The most powerful thing in the world.

Year 1991, PV Narsimha Rao was dying. His neck would wobble every time he opened his mouth to speak. Nobody thought he would live more than a few months. Then something miraculous happened. His health improved. Five years later, he retired after serving as the 9th PM of India, before finally dying in 2004.

What made PV Narsimha defy death and live 13 years more?

Freud had famously said that all motivation comes from two desires: the sex urge and the desire to be great. Desires rule our world. The most common of them are money, sex, and power. But a few people have still managed to control, even eliminate them.

The force that transformed a dying man into one of the best PMs India has ever seen was not Power. Not even Money. That intangible, yet the single most powerful force is the “feeling of importance”. The same thing which Freud described as “the desire to be great”. People have learned to tame the other natural desires, but NOONE can control this desire.

Everyone gets his feeling of importance in a unique way. Politicians feel themselves important when they are able to exert power over others. Criminals and terrorists get this feeling when they see others being terrified of them, and after successfully committing crimes. This desire is the reason why organizations give sexy and meaningless titles to their employees, to make them feel they are valuable.

But this desire to be great doesn’t necessarily comes from the ability to exert power or to make large-scale changes. Some people get it from as simple things as being different from others. This is what monks and hermits do. This is also what most researchers do, they feel themselves superior to others when they discover something the ignorant public doesn’t know about. This feeling of superiority drives the entire research area.

The same line of reasoning is used to brainwash people. “Do you want to live like millions of others who live a mundane life, those who take birth, have families, work like slaves all their lives, and ultimately die without achieving anything. Their life has no meaning. Their death doesn’t affect anything. Their existence has no value. Do you want to be like that or do you want to make an impact in the world?” From religious preachers to terrorists, everyone uses these lines to persuade people to join their organization by giving them a feeling of importance. The latest addition in this category is Anonymous. Just watch their last video.

If you know this one thing, you know the secret of all negotiations and persuasions. This is the ultimate secret of effectively dealing with people. Find out how the other person gets his feeling of importance, and give it to him. If you are able to do that, he is your slave.
(Some ideas taken from How to Win Friends and Influence People)

P.S. I am back to writing, so expect more interesting articles.