Page 102 - The Power to Change Anything

Make the Undesirable Desirable 91

one at Delancey. There comes a day when residents become
a person they’ve never met—and they like it. They care.
They take satisfaction in accomplishment. They’ve discovered
the intrinsic satisfaction that comes with living a law-abiding
life.
The “try it, you’ll like it” strategy can be further aided by
the use of models. Many of our influence masters have
found that vicarious experience can work in situations where
they can’t get people to try a vital behavior based on faith alone.
For example, as you recall from an earlier chapter, Miguel
Sabido inspired hundreds of thousands of illiterate Mexicans
to sign up for literacy programs by engaging them in the story
of a man just like them—someone who was “too old to learn.”
Someone who was initially unwilling to bear the shame of sit-
ting in a class with much younger people and admitting his
“defect.”
Week after week as Sabido’s audiences experienced the
journey to literacy and vicariously experienced what it would
be like to be able to read, it began to mean something. They
imagined just how entertaining life would be with access to fas-
cinating books. They saw the effect a grandparent could have
on grandchildren. They felt what it would be like to have the
sense of pride that comes from graduating from literacy class.
And eventually they shut down the streets of Mexico City with
their deluge of requests for literacy information that was adver-
tised on the series.
What do you think happened when all these new people
arrived at their first reading class? They quickly found that
learning to read was difficult and not always a whole lot of fun.
They couldn’t go home that night and read to their grandchil-
dren. Fortunately, the characters in the television show had
demonstrated the difficult side of the learning process, so it
wasn’t a huge surprise. People understood the pleasures of read-
ing, but knew they’d have to work to become proficient before
these pleasures would be theirs.