Sagar Acharya's Reviews > Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

I've always valued competence way more than professionalism. Since quite some time, I've never tried to present myself better, but just in an original way to others(assuming they'll question me with things they don't understand) with seldom any success. This books made me think quite in the opposite direction to that attitude.

It started off with the concept that creating the moment where people are ready to accept your pitch (be it of a product, convincing, dating nature) is extremely more important than what's in the message. To do that, Robert Cialdini presented different studies in which subconsciously, people were made to like someone or create a bias towards some product.
eg. To ask the person for an advice on something, capturing his attention by appreciating a public renowned figure like M.S. Dhoni(say) in India in extremely subtle ways.
There's a high chance that people like other people to respect their views and Indians liking M.S.Dhoni. It's so subtle that it changes people's attitudes towards following questions without them understanding it.

An absolutely crazy concept was attentional bias. Huge. Daniel Kahneman was asked what is the most important thing that people need to know. He explained that things in attention seem much more important to you than any other thing. Looking at it from different point of views, you'll appreciate how we can be happy using attention, why average authors giving decent enough talks on stage are seen as outstanding achievers by audience, and many more things. This was mentioned in the chapter named "What's focal is causal".

Towards the mid-part, he started having lots of unconnected theories based on biased studies where it got a bit strange. But an amazing book to read overall.