3 irrefutable laws of Influence: follow these and people will follow you

Persuasion is a science. We all have underlying psychological buttons that can be pushed and manipulated in order to persuade people to do things.

But in the long that doesn’t work. In the long term the only way to exert genuine influence is to play the long game.

That’s not to say that we can’t or shouldn’t use Cialdini’s six principles of influence: reciprocity, liking, social proof, authority, consistency and scarcity.

We should definitely use those — but those are tactics. Manipulations, that work well in the short run, but lead to disasters — such as the financial crises — in the long run.

What we need is something that works well in the long term, and I’m going to present five laws of influence that works in the long run as well as in the short run.

1. Trust Or Bust: You must influence with integrity

There is no greater influencer than genuine trust. When we trust people, we trust that they want what’s best for us, and that they will help us get there. The way we go about our business today, trust is at a premium — we buy things from companies we trust, we listen to podcasts and read books by people we trust, we engage with people online all the time, who…