The Sources of Influence ( Diego’s Daily Blog — August 4th.)
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There are only two ways of influencing people.
The first one is through love and affection. It is a very long process to create the rapport necessary for people to love you. It is hard and draining, yet massively constructive and rewarding.
The second one is through fear and intimidation. You can be able to develop immense amounts of respect if you scare people into listening to you. The issue with this is that influence through fear and intimidation is addictive. It is also destructive to the ones around you.
One specter of influence transforms you into a higher being. The other one destroys the very essence of who you are.
A couple of months back, I was at the gym talking to my coach & mentor. He is one of the most well-respected men in the Cross-fit community here in Canada.
He was telling me the story of when he was my age (23) he used to work in Brooklyn selling Christmas trees. My mentor talked about how much of a dog-eat-dog environment he was living in through the season.
This job was no easy task.
He used to work long hours in the cold moving trees at night and selling them in the morning. Seventeen hour days were average for him. The shipments came in big trucks and he had to unload them by hand. The big issue was that there were cars parked around where the shipment arrived. They needed to be careful not to scratch the cars. Any damage inflicted to the vehicles was deducted from his paycheck. One night, a new shipment came in. The big boss number one man was the one unloading the truck. My coach got woken after 3 hours of sleep to unload the truck.
When he got to the truck, he saw the carelessness in which the other guys were unloading the trees. He calmly told them to be more careful. There were cars all around and he didn’t feel like paying for some other idiot’s carelessness.
Of course, the idiot didn’t listen to his warnings and dropped a tree too close to a car.
The branches scraped the whole side of the vehicle.
That is when He lost it…
The scream that came from my coaches mouth was probably the Devil himself speaking because…
