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How Do You Convince Someone to Die For You? The St. Crispian Speech
If I care the most about just three steps in the Persuasion Framework, they will need to:
- Help me persuade other people
- Help me persuade myself
- Help me understand WHY other persuaders (including myself) succeed and fail.
In other words, I should be able to look back at prior conversations and figure out the moment I broke through, or why they turned away. Look at my own life and see how I changed my OWN mind: broke a bad habit, formed a positive habit, moved forward against obstacles, changed my self-image, and so on.
What would be even more? It would help me understand how couples in relationship make decisions, including the decision to mate. Help me understand societies and how they regress, get stuck, or move forward. Look at any historical incident, zero in on a figure therein, and at least hypothesize about how they made decisions and took actions under pressure.
Here is an exercise for you: Apply the most important aspects of the Persuasion Framework to Shakespeare’s St. Crispian’s Day Speech from HENRY V, when a small force of men took a stand against a much larger force, apparently hopeless odds.
In it King Henry has to persuade men to be willing to die for him. There’s really no prettier way to put it. If there is anything that would be a starker example of how this can work, I don’t know what it is: the survival drive is the single…