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I watched this video today, and I think there’s something important to learn from it.
LOOOOOOOL HE JUMPED OUT OF HIS SUPREMACIST UNIFORM TO AVOID A WHOPPING LIKE THIS WAS SCOOBY DOO pic.twitter.com/qd5XHrS4GC
— Plantainbae™ (@justcallmeBABA) August 16, 2017
The poor idiot claims he’s doing it for fun. I’m inclined to believe him—which is not a justification; I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for him but trying to understand the reason behind his behavior. Later he says that he’s been in jail and that he enjoys offending people. I’m speculating here, but if he told the truth and he was once in jail at such young age, probably he’s poor and uneducated. In other words: powerless. And if he gets his kicks from being offensive it is because that may be the only way he feels in control. He finds meaning on causing a reaction, even a negative reaction.
Where did he learn to behave like that? There’s a part of violence that is innate, of course, but we live in a society where violence has become increasingly costly. Violent individuals risk punishment, condemnation, and ostracism—not to mention the wrath from Twitter. This guy barely escaped a beating. Why then does he behave like a jackass? My guess is, as he swiftly confesses, because he’s bored. Yes, he may be an idiot too, but being an idiot doesn’t make him engage in reckless behavior, being an idiot simply prevents him from foreseeing the consequences of engaging in reckless behavior. Boredom is what forces him to find his kicks in violence. Boredom signals the brain to look for a different goal because the current one is not rewarding enough or even toxic. Any goal! Even destructive behavior like consuming drugs, skipping school or attending a Neo-Nazi rally.
Combine boredom with the way we acquire most of our knowledge: by consuming mass media. Is media doing a good job educating us? The problem will only get worse with automation when millions find themselves with nothing to do but consume more media.
When I was eight years old, I was called to see the school psychologist. He asked me to make a drawing. Guessing I shouldn’t draw a My Little Pony and expose myself as a sissy I draw the manliest thing I could think of: the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard. I put particular attention on the Confederate Flag on the roof. I didn’t mention that I found the Duke Boys sexy, I just let the man wearing glasses think I was as manly as any other boy my age, and fascinated by cars and adventure. That’s what the General Lee meant to me: manliness. I rated manliness positively, so you could say I had a positive attitude toward the Confederate Flag too. It didn’t mean oppression and slavery to me — I was eight, I had no idea!
My attitude had a function: liking the General Lee made me appear manly in front of others, which was necessary for my survival. Back then, I would have rejected anyone’s arguments trying to convince me that the General Lee was a bad influence, but maybe I would have been opened to hear that liking My Little Pony was okay for a boy.
We should ask ourselves: What function does a Neo-Nazi attitude serve? Telling them they’re dead wrong isn’t enough. They probably know they’re wrong, but they stick to their wrong ideas for a reason. Why?
And then, where are they getting those ideas from? Could it be from media that tends to underrepresented minorities and glorify aggression? I’m not talking only about Fox News. Take this year’s Atomic Blonde, a beautifully shot, superbly directed all praise for violence. The film has a twist at the end trying to convince us that Charlize Theron’s character is not only incredibly beautiful and resilient but incredibly smart and cunning too. Well, if she were that smart she wouldn’t have risked her own life just to kill all those people. Yet we are too engrossed in the narrative to question her motives. Narratives reduce counter-arguing, that’s why they’re so persuasive. We get too busy interpreting the events in a narrative that there’s little cognitive power left behind to judge its meaning.
Take “irresponsible” Prissy, from Gone With the Wind, to go back to a classic example. In one scene, Prissy gets slapped for lying to Scarlett O’Hara about knowing how to deliver babies. Because we are transported by the story and are seeing it through the eyes of Scarlett, who’s alone and dead worried about Melanie, we agree with the slapping. However, as a commenter says on YouTube, Prissy has no reason to “give a damn about either of those two white bitches.” Why should she? Prissy is only a teenager and a domestic slave. She’s a fictional character of course, but slaves like her were probably beaten often, starved, separated from their family, and received no compensation for their work. Why should she feel sympathy for her oppressors? Nevertheless, because it is Scarlett’s and not Prissy’s story the one we follow, and because we’re too busy worrying what will happen next—will Melanie survive?—we don’t stop to ponder over Prissy’s motives.
The point is, we are bored, we are powerless, and we acquire most of our knowledge from narratives that may be distorting reality but at the same time are so engaging that they limit our capability for critical thinking. Punching nazis may temporarily improve our mood but won’t solve the problem. The obvious answer is education, but education tends to be incredibly boring too. What we need is our education system to learn from the entertainment industry on how to become more engaging so that destructive behavior doesn’t become a way to escape boredom. And we need entertainers to become more educated too, so they can create better content.
Storytellers want their stories to be addictive so that the readers keep turning pages and viewers keep asking for more. How does one achieve that? What does engagement entitle? My proposal here is to turn stories into a game for the readers—or listeners, or viewers, anyone that consumes a story—to play.
No, I’m not proposing to write interactive stories in which readers decide with a click what is going to happen next, but for storytellers to use gamification principles when crafting a story to increase engagement. Basically, to reconcile the transportation-imagery model (Green & Brock, 2002; Laer, De Ruyter, Visconti, Wetzels, 2014) with self-determination theory (Ryan,& Deci, 2000) and Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow (Green & Brock, 2002). Don’t worry; I’ll try to lay my arguments in plain English.
Let us begin by defining terms. What is engagement? That which keeps you interested and willing to continue performing an activity, such as reading a book or watching a movie until interrupted by boredom. In other words, something is engaging when it is not boring. Lame definition, I know, but this is our first aha! moment: the first step to increase engagement is to avoid boredom.
We could blame boredom on the readers’ ignorance or lack of discipline, but the truth is that even the most compelling stories can become boring if told the wrong way. Likewise, the simplest adventures can be a rollercoaster of fun if spiced up. Is that what you should do, then, add more salt and pepper to your story? Yes, but, as the cliché says, one must also learn when to kill his darlings—those that are boring, that is.
Boredom is an emotion, and as every emotion, its function is to direct behavior (Bench & Lench, 2013). Boredom is related to disgust (Toohey, 2011), and as disgust, it convinces you to stop, plain and simple. Boredom signals the brain that the current goal is no longer attractive, even toxic (Willis, 2014), and that a different goal must be pursued (Bench & Lench, 2013). Therefore the feelings of discomfort one suffers when bored and still forced to continue. Not only that, boredom cuts the communication between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of your brain, impeding the formation of long-term memories (Willis, 2014).
Yes, boredom can prevent you from acquiring valuable knowledge. It is an evolutionary advantage to increase the chances of survival: Just like disgust prevents us from getting sick by not eating what we find repulsive, boredom prevents us from devoting our undivided attention to a single, unrewarding activity for too long. The world is a scary place, and if we wonder for too long why the sky is blue or how many angels can dance on a pin head, we may get eaten, killed, or left behind. The risk may not be as high in this modern world, but your brain doesn’t care. No matter how much time you have on your hands, your subconscious still decides whether a current task deserves your whole attention or not. That is, perhaps, why you keep checking your social media accounts every ten minutes, because you’re not sufficiently engaged at work.
So far this may sound like redundant advice: to be interesting one must not be boring, but the temptation to write long, insipid, unrewarding back stories or fill up pages with exposition exists. If it is boring, cut it, regardless of how beautiful the prose. Your readers’ brains will reject it anyway.
So how not to be boring? If boredom is an indication to stop and pursue a different goal, you need the opposite, to motivate your readers to continue by leading them into a state of flow, one that demands intense focus but is also meaningful, challenging, and rewarding by itself (Green & Brock, 2002) as when you read an amazing story or play an interesting game, and you simply don’t get bored. Applied to narratives, we say that an engaged reader has been transported to the world of the story to the point that they ignore their physical surroundings and instead “see the action of the story unfolding before them” (Green & Brock, 202, p. 317).
When fully transported, the decision to continue is automatic. If you get bored, the decision to proceed or not becomes conscious and will depend on an external reward rather than intrinsic enjoyment derived from the activity, as in “I better finish reading this BORING article if I want to pass the finals,” or “I better stop here, this article is BORING, and I have much better things to do.” That is the tenet of self-determination theory, which explains motivation. Concerning consuming stories, we can say that readers are intrinsically motivated to read a story when the story is rewarding by itself, and extrinsically motivated when reading depends on an external reward, like obtaining a good grade.
What this means is that to craft an interesting story, you must reward your readers because rewards keep them engaged.
Does that mean stories should be a sugary road to happiness? All the contrary. Rewards bring you joy, of course, but joy, like all emotions, fades with time and has a diminishing marginal utility (Bench & Lench, 2013). One pony is fantastic, two ponies better, why not, but the sixth pony is just meh! By pony number fourteen you are probably so sick of those tiny horses, you can’t care less if all die. Transportation is off, and you return to the real world. For stories to be rewarding they need to be painful too; otherwise, the rewards become meaningless. Conflict brings some of that pain. Pain is what makes rewards delicious. Too much pain, however, and the activity becomes harrowing. How much is too much? Conflict arouses your readers’ interest but only when there is hope this conflict will get resolved, and in the measure of the emotions it arouses. As directives of behavior emotions serve also as indicators of progress toward a goal (Bench & Lench, 2013), so what truly keeps readers engaged are the little steps toward a distant yet attainable goal. Here we get closer to what makes a story engaging: goal setting.
A reader’s goal is to be entertained as she relives how characters suffer and rejoice toward achieving their goals. To be engaged then, or transported—we should prefer this term since we are talking about being engaged in a story—means to emotionally identify with the characters’ predicament, empathize with their plight, and wish for them to achieve their goals, regardless of what these are. Goal setting is not the only determinant of transportation but an essential one because without goals there cannot be an emotional investment in the characters and we get bored!
Therefore the success of the hero’s journey, a classic map to create engaging stories. You have a hero, one with a clear goal and a journey that is but a rollercoaster of emotions as he rejects the quest first, then accepts it, then succeeds, then fails, then gets help from a supernatural power, then fails again, then succeeds. The problem I see with the Hero’s Journey is that it becomes a recipe that storytellers follow to achieve success rather than an example. Works with children, who are easy to please, but as you mature and have watched or read your fair share of stories, you gain the ability to anticipate any new development. When the rewards start coming at a predictable pace, the story becomes less engaging (Eyal, 2012).
How does this relate to gamification? Gamification refers to the application of game elements to non-gaming activities to increase motivation (Conaway & Garay, 2014; Crowley, Breslin, Corcoran, & Young, 2012; Landers & Callan, 2011). Understanding what causes a state of flow, and Self-Determination Theory explains how games keep you motivated.
Let us use a game we all know to explain it: Candy Crush Saga. Solving puzzles is basically a waste of your time, and as we said before boredom protects us from wasting time. Why then is the game so addictive? Because we derive satisfaction from solving puzzles, it makes us feel smart. What Candy Crush Saga does is to allow the player to reach a state of flow, one that demands her full attention and is rewarding by itself (Morris, Croker, Zimmerman, Gill, & Romig, 2013). Then, the game keeps the player motivated by satisfying her needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, which per Self-Determination Theory are key to motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
Candy Crush Saga satisfies your need for autonomy by allowing you to play at your own pace and devote only as much time—or money, if one decides to buy the boosters—as you want. You can play the game anywhere, anytime, as long as you have a device with an internet connection.
Candy Crush Saga satisfies your need to feel competent, with puzzles that are easy to solve at the beginning but get increasingly challenging as you progress. Instead of boring us, the increasing challenge keeps us going, and we only quit when the game becomes too easy or too difficult—or reality calls. Additionally, the game continually rewards you for your good decisions with catchy sounds, power ups, explosions of color, and words like “divine” and “tasty.” By the time you complete level 252 with over two million points you feel nothing less than the Queen or the King of the world, especially because completing a level is yes, product of your own effort but also occurs relatively at random, which keep you even more hooked: uncertainty increases our willingness to continue, because our dopamine levels increase with anticipation (Rose, 2012; Eyal, 2012). In other words, we are happier when we are about to attain what we want than when we attain it. Lastly, if you fail, no big deal, you can try again, and then again, and again, until you complete the level. Candy Crush Saga won’t judge you. It celebrates you the same whether it took you ten minutes or a year to complete a level.
It doesn’t stop there: The game also makes you feel part of a community, satisfying your need for relatedness by allowing to brag about your success on social media, see your friends’ progress, help them or ask for their help, and gives meaning to your apparently purposeless efforts by interjecting the story of how Tiffi lends a hand to the residents of Candy Kingdom. These may be only fictional characters, but they sure are grateful.
To summarize, the elements of gamification are: 1. progress path, through the use of challenges; 2. constant feedback, on what you do right and what you do wrong, and instant gratification to keep the user motivated and make forward movement obvious; 3. social connection, with both real and fictional characters, providing competition and support, and 4. interface and user experience, which refers to the aesthetics of the game (Conaway and Garay,2014).
How can you apply this to increase transportation?
Let’s recapitulate. To increase transportation, a reader must willingly join the characters’ on an emotionally bumpy quest to achieve their goals. Bumpy, because if it isn’t challenging enough, the journey becomes boring. To remain engaged, the reader must constantly be rewarded, but these rewards must come after solving the challenges along the trip. If the trip is too easy, the reader may get bored; if it is too difficult, the reader will get frustrated, and bored and frustrated readers quit. Because seeing the characters’ attain their goals is the ultimate reward—in addition to those smaller rewards collected along the way—these goals must be set as early as possible. The reader must know what the purpose of immersing into a story is. Otherwise, boredom will signal the reader’s brains to occupy herself with something else.
In essence, transportation results from leading readers into a state of flow, but not any state of flow, but one that leads to the creation of mental imagery and developing empathy for others. Solving a simple puzzle involves no characters. Narrative transportation occurs only when the task at hand involves interpreting a story, a sequence of events with identifiable characters. Interpreting is the key word. One must differentiate then between a story, as one that is told, and a narrative, as one that is interpreted by the reader (Laer, De Ruyter, Visconti, & Wetzels, 2014). The difference is important because interpreting is what makes consuming a story an active and progressively challenging task that can lead to a state of flow. Therefore, all the writing advice clichés: Show; don’t tell. Less is more. Make the reader read between the lines, and kill your darlings. In other words, provide just enough information so that the reader is forced to solve a puzzle. Exposition should set the rules not drive the story. Too many rules and nobody will want to play. Too little rules and players will get confused. Start easy and acknowledge the reader’s abilities and familiarity with the subject, the characters or the genre. Do not waste time explaining how a submarine operates, unless the reader needs the information to solve a future puzzle. If she does, bring the information closer to that puzzle; if she doesn’t, delete it. That not only makes a story engaging but also satisfies the readers’ need for autonomy, for they become the ones building the story with you. Give them control over the little details; let them decide the make and color of the heroes’ automobiles; the clothes they wear, etc. It is not a matter of losing control but of staying in control by constantly teasing, by leading the path with crumbs, create anticipation, and not losing their attention. An increased sense of presence should result not only from the creation of mental imagery suggested by the story but also by speculative thoughts.
For instance, in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Besson, 2017), the origins of the city are suggested with a series of images of the International Space Station accompanied by a well known song, Space Oddity. The Bowie song puts you in a good mood and because we all know it (and love it) and because the International Space Station is also a concept we are all familiar with, as viewers we easily reach a state of transportation and do not question what comes next: the City of a Thousand Planets, Alpha, growing from all sorts of interplanetary species joining the station. The details of how the different technologies and politics were reconciled are irrelevant. We are too busy interpreting and enjoying the story. Had Besson chosen to explain the origin of Alpha with exposition, say by listing the circumstances under which each civilization joined the station, the result may not have been as transporting. What he did was to exploit the knowledge that most viewers already possessed: a catchy song that suggests the magic of space exploration and the existence of a real international enterprise, and then lead the viewers to connect the dots.
Is the experience rewarding? Absolutely. Not only is aesthetically beautiful, but it inspires a sense of hope in the future of humanity. Then it becomes valuable knowledge for what is coming next, the most exotic world you could ever imagine, compressed in a relatively small space, the size of a “city.” By the time we return to Alpha, we do not question its existence, or how it became such a chaotic place, but it remains an intriguing place, we want to know ans see more, and thus we continue engaged.
The Alpha sequence does not introduce us to the main characters or their goals; nonetheless, it sets a clear goal in the reader’s mind: to learn more about this world. It prepares us for wanting more.
Cinema as a medium has the advantage of being more immersive than print narratives because a film can provide in one frame much more detailed information than text could in one line and without disrupting the pace of the narrative (Biocca, 2002). Immersion, however, does not guarantee continuous engagement. All the contrary, ambiguity does, because ambiguity leads to the creation of mental imagery and speculative thoughts. Take the opening scene in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
‘My dear Mr. Bennet,’ said his lady to him one day, ‘have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?’
Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.
‘But it is,’ returned she; ‘for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.’
Mr. Bennet made no answer.
‘Do you not want to know who has taken it?’ cried his wife impatiently.
‘YOU want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.” (Austen, 2009, Kindle Location 21659)
Austen takes advantage of our familiarity with similar characters and circumstances to let us deduce that Mrs. Bennet talks a lot, but her husband doesn’t. From the text we also infer that the new resident of Netherfield Park is rich and single, that the Bennets have daughters of an appropriate age to be married, and that Mrs. Bennet wants to marry one of them with him. Nothing of this is stated, though, merely suggested. The reader becomes acquainted with the characters, and that without being told what they look like, how they’re dressed, where exactly the action takes place, or any other information irrelevant to the story. I imagine the Bennets in a small drawing room, one similar to the many drawing rooms I’ve seen in British movies, Mr. Bennet busy with a book, Mrs. Bennet pretending to be examining the curtains. Austen presents us with a challenge, that of interpreting the story, but she gives us the absolute liberty to recreate the scene in whichever manner we want. In a game, we have the autonomy to move and explore with liberty as long as we follow certain rules. In Austen’s novels, we have the autonomy to imagine what the Bennets look like, where they are, as we discover what they want. Our reward? Elegant yet easy to follow prose, which plays the role of hyper realistic graphics, and the comedic situation. Impossible not to smile at Mrs. Bennet’s attempt to call her husband’s attention! By the time we meet the Bennet daughters, we have already sided with their mother’s intentions whether we approve of them or not. Alas, when Lizzy and Mr. Darcy first meet, they dislike each other intensely… And how fortunate that is! It would have been a waste of our time if the story ended without any obstacles. Finally, not every reader will be enthused about the limited options for the Bennet daughters, but as the story progresses, it becomes impossible not to relate and dream about living too in that world, England’s countryside at the turn of the nineteen century, despite the lack of comfort, the threat of war, the poor hygiene, and other circumstances from which the narrative distracts us.
Laer et al. (2014) list identifiable characters, imaginable plot, and verisimilitude as antecedents dependent on the storyteller, and familiarity, attention, transportability, and demographics such as gender and age, as antecedents dependent on the story receiver that influence transportation. My proposal is not to change these ingredients, but the way they are cooked: as a series of puzzles following a progress path, providing feedback, social connection, and a pleasurable user experience. A storyteller must not limit to introduce characters and their goals but invite readers to recreate these characters and infer their goals based on the rules that the storyteller sets upon consideration of the readers’ abilities, that is by taking advantage of the readers’ experience and their willingness to confront a challenge, because this will satisfy the readers’ need for autonomy and competence. The storyteller must also reward readers with beautiful images, witty lines, and by allowing progress to be evident to keep the readers’ attention, and be careful to provide these rewards only when they are deserved, after some good tormenting, and not as often or in a pattern that makes them predictable, to satisfy the readers’ need for competence. And a storyteller must invite his readers to bond with his characters and feel part of their world, and their circumstances. Who wouldn’t change places with Harry Potter, orphaned as a baby, raised without love, surrounded by enemies, and in constant peril, for a chance of attending courses at Hogwarts and Christmas at the Weasley’s? A story needs to satisfy our need for relatedness to be complete.
References:
Austen, Jane (2009). The Complete Works of Jane Austen (Annotated with Biography and Critical Essays) (Kindle Locations 21662-21666). Douglas Editions. Kindle Edition.
Bench, S. W., & Lench, H. C. (2013). On the function of boredom. Behavioral Sciences, 3(3), 459-472. doi:10.3390/bs3030459
Besson, L. (Director). (2017). Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets [Film]. France: Europa Corp.
Conaway, R., & Garay, M. (2014). Gamification and service marketing. SpringerPlus, 3(1), 653. doi:10.1186/2193-1801-3-653
Crowley, D., Breslin, J., Corcoran, P., & Young, K. (2012). Gamification of Citizen Sensing through Mobile Social Reporting. Paper presented at the Games Innovation Conference (IGIC), 2012 IEEE International.
Eyal, N. (2012). Hooks: An Intro on How to Manufacture Desire. Retrieved March 26, 2016, from http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/03/how-to-manufacture-desire.html
Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2002). In the mind’s eye: transportation-imagery model of narrative persuasion, in M. C. Green, J. J. Strange & T. C. Brock (Eds.), Narrative impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations (pp. 315-342). Mahwah, NJ, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Laer, T. V., De Ruyter, K. , Visconti, L. M., & Wetzels, M. (2014). The extended transportation-imagery model: A meta-analysis of the antecedents and consequences of consumers’ narrative transportation. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(5), 797-817. doi:10.1086/673383
Landers, R., & Callan, R. (2011). Casual Social Games as Serious Games: The Psychology of Gamification in Undergraduate Education and Employee Training. In M. Ma (Ed.), Serious Games and Edutainment Applications (pp. 399-421). London: Springer-Verlag.
Morris, B., Croker, S., Zimmerman, C., Gill, D., & Romig, C. (2013). Gaming science: The “Gamification” of scientific thinking. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 1-16. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00607
Rose, F. (2012). The art of immersion: how the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories (Kindle ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. In Contemporary Educational Psychology 25, 54–67 (2000) doi:10.1006/ceps.1999.1020, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com
Willis, J. (2014). Neuroscience Reveals That Boredom Hurts. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (8), 28-32. Doi: 10.1177/003172171409500807.
Post a picture of your husband and pancakes, forty seven likes. Post a reminder that you wrote a book and need reviews, zero likes. What’s the point of having hundreds of friends on social media if none will rush to attend your every desire? It is almost as if people thought their own lives are more important than mine. How can they be so callous and heartless? An author needs praise! Constant praise! Anyways, since the photo proved to be popular, here it is again, and, why not, an excerpt of my newest novel Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love, where I mentioned the recipe.
Read it in the voice of thirty-seven-year-old white homosexual from Leitchfield, Kentucky.
28. Johohoe!
It’s Sunday morning, and I’m in a terrible state, hardly in the mood for my traditional kale, oats, and cornmeal pancakes. Jignesh looks rather skittish too. His face is as pale as Meryl Streep’s in The French Lieutenant’s Woman when she first sees Jeremy Irons at The Cobb in Lyme Regis’s harbor.
“Do you still feel like going to the Opera this evening?” He asks without lifting his eyes from his plate.
I put my fork down. He must be kidding me. I’m wearing my new silk robe from Ralph Lauren—since it is a special occasion, I saw no point in buying only clothes for the evening—I didn’t eat anything but steamed broccoli for the last two weeks so that I would be the skinniest man at the Dorothy Chandler—I’m having only half a pancake today and totally planning to barf it—and I have lived for the last three months with the oppressive fear on my chest of not knowing whether the man I share a roof and sometimes a bed with is going to murder me. And after what I saw on Friday morning…
“I’m really looking forward to it,” I say, giving a sad tone to my words, like that of a heartbroken Kate Winslet in Sense and Sensibility after she lost Willoughby, while trying not to scratch the table from underneath and ruin my $50 manicure from Kinara.
I cannot show myself mad, lest Jignesh gets mad too and kills me, the butter knife inches away from his hand and all. The disappointment on my face must be evident, though, for he doesn’t insist. He briefly looks at me then continues drinking his coffee in silence.
It’s been a rather uneasy two days. A rather uneasy three months, since I discovered the first body… Friday, I closed yet another week without having a single sale, and Tunisha had to let me go.
I did like Julianne Moore in Safe and started sobbing quietly. Poor Tunisha, she’s an excellent boss and awfully inspiring, but she doesn’t know what to do when white people start crying. She got all mortified like that one time when that irresponsible meth addict—what’s her face? some white-trash name like Kimberly—started crying too because she wouldn’t approve an advance on her commissions. Kimberly had terrible skin, but her hair color was just gorgeous. And it was her natural color, I imagine, you wouldn’t think that a drug addict driving a 1987 Crown Victoria full of ten years of fast food wrappers would spend her hard-earned commissions in hair coloring, would you? Not when her teeth and skin were what needed attention. Anyway, Tunisha is such a great a supervisor; she’s always super considerate. She has a brilliant future ahead within the company. The last thing I wanted was to make her feel uncomfortable. After a minute, I brushed away my tears, took a deep breath, said “thank you for everything” and that I would just go empty my desk and leave.
When I reached the door, though, all the repressed emotions came out at once. “I thought he was the man I would spend the rest of my life with,” I think I said at one point. “But he kills people!” Thank God I was bawling by then and so Tunisha couldn’t quite understand me. She called Sherise to bring me a glass of water. When I calmed down, I promised Tunisha I would do better if she gave me another chance. I even knelt down and attempted to kiss her feet. And that rug is so dusty…
Apparently Jignesh had problems at work too. What precisely, he wouldn’t tell me, but the meal we had on Friday evening was the saddest meal we’ve had since he moved in. I couldn’t talk and he just wouldn’t.
He spent the whole day yesterday at his office. Some emergency he had to deal with, he said. One can only hope he wasn’t killing more people.
I decided to visit my friend Lucille in hopes that she could—well, adopt me?
I hadn’t stepped out of the car when she came running as happy as a dog on its first day at the beach: “We’re pregnant!”
I could not ruin her day of happiness, could I? Lucille and Marco have been trying to have a baby for months—what for? It’s beyond my grasp. She has such a nice figure… Gosh, today’s pancakes are so good, I’m glad I added coconut oil to the batter instead of butter. Should I have another half? Anyways, I didn’t tell Lucille that I had lost my job. I simply let her talk and talk baby while I internally basked in my private tragedy. At last, she asked: “So how are things going between you a Jignesh?”
“Oh, marvelous!” I replied.
What else could I have said? For the first time since I met Lucille, her tone didn’t sound like a reprimand. I didn’t want her to feel disappointed.
“And tomorrow is the big day, yay!” She clapped.
“Oh, yes,” I laughed, as if I had forgotten all about it. “Der Fliegende Holländer.”
I’m positively looking forward to tonight’s performance, I can’t deny it. I know the lyrics by heart already: Johohoe! Johohohoe! Johohohoe! Hoe! Hoe! Hoe! Hoe! That and the satisfaction I know I’ll get when, once more, I check in on Facebook at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, donning my super expensive razor jacket from Rag & Bone, and then I see all those likes flowing in, especially from all those people I left behind in Kentucky who never thought I would make it as far as Cincinnati—that’s what keeps me alive.
“I never truly loved your father,” I imagine a septuagenarian self on a rocking chair telling our grown-up children. “But that was the best night of my life.”
Yay, people are reading my paper, A Cross Theoretical Model of Persuasion!
Its code title was BRAINWASHING WITH LIES!!! Because it is a guide on how to increase the persuasiveness of a message when dealing with stubborn people that JUST DON’T GET IT. Sometimes a fictional story is the only plausible solution.
You can download it here:
https://www.academia.edu/32450091/A_Cross-Theoretical_Model_of_Persuasion
Here’s the link to the video https://youtu.be/iXln8IXIPdA
Have you heard about Bethany Mota? Bethany is part of a generation of successful video bloggers (or vloggers) who have made a successful career by, apparently, just being themselves and playing silly in front of a webcam.
Bethany was 13 years old when she created her first YouTube video in 2009, a makeup tutorial for products she had just bought from MAC and Sephora. She made her video out of boredom, trying to reduce the stress of being bullied online by a classmate, using herself as a model and her bedroom as the location. The video and the ones that followed earned her a small community of followers. Soon Bethany expanded to outfit ideas, hair tutorials, and decoration advice. Today, she has over 10 million followers on YouTube — that is one and a half million more than Lady Gaga — 10 million on Instagram — Vogue Magazine has a little under 16 — and 4 million on Twitter — Madonna has only 1.5 million.
Do these numbers make you jealous? Don’t be ashamed if they do; they are big enough to make the best brands VERY jealous. Prada’s YouTube channel has only 66 thousand followers. Chanel has only 805 thousand. It makes one wonder: how can I replicate Bethany’s success? Was it luck? Talent? What is her secret?
As much as I would love to give you a recipe with easy-to-follow steps and accurate measures for replicating Bethany’s success on social media, such thing does not exist. Thankfully, psychology and media experts like Henry Jenkins and Robert Cialdini have studied similar phenomena before, and from Petty & Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model we can learn how to strategize possible routes to engagement and persuasion. Here, I use Bethany’s success as an example to explain the experts’ recommendations to increase engagement.
To consume your content, your public has to be motivated
Easier said than done, so bear with me on this one. As I mentioned in a previous blog, motivation depends on satisfying the needs of autonomy, capability, and relatedness. In other words, to become engaged with a message such as a blog post, readers need to do so willingly, they need to be able to understand, and they need to relate to the contents of the message. Satisfying the needs of autonomy and capability when creating content to share on social media is almost a given. No one forces Bethany’s followers to watch her videos. They do so out of genuine interest. Bethany’s viewers are also plenty capable of understanding her videos: the videos are in English, they portray situations which are easy to relate to and understand, and, thanks to the affordances of mobile technology, her viewers can watch them pretty much anywhere, anytime, using a mobile device. Also, because of the affordances of social media, her viewers can find the videos without much difficulty because their close network of friends spread them each time one of them likes, upvotes, shares or comments on a video. The tricky part is then fulfilling the public’s need for relatedness. Who watches Bethany’s videos? I do not. I cannot relate. Do you? Unless you are a teenage girl or have one at home, you probably don’t either. Her audience is young girls mostly, specifically young girls that relate to what she talks about (makeup, hair, fashion) and find her advice valuable because they are interested in the same subjects. Should you run to Sephora and start creating makeup tutorials then? Nope. The lesson to be learned here is not to attempt to lure everyone but merely a few. Create content for a particular audience. Bethany sticks to subjects that are of interest to teenagers living a middle-class, sheltered lifestyle, and covers brands that she knows her followers can afford, like Forever 21 and Aéropostale.
Before you start creating content to spread on social media, figure out who your audience is. Ask yourself these questions: Who buys my product? How do they use it? What are their needs? How can I help them fulfill these needs? If what you are trying to do is broaden your existing audience, then figure out who specifically you want to attract. The smaller your audience, the easier it will be to create content they can relate to. See it this way: Bethany fails to engage 99.87 percent of the population on this planet, now hovering close to 7.5 billion. The 0.13 percent she draws, however, can guarantee her an estimated $40,000 a month business.
The windy road is often the fastest
The central tenet of Elaboration Likelihood Model is that there are two routes to persuasion:
A central route that relies on the diligent consideration of rational arguments; as when I say that eating broccoli is good because of its anti-cancer properties, and you decide to start eating it because you can verify the validity of my statement and do not want cancer, and
A peripheral route that relies on heuristics and other mental shortcuts, as when I say: Broccoli is fun! It looks like a little tree! Celebrities love it! You wanna be healthy, huh, so why don’t you try it?
Taking the central route leads to longer lasting change and less counter-arguing, yet rational arguments are often BORING. Most times, it is easier to lead your audience through a peripheral route, and once engaged, give them the cold hard facts: Broccoli is high in fiber.
Increase engagement by appealing to heuristics
The first thing one notices when watching one of Bethany’s videos, like this one for Valentine’s Day is that she is quite attractive. Beautiful hair, flawless skin, big eyes. Then, that she’s also quite expressive, cheery, bouncy, and even a little childish. Bethany is quite likeable! And because she is good-looking, confident, and the video looks professionally made, we can safely guess that she knows a thing or two about making things look pretty. Finally, we notice the number of people that have watched the video. Whoa! Nine million views and counting. We have not watched much of her video, but after a few seconds, we already know that Bethany is pleasant to watch, she seems to be an expert on the subject of beauty, and over nine million viewers have endorsed her message. One can only conclude that, if beauty advice is a topic that interests us, her message is worth watching. Note that we reach this conclusion before a careful deliberation on the merits of her video, but by using heuristics, mental shortcuts based on experience and driven by emotions that we use to save time every time we need to make a decision. Any decision. As humans, we prefer to guess rather than to elaborate, because elaborating takes time. The lesson to be learned from Bethany is that for your message to successfully reach your target audience, you need to convince them first that there’s value in spending time going through your entire message. The sooner, the better, because there are zillions of other things, including cat videos, potentially more interesting than your content going around on the Internet. The Internet is a cruel, nasty place, where nobody has time for the central route. Unless your viewers are super motivated to engage in your content, appealing to heuristics, the peripheral route, is a more effective way to persuade them that your content is worth their time, at least until they have enough information to decide whether the information is relevant or not.
Good, but you don’t have time for a course on consumer psychology, do you? Cialdini mentions six basic principles of persuasion based on our use of heuristics for decision-making. Above I mentioned the three most important:
1. Liking, either the speaker or the way the message is delivered: using fancy colors, music, humor, etc. You do not have to be as gorgeous as Bethany to be liked. Being funny and relatable helps.
2. Authority, recognizing that the speaker must be an expert on the matter at hand,
3. Consensus, public validation of the message.
The other three are:
4. Reciprocity, our desire to repay people like Bethany for her valuable and funny advice with our attention, first, and maybe then with a “Like,” or by purchasing their product. Think about it, how many times did a restaurant earn your business with a free sample?
5. Consistency, our desire to stick to what we commit in public. Credo Mobile marketing strategy relies on reminding the public that they are as committed to social progress and environmental causes as their customers are. You cannot use another carrier if you truly care about the environment, can you?
6. Scarcity, as in “this offer will not last!” Scarcity appeals to our fear of losing an opportunity. Sure, by now we all know that that 30 percent discount will happen again next month — but what if it does not? Taking advantage of the now is an evolutionary advantage acquired during a time when winters were harsh and summers were relentless.
Tell a Story
What is stronger than Superman? A story about Superman! In the Running Late for School video, Bethany starts by telling us a story. The birds chirping let us know it’s morning time, we see her tossing and turning, then when her alarm clock goes off, she pushes it off the bed table. Oh, no, she’s going to be late! Then comes the core of her message: Running Late for school? Easy & quick hairstyles under 5 minutes. If we weren’t interested in the subject before, now we are, because by following her narrative and understanding her goal—making it on time to school and still look ravishing—we got emotionally involved. We want to know whether she will make it on time and how. Yep, Bethany’s is a simple story that won’t entice everyone, but remember the only people you need to lure are your target audience. Not every message can easily be turned into a story and stories are not always the most efficient way to deliver a message because they are not as economical as simple rhetoric — it takes Bethany a full 36 seconds of introductory narrative before she starts talking; that’s longer than most commercials. However, when motivation is low, stories are your best bet to increase engagement.
How can you create an engaging story? The recipe is simple:
Identifiable characters. Bethany uses herself. It doesn’t matter who you use, as long as you make it clear that the story is about that character.
Familiar situations that your viewer can relate to. In Bethany’s video, we easily infer it is morning time inside a teenage girl’s bedroom.
Conflict. A dismissed alarm clock. Uh-oh, she’s going to be late.
Clear goals. Making it on time to school while still looking good, as stated in the video title
Resolution. Following Bethany’s advice for Easy & quick hairstyles under 5 minutes.
Note that Bethany’s story is not about how her product saved the planet from zombies, but about how using her product, beauty advice, can save an ordinary girl from an embarrassing situation. Your story should not be about what your product does then but about how it helps people succeed or avoid failure. At ePaisa, we constantly use stories to show how our product can change merchants’ lives, like this one about a man that learned that not embracing technology can be costly.
Want to learn more about creating persuasive messages? I created this video to help communicators on choosing the shortest route to persuasion based on their audience’s motivation to engage. It’s a bit long, so watch it at your own risk 😉
— Originally written for ePaisa.com
Oy, oy, oy. You already know what happened with United. If you don’t, here’s a mighty complete recount of how social media made United the biggest news on the internet.
Now, we’re not here to pass judgment or to speculate on how that particular incident could have been prevented. We’re here to tell you what to do in case you or one of your employees ever make a similar mistake to avoid a social media catastrophe. Because you are on the Internet, aren’t you? If not you should — with ePaisa’s loyalty and marketing tools it’s easy.
You aren’t as big as United, so you may wonder, why should I care? Let’s start by explaining why you should care.
The actual size of your Extended Network
Even if you only have a few friends and followers, you are connected to everyone across Social Media. How come? Because those friends and followers you have also have friends and followers. And the friends and followers of your friends and followers have friends and followers too. Think of it as a railroad network. Some persons have lots of connections, like the stations at Mumbai or Delhi. Some persons have few connections, like the Tenkasi station in Tamil, or the Amritsar station, in the Punjab. Still, one can travel between Tenkasi and Amritsar by changing trains a few times. People on social media act like station hubs, connecting other people, even across platforms, every time they interact with someone else’s post. Just imagine the number of hearts you’d get if @priyankachopra with her 17.1 million followers re-tweeted one of your tweets. And because social media travels through the rail tracks of the Internet, a tweet from Tenkasi may take only seconds to travel all the way to Amritsar, instead of the two and a half days it would take to travel by train.
Going Viral
You’ve heard of videos going “viral.” Content does not go viral at random; people must spread it by interacting with it, either by sharing, liking or commenting on it. When you and a friend go down a path, and you are overcome by the scent of beautiful jasmine flowers and comment on it aloud, your friend may be the only person that hears your comment. When you post a picture of those flowers, your close network may get to learn about them too. Depending on the size of your close network (and your popularity), you may get a comment or two, but what if you post a picture of one monstrous jasmine flower devouring your friend? That may cause some more reactions, huh? For content to go viral, two things are necessary: the content should be easy to share—and pretty much everything posted on the Internet is—and the content should be relevant. Sex, food, and fear engage everyone. Then it’s all a matter of what the public cares about.
No one likes cheaters
Now, what if you post a picture of your friend doing something really, really bad, and just for fun, like burning an entire field of jasmine shrubs. Full of baby kittens. People may react to that too, right?
To increase our chances of survival, we live in societies. And to increase the chances of society to survive, we follow rules. When we follow the rules, only our close kin cares enough to give us praise. When we break a rule, strangers may step in to let us know that wasn’t cool. The bigger the sin, the more that will rise to chastise the sinner. Morality is part of what we are. As Steven Pinker puts it humans feel that “not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to.” And when we’re bored or feel bitter about something, taking it out on someone else feels good, doesn’t it? Tweeting about #UnitedAirlines is the modern equivalent to attending a public hanging. And because of the affordances of social media, you don’t need to put on your pants to burn the witch.
Combine our innate desire to punish the wicked with how easy it is to share content nowadays (it takes a click), and the size of our entire extended network (friends of friends of friends of friends), and you have a recipe for disaster. Remember the dentist who killed Cecil the Lion? Do something that incites the wrath of the Internet, and you will go viral, but for the wrong reasons. As of March 2017, Facebook has 1.86 billion users. As of February 2017, Twitter has 319 million active accounts. How many of them do you think didn’t hear about Cecil’s death?
So, what to do when everything goes wrong?
For a start, don’t do anything rotten. If you do, this our take:
Empower your employees.
When protocol conflicts with the fair and decent thing to do, your employees should feel confident you will trust their judgment by abandoning protocol. Train them, motivate them, and make sure they’re ready to make good decisions. The moment you hire your first employee, you lose 100 percent control on your company.
Own your mistake.
Remember that you’re dealing with the All Judgmental Internet, a monster of a million heads that hear no reasons. You did something wrong, so be ready to apologize once, apologize twice, apologize thrice and do not try to justify it by saying you were merely following standard procedures. If your procedures led you to do something morally wrong, or at least appraised by the public at large as morally wrong, then your procedures were wrong. Recognize it.
Do not blame it on someone else.
Especially not the victim. Within one day, the United CEO was blaming the victim. That is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline! Do not blame it on villainous employees, either, even if it was ultimately their fault. From the viewer’s eyes, it is your company who is at fault. Ultimately, what employees do on company time is your company’s responsibility. On the public’s eye, if your employees do something wrong it is because you did not supervise them or train them correctly. Settle things internally, but as the leader, you must publicly own blame.
Remind the public that you are more than a faceless brand.
As a company, you are a community. You are more than a “heartless” CEO and a bunch of “greedy shareholders.” You are the company’s employees. You are the company’s vendors. Show those faces! Remind the public that your mistake hurts your team too. In other words, appeal to people’s sense of compassion by reminding them that by attacking your brand they are attacking real people. Do not try to become a martyr, just show some real faces with whom the public can empathize. Remember the Domino’s Pizza scandal when a couple of troubled employees pretended to taint customers’ orders with unsanitary tricks? Domino’s CEO jumped to defend the brand and accuse the employees as disgusting. That helped, but it took months to restore the public’s trust in the brand. Had Domino’s shown how those two troublemakers hurt the owner and employees of the franchise affected, maybe the public would have shown more sympathy to the brand.
Think coldly but be empathic.
If you are too upset to deal with the public, then don’t. Have someone less emotionally affected draft all communications, but make sure that this person empathizes with who the public recognizes as the victim.
Offer a solution.
If you cannot offer a solution right away, state that you are working on one. Don’t take too long! It’s better to overcompensate a disgruntled client than to lose all future ones. United Airlines stock took a big hit in the aftermath of the scandal. The price of its shares will probably go up again, but could your business take a similar hit?
— Originally written for ePaisa.com – enabling commerce
Here’s the link to the video https://youtu.be/iXln8IXIPdA
Here’s a link the PDF A cross-Theoretical Model of Persuasion – Carlos Allende Final Capstone for those of you interested on reading the whole paper or checking references.
How to motivate your employees using gamification principles
You’ve heard about the perks that employees have at those hyper-funded new startups: Guitar Hero hour, yoga room, video game room, unlimited coffee, unlimited beer, free lunches on Friday. You would love to offer the same, but —can you afford it? Unless among your investors is a Saudi prince, probably not. And do all those perks really keep employees motivated? I recently toured one of those startups with a friend. “Nobody ever uses the yoga room,” she told me. “And on free lunch Fridays, most of the food goes to waste because we’re so sick of seeing each other – most of us go out to eat somewhere else.”
According to a recent study by Dale Carnegie Training Global Leadership (2016) that considered 14 countries, including India and the US, only 22 percent of full-time employees plan to stay in their current jobs for the long term. 16 percent are currently looking for a new job, and 29 percent intend to start looking for a new job. Considering how expensive, painful, and tiring it is to hire and train new employees, those aren’t good numbers! The same study explains what’s best to keep employees happy: sincere appreciation and praise, effective leadership, and reliable leaders, leaders that seem honest with others and themselves. For employees that always see their employers as reliable, job satisfaction grew to over 80 percent.
“What nonsense is this!” You’ll say, “I have to be nice? I pay my employees to do their work. I don’t have to explain my actions, and if they don’t like it, there’s a long line of others that would love to have a job!”
Well, if money is what drives you, there is an important reason why you want to keep your employees motivated other than reducing hiring and training costs: increased productivity. A highly motivated employee performs better.
Should you invest in a PlayStation, then? That’s not exactly what I meant by gamification principles. Gamification is not turning things into a game, but using elements of games use to increase engagement. What many successful games do is apply the principles of self-determination theory. Let’s put some psychology on this. You already know you have to be nice (which is cheap) but let’s explain why, so you will be more motivated.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
According to the Self-Determination Theory, people are intrinsically motivated to perform a task when the task is inherently pleasant. We play games because we derive pleasure from the activity. How do you feel every time you pass a level on Candy Crush Saga? You feel good! It’s the dopamine working inside your brain. The tougher the level, the better you feel. You may not have done a victory dance when you passed the first level, but didn’t you do one when you passed level 45? Now, how do you feel when you have to do chores? Take out the trash, drive through heavy traffic—you don’t dance much, do you? You are extrinsically motivated when the motivation to perform a task comes not from the pleasure the task will bring you but from a separate outcome: you take the trash out to keep your house clean; you drive because you need to get to work, and you work because you want to get paid.
Your employees are extrinsically motivated. If they were intrinsically motivated, they’d work for free! You cannot transform extrinsic motivations into intrinsic motivations unless the separate outcome (reward) becomes the task. Most times that’s impossible, but you can make the separate outcome more attractive: free beer, free coffee, yoga room, higher pay… or apply some dirt-cheap psychology to convert external regulations, the separate outcome, into integrated regulations, regulations that we follow not only because they lead to a reward but because we have made them part of our concept of self.
Self-Determination theory also says that motivation increases as we satisfy the needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These are psychological needs we all have the urge to satisfy, just like the need for food and shelter. We want to control our own decisions. We want to feel capable. We want to belong. We’re not walking machines, we’re social animals!
How can you make your employees feel more autonomous?
Stop micro-managing. Train your employees properly on how to do their work instead. Give them responsibility. You do not have time to train them? You have less time to hire constantly. Explain to your employees what’s expected of them, give them the tools to do it, and then let them run free. Let them make decisions. That’s how you learn to play video games! A short basic tutorial, you jump with button A, you run with button B, the mushroom-looking guys are the bad guys, and then you’re free to run through the hills and rescue the princess. You’ll spend some time exploring the world, and your employees will spend some time exploring what they can do with the newly earned responsibility and maybe making mistakes. That’s alright. Of course, in video games, you have unlimited lives (you can always restart when you die), and you don’t find the first boss till the end of the third level, but video games also start easy. Give your new employees only the autonomy you both feel comfortable with. As they get more experienced, give them more. Then some more.
“But training is expensive!” you’ll say. Then use tools that are both empowering and easy to use, like ePaisa point of sale.
How can you make your employees feel more competent?
By letting them know they’re doing a good job – just like in video games. Every time you grab a coin in Mario Bros, you hear a little ca-ching! Every time you defeat an enemy, you gain points. Every time you finish a level, you hear this catchy song. Video games constantly let you know that you’re doing a good job and rewarding your efforts with cheap praise. Our response? We become addicted. We spend HOURS trying to defeat the boss so we can hear a silly song and get a message saying, “Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle!” and then continue playing for another hour or so. Same with a job: a little praise here and there works wonders. Why? Because when we verify that our efforts are paying off, we feel happy. And happiness makes us release dopamine, to which we’re all hooked. Likewise, when something prevents us from achieving that goal, we feel angry. And when the goal is no longer attainable, we feel sad. That’s the function of emotions, to indicate our progress towards a goal, and serve as directives for behavior on how to achieve that goal. Emotions fade with time though. If something is too easy, you may feel happy at first but then bored. Boredom is an emotion that indicates that a goal is no longer attractive. What do you do when video games get too easy? You stop playing. What does a video game need to do to keep you hooked? Get increasingly difficult, not so difficult that you cannot pass the level, just difficult enough to keep you interested. Same applies to a job: Praise your employees, so they know they’re progressing, but keep them challenged, so they stay interested. If the job is too difficult, they’ll quit. If the job is to easy, they’ll get bored.
Many tasks at work are either difficult or tedious and therefore boring, which reduces motivation. How can you easily increase your employees’ competence? Give them ePaisa! Okay, yes, this is an infomercial but you’re getting lots of good advice and ePaisa does increase competence, by making tedious tasks, like controlling inventory or keeping detailed records of sales easy, so your employees can do more! Keep reading.
How can you make your employees satisfy their need of relatedness?
Let me be cynical about it: humans are effing gullible. The one person we love the most in this world is our own self, that’s why we need constant affirmation. It isn’t just vanity but an evolutionary advantage: we prefer those that are nice and complimentary to us because being surrounded by that kind of people increases our chances of survival. Friends will fight with you against enemies. Friends will feed you in the case of need and keep an eye on your stuff and protect it from thieves. It works both ways, when you feel that you are part of a team, you fight for your friends and you protect their resources. Before being rational, we’re social animals, don’t forget that! Your employees need to know they’re part of a team. They need to know that you are all working together for a common goal. Not to make you rich, but to make everyone working for the company live richer lives. They need to be proud of their team. They need to feel that work is like family. That’s why video games always start with a clear inclusive mission: rescue our princess. Help us defeat tyranny. You are our only hope.
Tricks to increase relatedness? An all-expenses-paid bonding seminar to Hawaii, which will drive you out of budget… Or just the occasional “How do you do?” to let know your employees they are important to you. Spend some time explaining to your employees what you’re doing and why their work is important. Let them know that even if they feel as if they were the smallest crew in the big machinery, that little screw is important. In games, you play with your team. You may not be able to choose who is in your team or which team you join, but it’s your team, and you’re loyal to that team simply because it is your team. Again, this is an evolutionary advantage: we have a tendency to prefer those that are close to us, because being close knit increases our chances of survival.
One final advice, for the shy: What if it’s not in your nature to be “nice,” to give praise, and make everyone feel welcome? What if you’re too “results-oriented” and just cannot praise those needy millennials for everything little thing they do? You got a box behind the ear every time you did something wrong, that’s how you learned! Well, if you cannot be nice, hire someone that can. I used to work in this office with a very negative vibe. Everyone in the sales team was always angry and tired. Productivity was very low. Then this girl came who wasn’t the brightest, or the fastest, and needed help constantly because she didn’t know too well how to use a computer; But boy, was she kind and joyful. She improved everyone’s mood because she always had a kind word and made everyone feel useful. She made that office a pleasant place to be and taught us how to be nice to each other. The result? Productivity grew. A lot.
— This post was originally written for the ePaisa.com blog
So, I’m unemployed, yay!
I’m actively looking for a day job, writing my capstone (dissertation) and editing my new novel: COFFEE, SHOPPING, MURDER, LOVE, a dark comedy about angry gays killing people. This morning I reached this, which I wrote a few months ago. How à propos!
Read it with a deep Southern accent!
[Charlie, who recently lost his job too, laments his situation]
I wish I could help Jignesh [his lover, who started a money laundering business]. Well, I better help, I’m all smeared into this murder catastrophe [two bodies, so far]. I need to find a new job, that would be a proper way to help, wouldn’t it? But I’m so depressed, so incredibly down by this perilous situation that I spend the whole day on Facebook and visiting porn sites. I only check Craigslist for the personal listings… God, the things one reads there. Let’s have a party in pantyhose… It’s rather unsettling.
I entertain some time cleaning. Dusting the shelves, fluffing the cushions. I start a mental list of the changes we need to do in our home. We could use a new dining table… And I think this house needs to be tented. The wood in the window frames is all rotten, and I haven’t had the bravery to check yet, but I bet the attic is vermin infested.
Dear God, I know he’s an infidel, and a sinner, and that the whole thing is illegal, but please help Jignesh succeed in his business endeavors and send us the miracle we need to get rid of those bodies. Touch Mike’s heart so he gets a bonus this month. And the next too. And the next too, and so forth, at least until I find a job and can take care of my own expenses… What could I do that doesn’t involve any actual effort, I wonder, scrolling down on my Tumblr newsfeed… Oy, nice peaches…
To think of all those lazy people on disability and me in the most complete wretchedness, depending on a man I’m not attracted to. I can’t even enjoy wasting time on the internet without feeling a lump form in my throat. The government should send me a monthly stipend to compensate me for all my suffering. I had a rough childhood. Discriminated. Prosecuted. Forced to leave my paternal home and move to Southern California to escape a reactionary life on a hyper-caloric diet, and once here, never discovered. I am too pretty. Too meek. Too sensible… Matteo has a forty percent sale. Would it be too extravagant to purchase new sheets, considering my dire circumstances?
