You can do amazing things if you learn how to program computers. But if you figure out how to program people, you could have them:

• Program computers
• Perform any task
• Program more people to perform tasks

I started thinking about programming people in high school. I thought I'd learn about it in my psychology or business classes, but it was never mentioned, so I assumed it wasn't possible. Until I read "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg. This book taught me that programming influencing people was possible, and more generally, there are open-secrets to be found in books.

Moving beyond the basics of influence, I wanted to know why it worked. And what should I influence people to do? My curiosity lead to more questions, and it became clear that understanding people means understanding: philosophy, biology, history, business, finance, politics, art, etc.

Now, after reading more than 200 books (and watching thousands of YouTube videos) across all major fields of study, it's time to start sharing what I've learned...

Why do people do what they do?

Survival

To be alive today, you must have survived yesterday. We know many things about your path to the present because there are a limited number of ways to get here.

The general strategy is to stay alive and have kids.

This is the root of human behavior, but it feels like we're missing something. There are many behaviors that don't obviously relate to survival. And many types of people, including those who decide not to have kids.

The idea that isn't obvious is the majority of behaviors come from unconscious decisions.

We're all running mental scripts in our head. They're imperfect, unable to handle every unique circumstance in a changing environment. They're learned from your experiences, culture, or genetics, so there's overlap between different people, but also room for many different outcomes.

If these decisions are important, why aren't we aware of them?

Consciousness is for making new decisions, not for repeating important ones. Over time, important decisions progress from being conscious to unconscious to genetic.

In short, people behave through unconscious scripts pointed towards survival, but influenced by their experiences, culture, genetics, etc,

Stories

We're wired to communicate in stories (conscious scripts). They're essential to survival, as a way to predict and/or control the future. The format is understandable in its simplest form: "John did X and got Y."

But the complexity multiplies as you add more people. Family, school, business, country, etc. These are stories we all know. Each with roles we spend our lives learning and playing.

For a story to survive, it needs people to play the roles. And if the story, in turn, helps them survive... motivating traits, among the story's actors, begin moving from conscious to genetic.

One major drawback of stories and predicting the future is we become aware of death. Stories aren't very motivating when they end with "and then he died and everyone soon forgot about him".

How do we cope with this? More stories, of course.

• You're not really going to die
• Your family will survive
• Some project, system, or idea of yours will survive

Of the many stories people believe, they'll invest most deeply in the ones they're using to deny death.

Worse than our own death is the death of everything, nihilism. What's the point if we're all going to die? The further you think into the future, the more likely your story will collapse. At this point, your options are to adopt a religion, or stop thinking so much.

In short, people live through stories, and prefer ones that promote survival and allow them to deny death.

Technology

We build tools to better understand and control the environment, and then build better tools. This process leads to exponential growth.

Is growth good or bad? In theory, every step forward increases our odds of survival (after a little time to adjust). In reality, that step forward might be a step over the edge of a cliff.

To be more specific, technology changes which traits survive (same as stories). And also changes which stories survive (or vice versa). This creates a dangerous instability. It takes time to make counterbalancing adjustments.

In short, fast changes are dangerous, but we're accelerating.

Closing

In conclusion, people do what their internal or external scripts tell them to do. The scripts are written for survival, but things don't always go as planned.