Fascinate summary

You’re at a dinner party. As the evening winds down, you notice there’s one piece of chocolate left on the table. No one else seems to want it, but you don’t want to be the one to take it. Yet you can’t stop thinking about how the chocolate would taste, how it would feel as it melts on your tongue.

What’s behind that craving? Lust.

Whether we’re engrossed in a “whodunit” or scanning the morning headlines, an unsolved murder is something that captures our imagination.

A lack of facts around a case prompts speculation, engaging your imagination and desire to figure out what might have occurred. But why does this happen?

Filling out a tax form isn’t the most enjoyable thing to do – which is precisely why so many people put it off until the last minute! However, when you realize that you have just two days left to file, that tax form and the task of completing it becomes instantly fascinating.

Why? Because as soon as you feel the imminent threat of serious consequences, you become alarmed, and this triggers your sense of fascination.

Have you ever noticed how many popular magazines and TV shows feature vastly wealthy people with massive houses and wildly expensive sports cars?

If so, you might also wonder why it is exactly that such shows and magazines are so incredibly popular.

For millennia, power has triggered our fascination: philosophers spend time trying to define it, and governments spend money and energy finding ways to monopolize it.

But we don’t have to think of power in such grand terms. Instead, we can use the word to refer to any attempt to control someone else. With this, a dictatorship that limits its citizens’ right to free assembly exists on the same spectrum as parents who limit their teenager’s access to the family car.

In the 1920s, the United States government enacted Prohibition, making alcohol illegal to consume or sell. Was this move effective in dulling people’s desire to drink alcohol, to make it less fascinating?

Certainly not! In fact, during Prohibition, the consumption of alcoholic beverages actually increased.

What’s the secret to the global popularity of McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks and so on?

In a word, trust – the last of the seven triggers of fascination which we’ll examine. Along with trust comes the comforting feeling of familiarity.

Now that you’ve learned about the seven triggers and how they can be used to improve a company’s reputation, you’re probably eager to try them out for yourself.

There are three steps necessary in the process of making your company more fascinating: Evaluation, Development and Execution.

Now that you’ve discovered your current level of fascination, it’s time to develop ideas that will make you even more fascinating.

This part of the process is a creative one, in that you are aiming to find the perfect combination of triggers to increase your fascination.

At this point, having discovered your most effective triggers and developed some great ideas for combining them, you now know exactly how to use your strengths to become as fascinating as possible.

There’s just one final thing for you to do: bring those ideas to life!