A few days ago, after reading a terrible article in The New Yorker, I decided to stop drinking coffee. At least for the next month.
It’s not a giant sacrifice. I was never a coffee snob, and coffee doesn’t do much for my flat-lining productivity.
But I do enjoy getting up in the morning, brewing some cheap coffee on the stove, and then thinning it to hell with cow milk. It’s a small pleasure, but in my life, that means a lot.
Even so, no coffee for the next month. That article spoiled it for me. It told the history of coffee, and it explained how the powers-that-be tricked society into getting addicted to coffee for their own evil ends.
To paraphrase Dave Chappelle, “And all these years, I thought I liked coffee because it’s delicious. Turns out, I got no say in the matter.”
Besides The New Yorker, I’m also reading a book called The Catalyst. The first chapter is all about reactance, which is what happened with me and coffee and that article. But the book gives another and better example of it:
Apparently, back in the 90s, the state of Florida ran one of the rare successful anti-smoking campaigns targeting teens. The ads didn’t tell teens about the harms of smoking. They didn’t tell teens to stop.
All the campaign did was highlight the devious ways the tobacco industry used to manipulate kids into getting hooked. As the campaign ran, teen smoking rates dropped by something like a million percent. Eventually, tobacco companies sued the state to get the campaign to stop.
Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” Something similar happens in persuasion and marketing and sales. The opposite of making the sale is usually not objections. It’s simply indifference.
Of course, the best way to deal with indifferent, ambivalent prospects is to never face them. Selling those kinds of people is almost impossible. At least that’s what I thought until I read that stuff about reactance.
People want to have a feeling of control and agency in their lives. If they feel that’s been violated, they get very motivated to change. Even to the point of doing the exact opposite of what they were doing up to now.
That’s reactance.
I’d still rather not face indifferent prospects. But if I do have to face them, I know what I’ll do to open the sale. I’ll simply show them how choosing the status quo is not actually their decision, but the work of some puppet master behind the scenes.
Maybe you can try the same. If you so choose, of course.
Finally, here’s some facts that are not designed to persuade you in any way. I write a daily email newsletter. It deals with topics like the one you’ve just read about. The way to get it is here. And I in no way encourage you to sign up for it.