Lessons Learned - Class 10: Persuasion

I need practice. I'm not just talking about practice on speaking or participating or on a skill... I need to practice everything in one way or another before I do it. I can only function in my life by practicing what I do to a point where it becomes a pattern I can live by. When I was in sales and service, this practice was the only thing that allowed me to understand how I could persuade people about what I knew.

I knew games, pieces of fiction and distraction that I had enjoyed since I was a kid. I knew how they made me feel, I knew how they affected my interactions with other people, I knew how people could change when in the middle of a game. I practiced how to play games, and then I practiced trying to figure out who I could play in which game. Chess, Poker, Clue, Mastermind, and almost a hundred other titles and rules. I knew how to act in the games because of the rules and that gave me structure.

So when I got a job selling and buying the games I practiced, I had learned to observe what people wanted and how they might react to various structures and methods. I didn't tell them what they wanted, I asked what they liked. I didn't tell them what 'the good game' was, I asked what they wanted to get from a game. I didn't know it, but I was applying some of the very methods that were described in this section. But now that I know how others see and view these methods, perhaps I can practice them better.