WATTage: How Brightly Burns Your Light?
20th June 2009
Consider your mind as a light. Sometimes it is brighter; others, not. The energy and effort you bring to thinking, changes from moment to moment, event to event, relationship to relationship, from fancy to desire to need, and so the light of your mind ebbs and flows, the tide of light surging through your days. Under the press of immediacy, salience, or want, your mind’s light burns brightly illuminating the moment, casting in high relief all the elements around you, exposing even the smallest, darkest thing. And, with the release of press, in the absence of urgency, relevance, or desire, your mind’s light diminishes, leaving only those exterior bright beams from the world around you to attract your attention and guide your thoughts. You make the flow or you go with it.
The energy and effort your give to your mind turns the dial. The light of your mind reveals the world around you and reveals you to the world. And the brightness of the light of your mind is the central character in the performance, the drama, the narrative of your life.
When you possess both high willingness and ability to think, the light of your mind brightens to full intensity and illuminates everything in the room of your mind. With this high WATT mind, you can see details, cracks, and facets and you can contemplate them for all their nuance, subtlety, and worth.
By contrast at low WATT, the light of your mind barely burns and you see less in the room of your mind. Now, you focus only on bright shiny pieces. The room of your mind is illuminated not by the light of your thinking, but by the bright light of those external ideas. You draw light from those ideas.
WATTage is the fundamental fact of human nature. Your willingness and ability to think, cleverly compressed as WATT, determines what you see in the world; controls how you think about, react to, and remember it; drives what you will think, feel, or do now and in the future.
If you understand only one persuasion idea, it must be WATTage.
With WATTage, you see why the same person can be persuaded so differently, sometimes working diligently trying to chose a new sweater as if solving a math problem and other times grabbing a top and cooing, “What a pretty red color!” Variations in WATTage cause us to prefer either Arguments or Cues to guide our persuasion choices.
From WATTage you can see the two fundamental routes of persuasion, the Central and the Peripheral. The high WATT mind seeks Arguments – crucial pieces of information about the persuasion event – and travels the Central Route to change. By contrast, the low WATT mind seeks Cues – those bright, shiny things that shake and jiggle – and ambles along the Peripheral Route to change.
Through WATTage you realize that when people change through that high WATT, Argument-driven Central Route, the change will persist over time, resist counter-arguments, and be highly predictive of future actions; Central Route change is strong change. By contrast, you see that when people change through the low WATT, Cue-propelled Peripheral Route the change will be less persistent, easily counter-argued, and less predictive of the future. And, all these differences can be explained with the one large persuasion concept: WATTage.
With WATTage you can understand the bewildering and baffling range of human behavior, how at one time we are rational, systematic, thoughtful, efficient, and detailed, then at another we are simple, categorical, shallow, superficial, and mindless. What controls this maddening variation in ourselves and others is variation in WATTage.
WATTage is the Main Point.