Fascinating fact about me:
I studied math in college.
Like I said, fascinating. And it gets even more so, because I was never good at math.
Not in elementary school. Not in high school.
Somehow though, when college came, and I could choose to study what I wanted, and I never again had to take any math classes, I wound up taking math classes, and lots of them.
I think I was trying to prove something to myself. I managed it, too, because it turns out you can get a lot done with just curiosity and internal motivation, even in the absence of talent.
Anyways, one time I was taking a math class about “complex analysis” — about how to work with complex numbers, which have both a real and an “imaginary” component (ie, involving the square root of -1).
Whatever. Don’t worry about the math.
The important thing is simply that complex numbers have their own bizarre rules for how they are multiplied and divided, how you take a derivative, how you do integrals.
I never understood complex numbers, not really. But I diligently worked through the course.
I remember a specific homework problem, and the epiphany that came with it.
I was struggling to apply the rules in the textbook. But with some derring-do and with a few leaps of logic, I managed to finally solve the problem and reach the answer.
The answer was simple and elegant.
I remember a feeling of understanding washing over me. I got it, whatever this particular section was about. It made sense to me now. All the struggle and confusion and work had paid off.
Then, as a proper diligent student, I double-checked my answer in the back of the textbook.
It turned out I was 100% wrong. Not just that I’d made some screwup in the calculation, but that I was completely off track. I had misapplied and misunderstood the rules. My feeling of understanding, which had washed over me and given me such relief, corresponded to nothing in reality.
When I was a kid, like 9 years old, I had a feeling I understood myself and the world perfectly.
It was pretty late in life, in my late teens or maybe my early 20s, when I started to notice cracks in my confident understanding of the world.
Gradually, I started to develop a theory that emotions like certainty, understanding, and insight are like maple syrup.
Maple syrup can be poured over whatever you want — pancakes, French toast, waffles.
Likewise, emotions can be poured over ideas that are true, ideas are not true, or even ideas that are complete waffles, meaning some kind of undefined nonsense, like my understanding of complex analysis rules.
On the one hand, it doesn’t get more unsettling than this. I realized my most basic, certain feelings of rightness are not actually reliable.
On the other hand, it was a powerful realization.
For one thing, it was liberating.
It meant that, even if I’m sure — if it cannot, will not, won’t work, if it’s black and not white, if I am right and not wrong — I don’t really know for a fact. It pays to go get some real-world data — the equivalent of checking the right answer in the back of the textbook.
For another, I’m not the only person whose emotions work like this. I find it’s pretty universal.
And it turns out there are ways to get other people to pour their own emotional syrups — whether of desire, or of insight, or of trust — over pancakes, French toast, waffles, donuts, rice, hot dogs, sponge cake, and pretty much any basic foodstuff you may have to offer them.
You can make hot dogs sweet and sponge cake delicious, even irresistible, if you pour enough maple syrup on them.
And you can make honest, dry, uninspiring information exciting and eye-opening and urgent, much in the same way.
Perhaps you’d like some specific techniques of influence, which you can apply to get your audience to pour out their own emotional maple syrups over your offers?
You can find such techniques, delivered daily to your inbox, inside my Daily Email Habit service.
You even double-check your own answers against my answers, which like today, tend to be based on the day’s Daily Email Habit prompt.
In case you’d like to prove something to yourself: