They’ll think you’re a genius.

How to hook the right people.

We all remember them. The good teachers.

The teachers that taught us something. I can count on my hands the grade school teachers and college professors that made a meaningful impact on my life, but more importantly in my development as a functioning member of society. I bet you could too.

I took a finance class in college and learned more about people than I did money. No complaints there, and most certainly not by fault of my professor. (Finance? I’d rather drill holes into rocks.) Because, while I still squint at the stock market, I have been given the ultimate tool. The tool to make people think I am a genius. And I’m going to share it with you.

When you meet people, the kinds of people you need to impress or cultivate a wielding sort of relationship with (if you know what I mean), refrain from talking about yourself.

Ask. Listen. Repeat.

Ask them about themselves. Respond only when asked a question. Share only when asked to share. Sounds like foolproof way to fuel a narcissistic fire, believe me I know. But, people will respond positively. People will regard you as a good, intellectual, human being. And that my friend, is your foot in the door.

For those of you groaning at the seemingly over simplistic suggestion (I can hear you), how about some science to back that thing up.

But wait, there’s science!

According to the good folks at Scientific American, people spend about 60% of their conversational time talking about themselves, a number that increases by 20% when the conversation is channeled via social media (holy 80%!).

Now we ask the scientists, why? Why do people talk about themselves so much? And the boiled down answer is: because it feels good.

In this study, answering questions about the self always resulted in greater activation of neural regions associated with motivation and reward (i.e., NAcc, VTA) than answering questions about others, and answering questions publicly always resulted in greater activation of these areas than answering questions privately. Importantly, these effects were additive; both talking about the self and talking to someone else were associated with reward, and doing both produced greater activation in reward-related neural regions than doing either separately.

(Want to read more? Here’s the whole article.)

The areas of the brain associated with reward, pleasure, and motivation, light up like a Christmas tree on fire when people are talking about themselves, and what better tool to have than to kindle those neural sparks.

You know?

Everyone knows that in today’s world it’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know. If someone tells you otherwise, you should smack them. Seriously.

The whole point of “making people think you’re a genius” is to strengthen the “who you know” part of the equation. Because at no point in your life will you ever not need people. So when you’re trying to hook the right people, just remember…

Ask. Listen. Repeat.

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Shout out to Anthony Testa for sharing this gem, and for putting up with me as a student.