Oren Klaff Quotes

If you have to explain your authority, power, position, leverage, and advantage, you do not hold the stronger frame.

That eureka moment has been carefully planned and programmed to deliver an insight at exactly the right time. When you put the pieces together before the detectives do, you feel smart, happy, powerful, and in control (exactly the emotions needed to motivate you to buy some canned beer, frozen pizza, and extra-soft toilet tissue). And you tune in next week so you can feel that way again.

To instigate a power frame collision, use a mildly shocking but not unfriendly act to cause it. Use defiance and light humor. This captures attention and elevates your status by creating something called “local star power.” (You will read about creating status and local star power in Chapter 3.)

No pitch or message is going to get to the logic center of the other person’s brain without passing through the survival filters of the crocodile brain system first. And because of the way we evolved, those filters make pitching anything extremely difficult.

Make people feel like the idea is coming from them and they will place more value on it, believe it more deeply, adopt it more quickly, and remember it more easily.

When Jack Welch eventually wrote his biography, it wasn’t called Intense Analysis; it was titled, Straight from the Gut.

You create novelty by violating the target’s expectations in a pleasing way.

Let's consider three of the most fundamental behaviors of human beings:
1. We chase that which moves away from us.
2. We want what we cannot have.
3. We only place value on things that are difficult to obtain.

Understanding how to harness and apply the power of frames is the most important thing you will ever learn.

Our thought process exactly matches our evolution: First, survival. Then, social relationships. Finally, problem solving.

The Intrigue Story Your intrigue story needs the following elements: 1. It must be brief, and the subject must be relevant to your pitch. 2. You need to be at the center of the story. 3. There should be risk, danger, and uncertainty. 4. There should be time pressure — a clock is ticking somewhere, and there are ominous consequences if action is not taken quickly. 5. There should be tension — you are trying to do something but are being blocked by some force. 6. There should be serious consequences — failure will not be pretty.

This is called creating local star power. This is critically important. With local star power, you’ll be able to succeed in pitching audiences who don’t know you; the ability to create and sustain local star power literally is going to mean the difference between success and failure. The first impression we make on another person is based on that person’s automatic calculation of our social value. As a survival mechanism, the other person’s brain is making it a priority to understand where you fit in the social structure. The person makes a hasty judgment using three measurable criteria: your wealth, your power, and your popularity. Based on some quick mental shorthand, the person is going to assign you a social status level, and from that calculation, a frame will be fixed. The person will not necessarily even consciously think about this. The people jaywalking behind the man in the nice suit did not deliberately pause to consider his status or think about whether it meant he was likely to cross streets safely. They just automatically calculated his likely status and behaved accordingly.

Prizing is the sum of the actions you take to get to your target to understand that he is a commodity and you are the prize. Successful prizing results in your target chasing you, asking to be involved in your deal.

There are limits to the human attention span, which is why a pitch must be brief, concise, and interesting,

Narrative and analytical information does not coexist. It cannot; that’s simply impossible. The human brain is unable to be coldly analytical and warmly engaged in a narrative at the same time. This is the secret power of the intrigue frame. When your target drills down into technical material, you break that frame by telling a brief but relevant story that involves you. This is not a story that you make up on the spot; this is a personal story that you have prepared in advance and that you take to every meeting you have. Since all croc brains are pretty similar, you will not need more than one story because the intrigue it will contain will have the same impact on every audience. You need to be at the center of the story, which immediately redirects attention back to you. People will pause, look up, and listen because you are sharing something personal.