POWER

When Asking For Help, Appeal To People's Self-Interest, Never To Their Mercy Or Gratitude

In your quest for power, you will constantly find yourself in the position of asking for help from those more powerful than you. There is an art to asking for help, an art that depends on your ability to understand the person, with whom you are dealing, and to not confuse your needs with theirs.

Most people never succeed at this, because they are completely trapped in their own wants and desires. They start from the assumption that the people they are appealing to have a selfless interest in helping them. They talk as if all their needs mattered to these people, who probably couldn't care less. Sometimes they refer to larger issues: a great cause, or grand emotions, such as love and gratitude. They go for the big picture, when simple every day realities would have had much greater appeal. What they do not realize is that powerful people are absorbed in needs of their own, and if you make no appeal to his self-interest, he merely sees you as desperate, or, at best, a waste of his time.

A key step in the process is too understand the other person's psychology. Is he vain? Is he concerned about his reputation or his social standing? Does he have enemies, which you could help him vanquish? Is he simply motivated by money and power?

When the Mongols invaded China, in the twelfth century, they threatened to obliterate a culture, which had thrived for over two thousand years. Their leader, Genghis Khan, saw nothing in China that lacked pasturing for his horses, and he decided to destroy the place, leveling all its cities, for "it would be better to exterminate the Chinese and let the grass grow." It was not a soldier, a general, or a king, who saved the Chinese from destruction but a man named Yelu Ch'u-Ts'ai. A foriegner himself, Ch'u-Ts'ai had come to appreciate the superiority of Chinese culture. He managed to make himself a trusted adviser to Genghis Khan, and persuaded him that he would reap riches out of the place, if instead of destroying, he simply taxed everyone. Khan saw the wisdom in this and did as advised.

When Khan took the city of Kaifeng, after a long siege and decided to massacre its resident, Ch'u-Ts'ai told him that the finest craftsmen and engineers in China had fled to Kaifeng, and it would be better to put them to use. Kaifeng was spared. Never before had Genghis Khan shown such mercy, but is really was not mercy that saved Kaifeng. Ch'u-Ts'ai knew Khan well. He was a barbaric peasant, who cared nothing for culture, or indeed anything other than warfare and practical results. Ch'u-Ts'ai chose to appeal to Khan's greed.

Self-interest is the lever that will move people. Once you can make them see how you can in some way meet their needs or advance their cause, the resistance to your requests for help will magically fall away. At each step on the way to acquiring power, you must train yourself to think your way inside the other person's mind, to see their needs and interests, to get rid of the screen of your own feelings that obscure the truth and there will be no limits to what you can accomplish.

Any questions??