Page 15 - The Power to Change Anything

4 INFLUENCER

Fortunately you’ve learned to follow the words of a well-
known prayer: Every day you ask for the serenity to accept the
things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you
can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Somehow that gets
you through.

THE SERENITY TRAP
And that’s the problem. It’s everyone’s problem. We’ve come
to believe that when we face enormous challenges that can be
solved only by influencing intractable behaviors, we might
attempt a couple of change strategies. When they fail miserably,
we surrender. It’s time to quit and move on. We tell ourselves
that we’re not influencers, and that it’s time to turn our atten-
tion to things that are in our control. We seek serenity.
This would be a good tactic were it not for the fact that the
problems we’ve listed—along with everything from changing the
culture of an organization to eliminating HIV/AIDS transmission
to reducing drug addiction to limiting divorce—can be and have
been resolved by someone somewhere. That’s right. There are
actual people out there who—instead of continually seeking the
“wisdom to know the difference”—have sought the wisdom to
make a difference. And they’ve found it. They’ve discovered that
when it comes to changing the world, what most of us lack is
not the courage to change things, but the skill to do so.
The promise of this book is that almost all the profound,
pervasive, and persistent problems we face in our lives, our
companies, and our world can be solved. They can be solved
because these problems don’t require solutions that defy the
laws of nature; they require people to act differently. And while
it’s true that most of us aren’t all that skilled at getting ourselves
and others to behave differently, there are experts out there who
do it all the time.
In fact, one of the best-kept secrets in the world is that over
the past half century a handful of behavioral science theorists