How to understand people, and how to understand yourself

Some time ago I heard someone say that the problem with corrupt politicians isn’t really that politicians are corrupt. The problem is that most of the population, if they were in politics, would be corrupt too.

In fact, raise your hand if you’ve never paid a plumber or an electrician cash in hand to save on the VAT. As common and harmless as this is, it’s still an offence. You’re committing offences similar to the corrupt politician’s, just at the level your position allows: you and the electrician are cheating the tax authorities (and possibly Social Security) to save yourselves 20 or 90 euros.

If you moved up a division, you’d probably do it with bigger sums. Quite a way to start an article, isn’t it?

Getting to know people

We all want the same things. First of all, we all want to sleep well, eat well, have financial security and be safe from danger. Nobody escapes these basic needs.

We are all driven by the same instincts

We are all driven by anger, revenge, ambition, fear and sex. A very religious person, or someone who believes in karma, may think they are free of the desire for revenge, but they aren’t. Saying “God will punish him for what he did” is basically the desire for revenge, just outsourced to the Almighty.

That’s why one of my first mentors used to say that “people are not rational, and if you treat them as if they were, you’ll be making a mistake.”

Some will find those words disrespectful, but I could irritate practically any reader simply by criticising their religion, their political party or their football team. And that doesn’t make you more rational; it makes you weaker. It’s a weakness we’ll leave aside in a sales meeting, but we’ll use it to our advantage whenever we think it’s convenient and profitable.

Numerous studies have shown that our decisions are, as a rule, based on instincts and emotions, with only a tiny share of reasoning.

Not being aware of all the biases that make you the person you are is what puts you below someone who does know them. In other words, it puts you at a clear disadvantage compared with someone who really understands how people’s brains work. Marketing professionals know how to do this rather well. If you’re wondering just how irrational (not to say stupid) people’s brains are, we saw it clearly when we discussed how someone won’t buy something for €20 but will scramble to buy it for €30.

See also: How to psych yourself up to do something you hate

How can you get to know people?

You’ll never be able to know people in their natural habitat, apart from the instincts mentioned above. A couple married for 20 years don’t really get to know each other until the moment they separate.

From then on, both of them can bring out their true selves and end up acting in ways that were unthinkable until then. The question would be: “Are they really like that, or is it the situation that has turned them into what they are now?”

A man whose partner had promised him eternal love could never have foreseen that his wife would leave him as soon as he lost his job. Until that moment, it was very hard to know how a person would behave once difficulties arrived.

You’ll never know a person until you see them under pressure

It’s very easy to hold your course on a calm sea, but when pressure appears, our real decisions, driven by ego and the survival instinct, come to the surface. So does fear.

That’s why companies hire an excellent manager when things are going well, but when trouble comes, the kind of manager they really are may show, because when a company is doing well, even an idiot can run it.

It’s in turbulent times that you find out what kind of captain is steering the ship. In the same way, you get to know a person much better not by how they treat their equals, but by how they treat people who can do nothing for them.

Human beings

Humans are the most dangerous predator in the animal kingdom, because they are the only one that kills not to eat or to survive, but purely for fun.

This killer instinct is the same one that shows up in our careers, which is why there’s a high probability that most of the people who work at your company would be quite capable of stabbing you in the back, for several reasons:

1. Just for the sake of stabbing you: amusement, envy, anger, revenge…

2. Survival instinct. If I bring you down, I go up. Ambition, or fear of the competition.

3. Pure fun: here we would already be looking at certain psychopathic traits.

Everyone can be bribed. You too

We can all be bribed. It’s a matter of working out the price at which we’d let ourselves be bribed. Thinking you can’t be bribed actually makes your price lower. Don’t agree? That’s because you haven’t stopped to think about what a bribe really is.

There may be someone in the world who couldn’t be bribed. Their profile would be that of a very rich person with no family, no friends and no love for life or for the world.

Bribes aren’t only about ambition, although ambition is behind 90% of them.

1. Doing something unethical out of fear of being fired, because you need your pay cheque to put food on the table.

2. Doing something to improve your family’s wellbeing. For example: “Let me build five more storeys than the permit allows and I’ll give your daughter a job.”

And my favourite:

If your child were ill and a company had the cure for that illness, but you couldn’t afford it because it cost millions of euros, and someone told you they would get you that cure if you simply put your signature on a paper rezoning some land for development, would you do it? No need to answer. I already know the answer.

Still, there’s no need for such extreme cases, because as a rule, whoever can’t be bribed for €10,000 can be bribed for €500,000. We could say that the only reason more people aren’t charged with taking bribes in any country is that there aren’t more people in a strategic position to be bribed.

Some say the clearest proof that people can be bribed is the millions of workers who do a job they don’t like because, in exchange, they’re handed a cheque every month (their salary).

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln

Everyone says they could never kill, but…

I’ll keep this point brief. In a hypothetical world ruled by chaos, where the survival instinct prevailed, if you were the only thing standing between my children’s food and me, putting their lives in danger, I’m very sorry, but I might very well make myself a necklace out of your intestines.

But is there any clue to really getting to know people?

Leaving extremes aside, there’s a line by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that goes:

“You can easily judge a man’s character by the way he treats people who can do nothing for him.”

It’s very easy to laugh when we’re having fun, to love when that person is giving us magnificent sex, and even to give someone money when we have money to spare.

Would you stay with your partner if an accident left them in a wheelchair for life? Would you put up someone in your home for a few days who has lost everything and will probably never be able to return the favour?

But above all, we can tell what people are like by the way they treat a waiter or a receptionist. When I meet a client for lunch, I know what kind of person is sitting across from me by the way they treat the staff in a restaurant or café. Their manners tell me everything about them.

Above all, listen to people, whether they’re clients, friends or your partner.

They’re constantly telling us what they’re like: if you let them talk, they’ll tell you their values, their worries and their aspirations.

The problem is that we don’t listen to what they tell us, but to what we want to hear

I always give the same example: “When your partner cheats on you, they’ve sent you more than 50 signals that they were cheating, but you fooled yourself into not seeing them so as not to break your false world of happiness.”

Exactly the same thing happens in business: when a client switches suppliers, they’ve been sending you signals that something wasn’t right, and you should have seen them.

In short: now that we’ve explained what human beings are like, expect anything from anyone until time proves otherwise.

You can’t control what other people are like, but you can control what you’re like. So always be honest, work ethically and never do something expecting the favour to be returned, because you’ll be disappointed many times. Do it because you want to.

But don’t forget that we’re still in the jungle and that we’re even more animal than the animals themselves, so in this jungle of life, or of work, you have to be ready to bare your claws and fight without falling apart.

When things turn ugly, sometimes it’s a matter of eat or be eaten. And in that battle you mustn’t give any quarter, whether we’re talking about a sales career or the business world.

As I always say: “In a world of cats, the lion always wins, but in a world of lions, a cat will never win. And both animals are driven by the same instincts.”

See also: The only difference between peace of mind and stress is attitude

Featured image: zeevveez from Jerusalem, Israel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.