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Length: ~3hrs, 16 lessons

My rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

My one-liner takeaway: Humans aren’t rational, and knowing the weak spots can help you get ahead and also protect you from yourself.

Dan starts off by emphasizing that persuasion is not about pressuring and that it’s a universal skill, encouraging us to drop our preconceived notions about pushy salesmen. In order to be effective at it, we have to first tune our minds to how the person across from us thinks. Through a few silly (and unnecessary) exercises, he makes a point about empathy and listening being the fundamental starting point. From there, he provides a broad array of tactics ranging from the “five whys”, social proof, cognitive biases like loss aversion, context framing and many others to improve our chances of success. I took more notes in this class than any other, often pausing lessons mid-way to reflect on how to practically apply them and how I’ve been convinced by smart marketing.

One lesson that stuck out for me was his advice to shift from problem-solving to problem-finding. He uses an example of someone shopping for a vacuum cleaner. Their problem may seem obvious at first, they need a vacuum cleaner, but their real problem is that they want clean floors. This opens up the possibility for up-selling the person cleaning services, carpet stain removers, etc. My personal take is was that problem-finding often is really problem-creating. All day products and services are promoted to us that we become convinced we need to have complete lives. Recently, I was shopping for a simple bike trainer for the winter season. My problem was simple: I want a cheap way to ride indoors. After reading through product reviews, my problem grew: I was convinced I needed a quiet trainer and only the expensive magnetic resistance models would do. There was an overwhelming amount of strategies presented, and I’ll likely give this course a second watch. I already have Dan’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, so I’m hoping to internalize as much of this as possible.

If you’d like to hear it directly from Dan, check out his course here. As of now there are over 100 instructors to learn from, with more being added every week!

This review is part of a larger series, where I try learning from every single course within the catalog. Find my full list here.