Scott Adams: Persuasion Reading List

Background: Readers of this blog have been asking for a reading list to learn more about hypnosis, persuasion, and influence in general. This is the start of the list. I will update it over time.



If you wonder why people are asking a cartoonist about persuasion, it is because I am a trained hypnotist, and mention it often in the context of blogging. I have also studied the various tools of persuasion for years because it is directly applicable to my job as a writer.



The bad news is that you can’t learn hypnosis from a book. It would be like learning to play a sport by reading about it. There is no substitute for physical practice with real humans. If you want to learn formal hypnosis, where you put willing subjects into a so-called trance state, you need to sign up for a class.



You can think of hypnosis as rapid A-B testing. The hypnotist suggests a thought and observes micro-movement in the subject’s muscle tension, breathing, and other body parts to determine whether the suggestion is having the intended effect. If you are not near the subject, to observe reactions, you can’t make the adjustments needed to get the best result.



The good news is that you don’t need to learn how to induce trances. That skill won’t help your life in any way. Formal hypnosis, with a trance, is for the benefit of the subject, not the hypnotist. My reading list is designed to help you be more influential, and therefore more successful, no matter how you define success.



When I talk about hypnosis I am speaking broadly and conflating all forms of influence in daily life. The only thing I am EXCLUDING is the trance phenomenon and the things that stage hypnotists do. Those things have no use to you.



I have grouped the reading list by virtual chapters as if this is one meta book. I think the order is important, but for those of you who have sampled similar material elsewhere, use your judgment about what to skip.



Several books on this list are ones that I have not read. I include them for completeness. In most cases I picked up the same knowledge from other sources. For this purpose it was easier to point you to a single book that Amazon reviewers like. For example, the book on my list about reading body language is probably one of many that has similar information, but readers seemed to like this one.



Let us begin.



Connecting Some Dots Just for Fun…



Now let me connect some dots.



Milton Erickson influenced Pierre Clement, who taught my hypnosis instructor, who taught me.



And…



Milton Erickson influenced Bandler and Grinder, who developed NLP, which influenced Tony Robbins (a self-help hypnotist). Tony Robbins (probably) influenced Donald Trump, by association. They worked together on at least one project.



When I listen to Donald Trump, I detect all of his influences back to Erickson. If you make it through this reading list, you might hear it too. I don’t know if Donald Trump would make a good president, but he is the best persuader I have ever seen. On a scale from 1 to 10, if Steve Jobs was a 10, Trump is a 15.



You know how the media has made fun of Trump’s 4th-grade-level speech patterns?



The joke’s on them.



He does it intentionally.



Because it works.

Score A book’s total score is based on multiple factors, including the number of people who have voted for it and how highly those voters ranked the book.