Lessons on persuasion from Seth Godin's book, "Poke the Box: When Was the Last Time You Did Something for the First Time?"

I am very interested in persuasion. Here is a key: How a person says something is just as important as what he says. So, I read with interest the travails of Ignaz Semmelweis as described by Seth Godin in "Poke the Box: When Was the Last Time You Did Something for the First Time?" Semmelweis was a doctor in Hungary during the 1860s. He was struck by an insight: Patients were dying because doctors failed to wash their hands. He was right, but no one listened to him. Godin asks why no one listened. Two reasons. First, Semmelweis thought the truth of what he was saying was self-evident and didn’t need an explanation. Godin writes, “Second, as reported by Atul Gawande in ‘Better,’ Semmelweis was a jerk. Impressed by his insight, he never bothered to persuade, or even to be patient. To one doctor, he wrote, ‘You, Herr Professor, have been a partner in this massacre.’ To another, ‘. . . I declare before God and the world that you are a murderer.’ ” You get the idea. As Dr. Samuel Johnson remarked, it is better to remind than to lecture. No one likes a finger-wagging lecture by a know-it-all. While Semmelweis is an extreme example, most people tend to believe so much in what they are saying that they ignore the needs of those they are trying to persuade. I imagine it is a little like love: If you insistently proclaim your devotion, the object of your affection retreats; but if you suggest, he or she may draw near.