This is a Xost analysis. See the previous Xost analysis here.
As usual, I will first explain all the details I would like the widest possible audience to know. Then I will go deeper on the psychology of this topic behind the paywall. Finally, I will end with my own advice on this subject, which differs substantially from the advice implied by our master persuader in this Xost.
This will be qualitatively different from other Xost analyses I have done in the past, as you can tell by looking at the colors I have highlighted. Our master persuader has a preferred tactic of inverting the subliminal messages and word choice relative to the technical or literal idea his post communicates, such that the post affects the reader differently than the reader expects when the reader consciously processes the post.
My favorite tactic to help people see this clearly is to highlight key phrases in bright colors. When you break down the components of a whole into its substituent elements, it often becomes easier to analyze the ensemble in an accurate way. In particular, I highlight negative affirmations or subliminal messages that direct the reader towards bad outcomes in bright red. Red is for stop. Reinforce in your gut what you want to understand in your mind.1
However, what’s this? The entire post is green. It only sends positive affirmations. If there is harm or bad advice in this post, it is not as a consequence of immediate emotional or subliminal persuasion. Hence, rather than being a persuasion-focused analysis, this will be a psychology-focused analysis. The lessons you can learn from this post will be more abstract.
For many master persuader posts, your best way to combat them is to think of a way to say the post with subliminal messages and affirmations that face you towards the peaks you want to climb. We’ll do something else here.
Let’s start with a claim that may be obvious to you, then spend some time explaining why I believe it’s true. The plan described by this post is extremely appealing to highly intelligent individuals. Our master persuader has an assortment of filters in his marketing funnel that are specifically aimed at intelligent people. This is one of them. This may not be apparent at first glance; it helps to discuss certain common experiences among intelligent individuals in youth.
This is the short version. People avoid talking about topics like this in public because it’s not politically correct to distinguish between individuals according to IQ. So, advance warning, what I say might make people feel uncomfortable. Ultimately, those who push the limits of their comfort zone increase their potential.
The easy analogy for many to understand is computers of different processing power. Some computers are faster than others. Give one a problem to solve, and it will solve the problem in a minute. Another, in an hour. Another, in 50 years. Human IQ is kind of like this. Obviously, it’s an imperfect analogy. We’re just demonstrating a similar idea to help people understand.
Humans of different intelligence levels can always default back to our “instinct level” or our “emotional responses” if we run out of mental horsepower to handle a situation. The lower one’s IQ, the more one does this in social situations. It often leads to… suboptimal outcomes.
Humans of uncomfortably high IQ basically never re-route to their primal instinctual hardware for social situations, because they have extra horsepower lying around that they get to use somewhere. They meticulously analyze things that others don’t. When they’re young, this puts them in a weird uncanny valley that is quite unlikeable to their peers.
In the replies of my own Xost, I gave a simple example. When someone asks a highly intelligent youth a simple question, he will often carefully think it through in order to give the best possible answer. Most kids simply and instinctually say something that is “good enough.” The person asking the question is expecting the youth to simply and instinctually say something “good enough.” The extra time throws the question asker off base, and makes him more likely to shun the intelligent youth.
Hopefully, we’re all on the same page now about why the master persuader’s post, by assuming the reader has an unlikeable personality, filters for intelligent people. Most young and intelligent people do not (yet) have a likeable personality. Our master persuader will, of course, filter for true misanthropes this way as well, but he has other ways of keeping his audience’s IQ high.
The other way that this post filters for high intelligence is that it presupposes the reader is innately capable of easily acquiring a large amount of wealth. The usual average IQ person who reads a post like this will not find it all that appealing. For AverageMan, it’s hard to make a lot of money, and easy to have a likeable personality. He does it naturally.
This is why the post specifically filters the master persuader’s audience to high intelligence individuals. For people who outperform everyone in tests of aptitude, but seemingly always struggle to get along with others, this “plan for life success” makes perfect sense. Behind the paywall, I’ll talk about the psychology of intelligent individuals some more, and finally opine on why there’s a light at the end of the tunnel if you spend time building your socialization skills. See you underground.