to do is put in their credit card information. The flip side is you can ask for their information up front and give them 30 days to cancel. If you get them to register in the first place, it will be too easy for them to stay on as a fulltime customer.

Want help moving? Buy them dinner or help them with something they’ve been wanting to do. Get them excited, take them to that restaurant they’ve always wanted to go to, or help them finish their model airplane. After you’ve aligned interests, have gloves, hand carts, and lemonade ready for when they show up to help you move.

Students who show that they’ve actually tried working on the problems make it easy for you to help them because what they need is specific. Anytime a student asks “I need help?” and they’re not specific it feels like they’re just asking for you to do the homework for them. This puts the burden on the person helping to figure out what the student needs help on, if they really want to learn it, if they just want hte answer, among other things. When the student needs help with one specific thing it’s easy for you to say okay, I’ll help.

Make it easy for people to give what you want and they will do so. It doesn’t take much sometimes but you’ve got look at it from their eyes.

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