It’s one o’clock in the morning, and we’re in a rented black Suburban, creeping along off-road through desert scrubland with our lights off. I squint in the moonlight, navigating around boulders, clumps of underbrush, and the occasional small tree. My buddy Ryan’s knuckles are white as he grips the passenger seat. Every few minutes, he cranes his neck to make sure nobody is following us. I take deep breaths, trying to stay calm. Neither of us talks, save an occasional “crap” from one of us when we take a hard bounce or narrowly avert a boulder.
Going just a few miles per hour, we make our way toward a group of boxy, nondescript buildings illuminated by powerful floodlights and other scattered industrial lighting. More precisely, we head toward the ten-foot-high security fence topped with razor wire that stands between us and those buildings.
At one point, about five miles into it, I brake hard as a coyote darts in our path. We shouldn’t be doing this, I tell myself.
About a quarter mile from the fence, I spot a large and deep gully cutting down into the earth off to my left. “How about there?” I ask.
“Fine,” Ryan says.
I maneuver into the gully, trying not to scratch the car on the thick, dry brush that lines either side. I go as far down as I can before parking so that guards or workers walking around this dusty wasteland can’t see the car. From here, we’ll proceed on foot. “Any company?” I ask, shutting off the engine.
“Don’t think so,” Ryan says.
“Let’s roll.”
We get out and close the doors softly behind us. Rattlesnakes and scorpions abound in this habitat, so we tiptoe around, alert to the slightest movement. We open the back hatch and pull out an aluminum ladder and some lengths of rope. Aside from the ladder, we’re traveling light—you never know if we’ll have to make a run for it. “Okay,” I say, pointing to a section of fence a bit to our left. “Over there, that dark area. Looks like a light is out. It’s our best bet.”
We walk, carrying the ladder between us. It’s eerily quiet, save for a low hum coming from the buildings and the occasional, soft clanging of the ladder. We’re fifty miles from the nearest town, unarmed and uninvited. If anything happens to us, nobody will know. And something might happen. I’ve been arrested and had guns put to my head. And those were easy jobs compared to this one.
I can’t divulge what kind of facility this is, or where in the world it is located. What I can say is that beyond this barbed-wire fence a powerful organization is keeping watch over something immensely valuable. This “something” is so valuable, in fact, that the organization has spent tens of millions of dollars designing this facility and outfitting it to be, as we were told, “absolutely impenetrable,” one of the most secure facilities on the planet. Besides the barbed wire, dozens of highly trained guards armed with automatic weapons patrol the grounds, making rounds throughout the night. Other guards stand watch inside high turret towers. Powerful spotlights illuminate the fence at regular intervals, with hundreds of cameras monitoring movements on the grounds and around the perimeter. An array of other costly and sophisticated equipment that I can’t reveal is also in place, all with one objective: keep people like Ryan and me out.
We know about the security in such detail because we’ve spent weeks preparing for this mission. Working from a remote location, we gathered reams of detailed information via phishing and vishing (phishing phone calls) attacks. In the course of seemingly innocuous conversation, people working behind the razor wire and at other facilities maintained by this organization revealed operational plans, scheduling details, even the names of employees and managers who worked here—enough of them so that we could piece together large portions of the organization’s management hierarchy.
In recent days, we continued to amass information while poking around the facilities in person. We had learned that the organization was building a new facility near this one, and that they were holding a groundbreaking ceremony this week. Although no information about the new facility’s location was available online, that didn’t stop us. Noticing that a local journalist had written articles about the construction, we hatched a plan to pose as this journalist and his colleague from the same news site. To learn the location, we had Debra, one of our female colleagues, call the facility’s main office posing as an assistant to the journalist. “Hi,” she said, in a cheerful tone. “This is Samantha over at WXTT [not the television station’s real name]. I’m Pete Robichaud’s secretary. He’s coming out to cover the ribbon ceremony on Saturday at ten thirty. I just have a couple of follow-up questions.”
“Hold on a sec,” a man on the other end of the line said, probably checking that Pete (also not his real name) was on the guest list. “Go ahead.”
“Okay, so first off, what kind of ID does he need to bring? He’ll need a government ID with a photo, right?”
“Yep. Driver’s license is fine, as is a passport.”
“Great. So, next question, he’s planning on bringing his own camera equipment. Is that okay? Anything he shouldn’t bring?”
“That’s fine,” the man said. “We’ll search him on the way in, though.”
“Absolutely,” our colleague said. “So, my last question is . . . I just want to verify. We seem to have lost his invitation, so I want to verify the facility’s location and where he needs to go.”
“No problem,” the man said. He gave us exactly the information we needed.
It was a seemingly trivial conversation, lasting only thirty seconds. The man on the other end of the line probably didn’t give it another thought. But there was more to the exchange than meets the eye. Debra only wanted to obtain one piece of information—the address—yet she posed two warm-up questions, eliciting basic information that we knew the man on the other end of the line would have no problem answering. This technique is what people in our line of work call “concession.” The warm-up questions served to get the man comfortable conceding to the prospect of answering her questions. Once his brain had answered two of them, it would be better primed to answer the third, so long as that last question wasn’t so outlandish as to arouse suspicion. Debra even threw out an answer to the first question for him, signaling that she knew what she was doing, had done it before, and everything was legit.
But Debra was deploying other techniques as well. When she posed the third question, she positioned it as simply “verifying” what she already knew. She was setting up the question by evoking its logic, making it seem a perfectly reasonable question to ask. And before that, when she asked if there was anything her boss shouldn’t bring, she was playing dumb, implicitly asking the man on the other end to teach her. This massaged the man’s ego, validating his authority and making him more comfortable and willing to talk—a task made easier by the gender difference between them.
Thanks to this conversation and others like it, we had been able to show up at the facility the day before and nearly gain access. Security personnel became suspicious and briefly detained us, but not before we’d learned numerous details about the security provisions, how the guards were trained, what weapons they carried, what kinds of threats they were alert to, what kinds of cameras the facility used, and so on.
Now Ryan and I are trying again to gain access, in a way that admittedly is far more dangerous. In the middle of the night, with two unidentified men dressed head to toe in black sneaking up to the fence, it would be easy for a nervous guard to shoot first and ask questions later. At six feet three, I’m hardly a small target. I try to push these thoughts aside as we make our way toward the fence, but it isn’t easy. My mind keeps returning to the phone call I’d made earlier to my wife and kids, telling them that I love them. With every sound, my pulse races and I suck in my breath. We shouldn’t be doing this, I tell myself again.
We reach the darkened section of fence and glance around—all clear. I rest the ladder against the chain link, and we use the rope to ease the razor wire down. With him video-recording on his phone, I climb up to breach the fence. I look around to see if we’ve been spotted, but fortunately, we haven’t.
Over the next hour or so, Ryan and I explore the grounds, break into a couple of buildings and large machines, and take photographs and video-record what we see. Not once do the guards approach us. They apparently have no idea of our presence. Still, every second is pure temple-throbbing, adrenaline-coursing torment.
When we feel we have enough documentation, we head back to our truck and call it a night. Over the next few days, we’ll use low-tech tools and psychological techniques to compromise this facility again from other entry points. We’ll have guards shouting at us and putting guns to our heads, but only after we’ve spent hours again wandering around buildings and into the facility’s most sensitive, highly guarded areas.
“Absolutely impenetrable”? I don’t think so.
You might think Ryan and I are government spies, high-end criminals, or fearless thrill seekers looking for another million YouTube followers. You’d be wrong. We’re not any of those.
We’re hackers.
Most people think of hackers as young techno-thugs who pound Mountain Dew and tap at their computers stealing data, crashing websites, or sending spam about Viagra. But there are good hackers, too, top-security professionals that governments and companies hire to protect them from the bad guys. And among these good hackers, there are a select few who don’t specialize in the technical side of breaking into computers, but rather the messy, human side. This subspecies of hackers bypasses even the tightest security not by writing code to hack machines, but by hacking humans. They’re con men, essentially, fast talkers who convince unsuspecting people to let them into machines and secured physical locations. The best of these hackers are so good that they not only get what they want, they make it so their targets feel better for having met them.
Ryan and I are hackers of humans. And don’t worry, we’re good guys. Thinking like the bad guys do, we apply advanced psychological principles and techniques to break into servers and physical sites. When we succeed, which is the vast majority of the time, we help our clients understand and fix their weaknesses, so that their customers and society at large are safer. That’s what we were doing in the desert that evening—probing the security of this supposedly ultra-secure facility and identifying weaknesses, so that our clients could fix them before the bad guys broke in and wreaked havoc. We make our living getting perfect strangers to say or do pretty much whatever we want.
I’ve honed my techniques for more than a decade, using them to compromise the world’s most secure facilities and computer networks, prompting one journalist covering the security industry to wonder aloud whether I’m “the most dangerous man in America.”1 That I’m not, but we do teach our methods to spies, military personnel, and security professionals around the world so that they can stay one step ahead of the truly dangerous bad guys. In this book, I’ll reveal our secrets to you for use at home and at work. You’ll learn how to read people effectively from their body language, how to get people instantly on your side by uttering exactly the right words, how to make requests in ways that dramatically increase your chances of a positive response, how to spot and thwart people who are trying to manipulate you, how to plot out an important conversation from beginning to end to increase your odds of success, and much more. Whether you seek to land a promotion, get people to give you free stuff, get people to tell you what they really think, or improve your relationships by learning to communicate better, our methods will be your new secret weapon. As you’ll discover, hacking humans can help anyone win friends, influence people, and achieve their goals. It can help you.
The notion of hacking people instead of computers might sound strange. Who knew it was a “thing”? I didn’t back in the day. In 1991, I got kicked out of college after only two months because of a little stunt I pulled. Actually, it wasn’t so little—I messed around with the primitive modems we had on campus and wound up shutting down practically the entire phone system for Sarasota, Florida, for a full day.
Afterward, I drifted. I knew I had this strange knack for convincing people to give me stuff I shouldn’t have, so I used it to land jobs that interested me. About a year after dropping out, I was working a job delivering papers when I walked into the office of a twenty-five-unit apartment complex and began chatting with the owner. I had never met this guy before, but in just a few minutes, I got him to tell me his deepest, darkest secrets. It turned out he had some personal issues he needed to resolve out of state. Two hours later, I had a well-paying job—with no relevant experience—as vice landlord renting out apartments and managing the complex. I was just seventeen years old.
I stayed for a while, leaving when I became bored. I got it into my head that it would be cool to be a chef, so I walked into a very fancy restaurant and, with zero kitchen experience, asked for a job. Two hours later, incredibly, I had one.
I got bored of that, too, so I talked my way into yet another job with no experience. Then another. And another. By the time I was in my late twenties, I was working as an international business negotiator for a company that, of all things, made stainless steel industrial products. I was traveling the world wheeling and dealing and making great money. But by that time, I had also talked this woman I loved into marrying me and having kids. Wishing to spend more time at home, I decided to leave and find something else to do.
It occurred to me, given my experience getting kicked out of college, that I might be good at hacking into computers. I went online and found a course offered by a security company on how to do it. I took the course and was the first person in the company’s history to break into one of its most hardened servers. The owner offered me a job on the spot helping them to physically break into computer networks using technical methods.
There was one problem: despite having taken the course, I wasn’t all that great at the technical methods. What I had going for me was my street smarts and skills as a fast talker. It turned out that this was all I needed. For the next few years, I helped out the team in unexpected ways. My colleagues would be messing around with computer code, trying to find software or hardware vulnerabilities they could exploit to break into a system. They’d go at it for thirty hours, forty, fifty. Eventually, I’d pipe in: “How about I just call this guy and ask for his password?”
They’d shrug and say, “Well, you can try.”
In ten minutes, we were in the system.
This scenario played out again and again. Sometimes I’d call people to extract information, other times I’d use phishing emails or just waltz into a facility with no fear and convince people to give me access to their servers. I wasn’t using any preexisting methods, just my intuitive people skills and street smarts. But it worked, so much so that I suggested to my boss that we create a course on these methods. To my surprise, he told me to go ahead and make one up. “No way,” I said. “I have no clue how to write a course. I never even finished college.”
“It’s easy,” he said. “Just find every book you can that might have relevant psychological theory or research and think about what you’re doing every day on the job. Write all of this down and organize it into a simple framework that you can teach to people.”
His advice made sense, so I accepted the challenge. In 2009, after almost a year of studying and thinking, I had my framework written. I posted it online, and then largely forgot about it. A few months later, a publishing house cold-called me and said they’d seen my framework. They wondered if I would like to write a technical book for people in the security business. I turned them down at first, telling them I was just a greasy little hacker, and nobody was going to read anything I wrote. I told my boss about the offer, thinking he’d find it as funny as I did. He almost jumped out of his seat. “Are you crazy? Call them back and write the book!”
Again, I took his advice, and Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking came out in 2010. It was the first “how-to” book on hacking humans and has sold more than 100,000 copies, which is crazy for a nerdy technical book. In framing what I did as “social engineering,” I appropriated a term first coined in the late nineteenth century and popularized during the 1990s and 2000s by the prominent hacker Kevin Mitnick. As I explained to readers, social engineering was “the act of manipulating a person to take an action that may or may not be in the ‘target’s’ best interest.”2 I have since altered his definition, distinguishing between influencing people to behave or think as you wish and manipulation, which is the darker art of forcing or coercing them to do so. Given the ethical constraints in which good hackers operate (discussed in a moment), the vast majority of what social engineers like me do is influencing people. We sneakily get them to divulge sensitive information, and we refrain in almost all situations from coercing them.
Cross paths with us, either in person, on the phone, or online, and you’ll think you had a delightful if perhaps trivial encounter with another human being. In some small way, you’ll feel better off for having met us. But because we framed the conversation in exactly the right way, using specific words and paying close attention to your reactions, you’ll almost certainly have also given us a password, a Social Security number, or some other piece of information we needed. The truth is, a well-trained social engineer doesn’t need to use manipulation. Influence techniques are powerful enough.
You know that nice old lady who called you yesterday soliciting a charitable donation, and who chatted you up for a few minutes? Or that friendly UPS guy who in the course of asking for directions remarked on your company hat, cracked a joke, and queried you quite innocently about your work? I don’t mean to scare you, but she might not have been nice, and he might not have been innocent. These strangers might have been malicious hackers, trying to squeeze you for information. They almost certainly weren’t—let’s not get carried away—but they could have been. Millions of people get hacked by criminals using influence techniques masquerading as an innocent conversation. The victims don’t know they’ve been had until one day they discover that someone has taken out a small business loan in their name or locked down their computer and demanded a ransom.
Social Engineering laid out the basic principles and techniques for hacking humans, so that security professionals could use them to thwart attacks and keep us safe. In retrospect, I’m not proud of this book—it’s pretty weak. But it did help put social engineering on the map. And for me personally, Social Engineering was a turning point. Excited about the reception it received in the security world, I started a company that evaluates companies for weaknesses by performing “penetration tests” such as the one depicted earlier, and that trains security professionals in how to hack humans effectively.
In the ten years that we’ve been in business, my firm has used the principles of social engineering to send 14 million phishing emails and more than 45,000 voice-phishing phone calls. We’ve broken into hundreds of servers, and physically compromised dozens of the world’s most tightly guarded corporate and government facilities, including banks, corporate headquarters, manufacturing facilities, warehouses, and defense installations. If we’d been real thieves, we’d have obtained highly sensitive state secrets, stolen untold billions, and wreaked havoc on millions of lives by stealing people’s identities and leaking their most sensitive information. We’ve been so successful that the FBI has recently invited me to train new agents in their Behavioral Analysis Unit. I’ve also partnered with law enforcement and used human hacking techniques to catch pedophiles online through a nonprofit I created, the Innocent Lives Foundation.
My team and I think of hacking humans as a super power, a psychological martial art, that we can use to get people we meet to do almost anything we want, and feel better about themselves—and us—in the process. In some ways we’re tricking people, but more fundamentally we’re wielding finely honed empathy and social savvy to our advantage. Applying insights from psychology, we cue in closely to how people are thinking and feeling, and use that information to nudge them so that they want to comply with our requests. Used correctly, social engineering enables others to feel happier, calmer, stronger, and just better about themselves by helping us out. They get this small, emotional “gift” from us, and they naturally return the favor, giving us what we want. All in the course of a few minutes of pleasant conversation.
Imagine that you could harness these skills in your personal and professional life. You can. Not long ago, my wife, daughter, and I were in London’s Heathrow Airport waiting for our plane. I was dragging around a cart piled high with our luggage, and as I approached the check-in counter, the cart hit a bump and some of the luggage fell off. Mindful that a major highway in London was named the M5, I made a joke: “Oh, a big American accident on the M5.” The lady behind the counter laughed, so I said to myself, “Okay, great. At least she’s in a good mood.”
My wife chatted with this woman for a few minutes. “Before we check in,” my wife said, “can I just tell you, your makeup is so immaculate, it matches your scarf beautifully. I’d love to buy one of those scarves. Is there any way I can do that?”
The woman was delighted at the compliment, not least because she’d probably been spending much of her shift until now taking requests from stressed and disgruntled passengers. She and my wife chatted for a few minutes more about scarves and makeup, and the gate attendant become visibly more relaxed—a smile on her face, the lines in her forehead easing, her shoulders relaxing. My wife wasn’t trying to butter this woman up, nor was she piling it on. She genuinely liked the woman’s makeup, and was happy to tell her so. The woman could sense her authenticity.
As for me, I sensed an opportunity. Leaning over, I put my arm around my wife and smiled, while tilting my head slightly. “Hey, you know,” I said, “while you’re checking us in, I’m wondering . . . I know we probably can’t afford it, but is there any way you can just tell us how much it would cost to upgrade from economy? You know, maybe just to premium economy or something?”
She looked at my wife, not at me, and whispered, “Don’t tell anyone.” She typed furiously on her keyboard. “I’m putting all three of you in first class.”
“What??? Thank you,” we said. “That’s amazing.”
Let’s break down what happened here. Whenever we meet someone for the first time, four baseline questions pop into our minds:
If you think back to your most recent experience meeting someone, surely these questions were salient for you, even if only in the background of your awareness. To get a person you’re meeting for the first time to do something for you, you have to quickly and deftly answer these four questions for them so that they can relax and feel comfortable. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You can say whatever you want, and they’ll be wary of you and unenthusiastic about complying.
When I arrived at the baggage counter, three out of these four questions were immediately answered for the attendant, simply from the social context and the way I looked. With my cart full of bags, I was almost certainly a passenger, and I almost certainly wanted to check in. Our encounter would most likely only take a few minutes, as these encounters usually do. The only question that was not answered was the fourth one—was I a threat? Likely, I wasn’t, but the attendant couldn’t be absolutely sure. Maybe I was drunk and would become loud and violent when told I couldn’t get an aisle seat. Maybe I was not drunk, but still a belligerent jerk who hated the airline and was looking for trouble. Maybe I was sick with COVID-19 and was about to cough all over her and expose her to the illness.
When I told that little joke, I settled question #4 for her in my favor. I was in effect throwing up what we call a “verbal softball.” I just launched that joke with the attendant and other passengers within earshot, not knowing who would respond and “catch” the softball. Whoever did would become my “target,” or as I also call it in this book, my “person of interest.” That the attendant responded was a positive development, since she had something I wanted. My joke allowed me to build just a tiny bit of initial rapport with her. She laughed at the joke, and we made eye contact. To her, I was no longer a potentially threatening stranger, but rather a fun, self-deprecating American. We were off to a good start.
Then my wife, bless her heart, spontaneously did something amazing. She felt moved to compliment the woman, in a way that was not calculated or off-putting, setting in motion what we call “the liking principle.” When it comes to influence, we tend to like people who like us. So, in addition to seeing me and by implication my family as nonthreatening, the gate attendant now liked us, or at least my wife. My wife also built a sense of common understanding with this woman—they were able to connect over makeup and scarves. Meanwhile, the compliment gave the attendant a chemical boost, causing her brain to release oxytocin and dopamine, molecules that create trust and produce the feeling of pleasure, respectively.
Amid this chemical soup, this mini-storm of connectedness, happiness, and pleasure, I knew that any request I made that was not outlandish would be more likely to elicit a positive response than it would otherwise. In that context, it would be easier for that attendant to honor my request, which she did. And then she took it a big step further by not charging us. We’d given her a “gift,” and she’d given us one in return.
My students and I have used these and similar techniques to get seat upgrades, rental car upgrades, sought-after reservations to restaurants, and many other goodies. We’ve also used them to fix family relationships, get a big promotion at work, deal with difficult colleagues, make new friends, feel more comfortable at cocktail parties and in other social situations, and much more. Of course, we’ve also used it to protect ourselves against others who might like to manipulate us to take action that isn’t in our best interests. Social engineering is a generally applicable approach that, when mastered, will allow you to win friends, influence people, and achieve most goals you might have—all by being kinder, more empathetic, and more giving.
Empathy in particular is foundational to human hacking. Popular culture often portrays empathy as inherently good, a view supported by psychologists such as Simon Baron-Cohen, who has theorized that cruelty is made possible in part by a relative lack of empathy.3 But other scholars have linked the presence of empathy to a range of negative phenomena, including cruelty and tribalism.4 I tend to regard empathy as a value-neutral concept, defined as the act of imaginatively inhabiting someone else’s emotional experience. Criminal hackers and con men are amazing at the perspective-taking that is at the core of empathy—they just deploy it maliciously to benefit themselves. They are keenly sensitive to what others are thinking, and they deploy that sensitivity to say or do exactly the right thing to manipulate others.
We can use the same empathetic mindset, but channel it more positively, influencing others to decide to help us rather than forcing them to do so through manipulation. As I know you’ll find, taking the empathetic leap makes it far easier to achieve whatever goals we might be pursuing. By displaying empathy, we can simultaneously address others’ needs, too, leaving them better off for having met us.
If you take anything away from this book, make it the cultivation of an empathetic mindset. All of us can empathize with others to a greater or lesser extent, and all of us can cultivate that ability by working on it. In fact, the tools we’ll explore in the following chapters all amount to different ways of practicing, channeling, and expressing empathy. By mastering these tools, you can become so awesome at empathy that it becomes a way of being, something you instantly and unconsciously apply as you move through the world. You’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to achieve your goals, and how much better it feels.
It might surprise you to hear that something as benevolent as empathy (coupled, as I’m suggesting, with a serious dose of kindness, respect, and generosity) underlies something as seemingly malevolent as hacking, but it’s true. Understand people better, communicate with them better, treat them better, and you’ll get more of what you want, too. Think of social engineering as the art of asking nicely, of behaving diplomatically, of reading others and respecting their needs, of practicing the social niceties, all rolled up into one powerful approach that you can mobilize at will to whatever end you choose.
I first knew I needed to write Human Hacking a few years ago when I noticed that laypeople were spending thousands of dollars to take my social engineering course, even though it was marketed explicitly to security professionals. A salesman was taking it to learn to sell more effectively. A Zumba instructor was taking it to improve personal relationships. A high school teacher was taking it to learn how to engage more fruitfully with her students. A mom was taking it to come out of her shell more and engage more effectively with her kids. These people had all heard about the course from friends and made the connection with their own lives.
Curious, I followed up with these people after the course was over, and found that they were achieving epic, even life-changing results by hacking humans. They were getting ahead in their careers, solidifying their romantic relationships, parenting their kids better—you name it. Many of these students were introverts who were painfully shy when they first came to my class. A week later, I had them running around the city asking bold questions of complete strangers. Over the following weeks and months, they were making new friends, networking with colleagues, and engaging with the world in other ways that they never would have imagined.
These are difficult times in which to live as a human being. Technology has rendered us more isolated from one another and more socially awkward than ever before (and pandemics like COVID-19 don’t help, either). We live in our little social bubbles, reluctant to connect with people in our immediate vicinity. Tribalism compounds the problem: entire categories of people seem so different from us that communication seems impossible. Meanwhile, as long-standing rules for social conduct are demolished before our eyes, it’s no longer clear how we should communicate with our work colleagues, people we meet at social events, members of the opposite sex, or even our kids.
All of these developments may leave us feeling powerless, insecure, and anxious when communicating with others. But if we learn how to hack humans, we can regain some of this power. We can learn how to read people and their emotions better than before, and thus become wiser when dealing with them. We can handle conflict with others more adroitly, and even better, prevent it from arising in the first place. We can ask for what we want and need in ways that seem natural and reasonable instead of off-putting. We can spot opportunities when they arise, getting more of what we want (as I did at Heathrow Airport). We can learn to protect ourselves against malicious hackers and scam artists, allowing ourselves to feel calmer and more confident in any situation. Critically, we can learn to become far more self-aware about how we’re communicating. When we do commit social miscues—and as we’ll see, even the most masterful hackers do—we can learn from them and get better going forward.
The chapters in this book take you through the topics that every expert hacker of humans knows and masters. We start with a powerful tool you can use to help you understand communications patterns better—your own, and others’. After all, if you understand what a person in your life is likely to respond to, you can tailor your communications accordingly to be far more effective. Subsequent chapters teach you how to:
Work through these chapters individually, taking time to practice the skills using the “missions” or exercises I provide. With diligence on your part, you should see improvement in your abilities as a communicator and influencer within just a few weeks. Hopefully, you’ll continue practicing and improving much as you would with a martial art or a musical instrument, recognizing that as good as you might get, you’re never “done.”
You can also use this book to prepare for specific, “big” conversations in your life, like a job interview, a negotiation, or a difficult conversation with a colleague or loved one. Instead of going into such conversations cold, you’ll have a whole set of tools to fall back on, as well as a plan and the confidence that comes with knowledge and mastery. Read each chapter with your upcoming interaction in mind, thinking how you might apply the skills in question to this particular “hacking humans” challenge. Then use the book’s final chapter to map out a detailed plan for how you’ll handle it. If you’ve ever tried to prepare for a big conversation before, I think you’ll find that this book will help you take your readiness—and your confidence—to a whole new level.
I just have one request of you: Don’t Be Evil. Can you manage that? As you read this book and begin practicing its techniques, you will quickly understand the potential of this new super power you are cultivating. Like any super power, hacking humans can be used for good and for evil. And when it’s used for evil, the effects both on individuals and society can be devastating. Mindful of these effects, my team and I adhere strictly to a formal code of ethics. There are a number of parts to it, but in essence, we won’t break the law in order to hack into a server or secure location.* We won’t tell the world about the vulnerabilities we uncover. We won’t threaten people or use other manipulative tactics that cause them to suffer. We will, in every interaction we have, leave others better for having met us.
In my courses, I have students agree to this code of ethics before I teach them the material in this book. In sharing it with you, I ask that you read the code of ethics at the beginning of this book and agree to abide by it. None of us are perfect, but I believe that the vast majority of readers will hack humans in ways that do leave others better off for having met us. A few readers might put my techniques to immoral or criminal ends, but on balance, spreading our hacking techniques will make the world kinder, more considerate, more empathetic, and more welcoming. For every person with ill intent, a thousand will use this book to become more successful and happier while also treating others in ways that they like, too.
Be one of that thousand. If you’ve been struggling to get ahead in any area of your life, or if you simply want to build on your existing success, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. Learn the skills, practice them, and master them. Do yourself and the rest of us a favor. Get off your butt, stop slacking, and start hacking. Humans, that is.