Cold drinks. Buy Three. Free Balloons
I don’t want free balloons. I don’t even want a cold drink because it may be fake—what if they give me Popsi instead of Pepsi?
Besides, the doctor told me to stay away from soda the last time I went to the hospital. Anyway, why does this placard have my attention? It’s not even real. It’s in a movie that I don’t know the title of.
It shouldn’t even have my attention. But it does. Maybe because I’m watching the TV without the sound on— a rare ritual that I read in ‘Suicide Notes’ by Michael Thomas Ford.
It was done by one of the patients in the psychiatric ward and I thought it was bizarre, but guess who’s staring at the TV screen with rapt attention watching the actors with the sound muted? Me.
It’s like a lonely car ride—the one when it’s raining outside so your view is murky and you’re just left with your thoughts and the pattering sound of the raindrops on the car.
Then, I realised that maybe it’s the perfect time to pay attention when the sound is muted. This time, I stare at the actor’s eyes, watching his facial features as if they were moulded on cherubic lines.
All of a sudden, I can imagine him in trouble, screaming for help without anyone responding. A surprising fact Daniel Kahneman explained in ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ was from an experiment— the helping experiment.
It showed that individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help. It’s a disturbing realisation that I have to live with.
Maybe that’s why this placard caught my attention. In real life, it probably wouldn’t. If the sound had not been muted, I would have been distracted by the sound of these bullets flying all over the village.
I wouldn’t have seen the crooked childlike inscription on the placard rooted firmly on the ground. But now I have and it is stuck in my brain.
Maybe it’s my subconscious mind searching for copies too. I’ve been binge-reading different copies lately so maybe that's the confirmation bias taking control again.
No, it has to be the incentive. The free balloons. Most things have an incentive now. Amazing marketing strategy. Micro offer, macro offer, whatever.
Once, during a webinar marketing strategy, I tried to brainstorm an incentive. I thought long and hard but I came up with nothing. It was too difficult.
When you’re thinking long and hard about concepts like supply chain management, international trade and African free trade continental area policies, the word incentive begins to feel like solving a physics question. And I hate physics, except for the principle of elasticity.
Why do we need to give people an incentive? Why did I have to start brainstorming conjuring terms that I do not understand too like shipping guides, importation guides, and ridiculous how-tos like ‘how to get your business financed easily?’
I have just realised incentives can come in different forms. If you unintentionally spend a Friday night reading ‘Dark Psychology Secrets’ by Daniel James, you’ll see how fucked up the world is—how intentional they are just to control you.
From steering attention and promoting ignorance to propagating mediocrity under the big umbrella of media manipulation.
Then you’ll see how incentives can take different forms, from freebies and discounts, to a small favour and then full-blown persuasion. It’s creative too. It’s also okay because at least they give you a choice. A false sense of control.
This is why I think Blair Warren is right about ‘attention’ missing in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It ought to be there. It’s so subtle yet so major.
There’s a section in this book that highlights the strategies for eliminating manipulative people in your life and it makes me laugh. What if you’re the manipulative one? How are you going to identify yourself? Manipulation isn’t always evil.
We all have a potential for evil within us, whether you’re shoving a moral compass down your throat or not and it oddly makes me comfortable. Perhaps, it is because of this potential that we like villains in movies.
Maybe it’s a good thing to be dangerous. Like Jordan Peterson said, ‘Be capable of cruelty but don’t use it’.
Now, I want a cold drink. I don’t want three but I want to know what owning a free balloon feels like.
I genuinely love how deliciously scattered but oddly organized this post is. I love how you seemed to ramble from one point to the next but somehow you were able to still link it all together🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼
Oh and you really have read lots of books... I’m intimidated 😂
Not sure I have told you this before but you are really intelligent, it's mind-blowing.