Presuasion is what you say immediately before you deliver your message that leverages your success tremendously.

The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others.

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.

What new psychology suggests, it's the factor that is top of consciousness at the moment before you make that economic decision that will win the day.

At the beginning of each lecture I say, 'Here's a set of events unexplainable by common sense, and I promise you'll be able to solve this mystery at the end of class.'

The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it.

What I'm talking about is pre-suasion, directing their minds to the moment before they experience the content. There's this interesting study. A guy goes to a shopping mall in France. And he tries to get women's phone numbers as they pass various shops, so he could call for a date. But in neither of those cases was he very successful. He only got a number 13 percent of the time. But there was one kind of shop that doubled his success rate when women were passing it, a flower shop. Why? Because flowers put women in the mind-set of romance.