21 out of 21 people found this review helpful.
Start Your Own Cult
Date of Review: May 8, 2001
The Bottom Line: You won't believe how easy these tactics are to understand and incorporate into your everyday life.
It was just too tantalizing to ignore -- get anyone to do anything you say? There must be something unethical about that! Before I knew it, I was walking out of Barnes & Noble with the $12.95 paperback version of this "Sensational New York Times Bestseller."
After well over two hours of non-stop reading, I realized that this great little book could potentially be so much more than that -- it could be my manual for world domination.
Anyone who has taken any sort of college-level psychology course knows that anything that deals with the complex human mind can be a little complicated. We're generally taught to believe that there are no absolutes, and exceptions to every rule. Not according to Dr. Lieberman, though. He explains in a very straight-forward and easy to comprehend manner that there are many specific subconscious similarities to the way every human processes information, and if you can learn to incorporate these truths into your thought process, you will understand how to slip under the common person's radar and influence them to see you, your ideas, and others in the light you are attempting to represent.
The biggest impression I walked away with after reading this book is that most of these tactics are just common sense. For example, have you just done something incredibly stupid and made a lousy first impression on someone? Dr. Lieberman says that there is only one thing you should say to reverse the person's opinion of you -- "I feel so embarrassed." It seems a bit silly and uncomfortable at first, but according to Dr. Lieberman that little statement actually tells the offended party three very important things about us at once that makes them forgive our previous blunder (but to find out what they are you'll have to get the book!).
I wanted to apply some of his tactics right away, to see if I could and to see if they really worked. There is a gentleman I associate with through my job that is just a pill to work with -- he's always cranky and although he constantly promises to complete projects for our organization, it's almost impossible to ever get him really do what he says he'll do. By applying Dr. Lieberman's principles in Section III, Chapter 15, I was able to not only get him to happily agree to my next request, he followed through on it THAT DAY. That accomplishment alone was enough to convince me that Dr. Lieberman is a genius.
The book itself is incredibly easy to follow. Those who are used to heavy books with redundant text may feel a bit neglected in the brief chapters (some are only a page or more in length). Trust me, if you read them carefully you'll know to not want anything more than what he offers. For further clarification of some of the more technical explanations, Dr. Lieberman offers examples of his principles or further explanations in "Power Points" and every chapter ends with a summary of the main facts you've just learned.
Get out your highlighter and set aside a few hours to dive right in to this amazing guide to human psychology. Then determine what would be best applied to better your life right now and spend some time learning it, living it, loving it.
