# The Hype Handbook — Chapter-07: Find a Void and Fill It - **Source**: /library/The Hype Handbook/source-file.pdf - **PDF pages**: 99–108 - **Pages without text**: none --- O HYPE STRATEGY #7 FIND A VOID AND FILL IT People are constantly giving out signals as to what they lack. They long for completeness, whether the illusion of it or the reality, and if it has to come from another person, that person has tremendous power over them. —ROBERT GREENE n the evening before April Fool’s Day 1848, 14-year-old Maggie Fox and her 11-year-old sister Kate knocked at the door of their neighbor’s home in the farm town of Hydesville, New York. The two girls seemed to be filled with both fear and excitement in equal measure. They told their neighbor they wanted her to see something that they had been experiencing with increasing regularity but that no one outside their household knew about. Curious, she followed them back to their house. The girls’ mother awaited them. Instead of greeting their neighbor, she stared blankly at a wall. Then, without warning she cried out. “Now count five!” The neighbor watched as the Fox sisters huddled together on their bed and focused trancelike on an indefinable point in the distance. After a stretch of silence, as if in response to some ineffable energy, a sound rang out. Five disembodied knocks. After she left, the incident was all the neighbor could think about. She told everyone she knew. Before long, people all over town were talking about it. Soon after that, people across the region were telling stories about the sisters, and not always in a positive light. Eventually, the Fox sisters announced publicly that they would give a demonstration to prove the veracity of the claims. The resulting showcase took place at the largest performance hall in Rochester, New York, which was filled by 700 people. The sisters were thoroughly searched. They were bound and gagged as two acclaimed fraud busters looked on. Nevertheless, to the astonishment of the assembled, the rapping noises rang out loud and clear. It was true! The Fox sisters could communicate with the dead. The movement they birthed, spiritualism, would go on to become one of the biggest new phenomena of the nineteenth century, and it can be traced directly back to this moment. Spiritualism was based on the belief that there are certain “mediums” who are tuned into the metaphysical realm. Not long after the Fox sisters’ emergence, people—mainly women—all over the country were claiming to have this ability. Séances became regular occurrences (attended, again, mainly by women)—and, in many cases, big business for those who organized them. It went on for decades. And then, after nearly a lifetime of promoting this new gospel, Maggie Fox decided she had had enough. She renounced all the claims she had ever made about her uncanny abilities. In front of an audience of 2,000 people at the New York Academy of Music, she showed how she was able to crack the joints in her toes and knuckles in a way that resonated loudly in the space around her while remaining completely motionless. It was this, rather than any spirits of the deceased, that had caused the rapping. In the wake of her revelation, you might assume the hordes of disillusioned believers would have become complete skeptics, or would have at least retreated into traditional religion. Not so. Instead, a rash of new movements such as Christian Science, Theosophy, and New Age sprang up, with former spiritualists flooding their ranks. During the mid-nineteenth century, rapid industrialization, new scientific discoveries, and technologies like the locomotive and telegraph were throwing long-held certainties into disarray. And when the Civil War broke out in the 1860s, an entire generation of sons and brothers was annihilated. Those affected most deeply by these alterations to the fabric of society had the least power. The grief of women regarding the upending of the only areas where they had any agency—religion and family—found its expression in spiritualism and its descendants. By giving disoriented, grieving, disenfranchised women a vehicle for connecting with memories of their loved ones, the Fox sisters and their successors filled a major void for a neglected group whose members had few means of giving voice to their emptiness. Contented people are not as easily influenced as the rest of us. Luckily for hype artists, no one stays content for very long. While dissatisfaction is the default human condition, it tends to be difficult for people to accept that their dissatisfaction springs from circumstances outside their control. As such, we constantly (albeit subconsciously) look for mechanisms, systems, and answers, even when there are none. Tim Ferriss is an author, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and lifestyle engineer. But his real talent is his ability to give the impression that he has the secret to filling a strain of mass emptiness that is specific to our current moment. Ferriss observed the deep lack of fulfillment on the part of the millions of white-collar employees spending countless hours in cubicle farms. As soon as he zeroed in on this, he saw his opportunity. He preached that there was no reason to live this way. He said that you could automate your work and live a fulfilling, semiretired life for now and forever. Jackpot! If you compare the number of The 4-Hour Workweek readers who have achieved the kind of low-toil success Ferriss claims is possible with the number of those who sing his praises, you’ll find a very small ratio. Yet that doesn’t stop them from coming back for more. When building your own hype strategy, follow Ferriss’s example. Start by taking stock of the zeitgeist. Are there any changes—in technology, politics, or norms—that are making certain segments of the population feel left behind? Make it a point to find out which people feel the most affected. When you pinpoint a void shared by multiple people, you gain the opportunity to exert incredible influence over them. Organic megamarket chain Whole Foods has made a fortune by giving baby boomers (and their children) a way to recapture the lost idealism of their youth through their purchasing power. Harley-Davidson reinvigorated its brand by appealing to Middle Americans who felt a lack of adventure in their lives. Calvin Klein launched the first mass market designer jeans by giving workaday people trapped in routine lives a taste of subversion, as hinted at by teenage model Brooke Shields who told them, “Nothing gets between me and my Calvins.” It is a fail-safe formula for anyone looking to generate fanatical fans, followers, or customers. BECOME AN ANCHOR IN THE RIPTIDES OF LIFE How do I understand this dynamic so well? Because I too have fallen under its sway. When I was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, I went from being a highly driven Ivy League–bound academic star of my high school class to a lost and lonely kind of guy. Early in the year, I realized what had kept me moving forward for so long was an obsession with getting into a top college. Now I had achieved my goal, and I couldn’t figure out how to best take advantage of actually being there. By Thanksgiving, my high school girlfriend had dumped me for another guy. In the midst of my heartbreak, I decided to refocus my attention on making my lifelong dream of becoming a writer happen. But when I told my father I planned to organize my coursework around this objective, he told me I was wasting my time. Within a week, he had sent me a printout of all the finance and accounting classes I should be taking. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty blue when a friend of mine handed me The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and told me it was exactly what I needed to read. It was—or at least, that was how it felt at the time. I tore through the 753-page book in a week and a half. The tale of the uncompromising architect who would sooner blow up a construction site than compromise any of his designs struck me as revelatory. Here was a blueprint for how to live my life. I would pursue my art, no matter what anyone said. (Take that, dad!) And in the meantime, I would hit the gym four times a week while shoveling brown rice and protein powder down my throat to forge myself into the pillar of iron every real man should be. Over the course of the ensuing 20 years, I have become increasingly less a fan of Ayn Rand’s writing and her ideas, but my interest in her methods of persuasion has grown. When I return to her books today, it’s striking how little her characters resemble any human beings I have actually encountered. They never experience confusion or doubt or internal conflict of any kind. They are perfect machines of self-sufficiency and single- minded pursuit of their interests. Considering that Rand was up front about her desire to use her writing to spread the gospel of a philosophy she called “objectivism”—the idea that unregulated capitalism and unmitigated selfishness are the ultimate good—it is no surprise that the personal qualities of her characters line up completely with her worldview. In her books, as well as in her nonfiction writings and her talks, Rand provides a ready-made set of solutions that her readers and followers could turn to whenever it was unclear what path they should follow. She even created a specialized vocabulary for her ideas, with terms like “second-handers,” “subjectivists,” and “psycho-epistemology,” which followers could refer to and use to defend their new all-encompassing scheme for organizing reality. Once you have identified a void, you must frame whatever you are selling as a comprehensive solution for filling it. There are many ways to make this happen. Devise a specialized vocabulary to represent the all-in-one solutions potential followers can apply to all that ails them. Create a manifesto or list of “rules for life” that tells people exactly what they must do to be successful, happy, or fully realized in a world where everything is rapidly changing. Whatever specific tactics you land on, the important thing is that you speak about the new reality you are presenting without doubt, with total confidence, and in black-and-white terms. Give people a steady anchor in an out-of-control world, and they will be yours. BECOMING A MASTER OF PROPHECY There is another reliable strategy for gaining influence by filling a void. It is a method that master hype artists have been using since before the age of the ancient magi and continues to exert a powerful pull well into the twenty-first century. I still remember when I first heard the name “Nate Silver.” It was during the election of 2008, and I was in a bad way once again. I was extremely unhappy in my job, a vice president of Solution Development (whatever that means) at a company that operated call centers in rural Appalachia. I couldn’t shake the sense that everything I had ever wanted to do with my life was slipping right past me and it was my own fault. After engaging in a tremendous amount of self-abuse, I finally gathered up the guts to quit. That would have been great, except the economy collapsed. And this was no ordinary economic downturn. It was the Great Recession. Friends were losing their jobs all around me. It looked like a depression was right around the corner. Yet another void had appeared in my soul. But then, as I saw it at the time, a champion emerged into the dark morass of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Barack Obama. Like so many other ex-hipster, still-somewhat-young urban professionals, I must admit I became a little obsessed with the presidential candidate. The line between my future happiness and the outcome of the election became somewhat indistinguishable to me. However, other than casting my single vote six months down the road, there was nothing I could do to affect the election. Until FiveThirtyEight entered my life, that is. Nate Silver was a statistician who had already made a bit of a name for himself using data analysis to help professional baseball teams draft players. Now he had entered the realm of politics. On his blog, Silver followed the election from, as he presented it, a purely statistical point of view. As he gathered data from polls, demographic assessments, electors, and various other sources I still don’t quite understand, he would make forecasts about whether John McCain or Barack Obama would win the electoral votes of each of the various states. What made Silver’s approach so refreshing and addictive was that it was apparently based on concreteness. While the pundits shouted their opinions and spoke from their emotions, Silver repeatedly stated that his personal political views had no bearing whatsoever on his forecasts. They were based on mathematics. They were based on the rules of nature. As a person who felt like he had little control over his own life, having someone tell me there was a set of laws, patterns, and equations that could indicate what was going to happen was incredibly comforting. In reality, though, my power didn’t change at all. I still only had one vote. What Nate Silver did was make me feel like I had more control over the outcome. In return for this feeling, I paid him with attention to his blog and dollars for his book. Prophecy is an incredibly effective sales tactic. While there were quite a few people who felt like I did about Silver before the election, it was when he correctly predicted its outcome that his star truly soared. His book The Signal and the Noise quickly shot up every bestseller list. His blog became more popular than ever. He appeared as a guest on every political talk show. ESPN hired him to create a website that would make forecasts about every conceivable element of the world through data analysis. One of the hardest truths to face as we grow up is that what lies before us is an infinite blind spot. There is no way to know what the future holds because, by definition, it hasn’t happened yet. It’s terrifying. So is the idea that whatever adversity we are currently facing might never get better. There have always been prophets, oracles, and soothsayers. In our scientifically minded society, they simply go by different names. Consider the financial newsletters for which experts charge large sums of money to lay out a web of signs of what stocks to buy and indicators of which companies will supposedly go up or down in value. Consider the futurists to whom Fortune 100 companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per engagement to predict social, technological, and economic trends. Consider the scads of market research firms, which use data and statistics to show clients what their clients will be buying in a few years hence. Masters of hype play with this intense human desire to control the uncontrollable. They understand that people want to believe there is a code to the unknowable. By positioning yourself as one of the select few that can interpret this code, you become indispensable. So how can you capture some of the magic of prophecy in your own career? Is it simply a matter of mastering the right statistical formulas? Patterns? Entrails? Tea leaves? Star charts? Don’t worry. It’s much simpler than that. To become a prophet, start making prophecies. First, get into the habit of watching trends. Imagine these trends stretched out into the future and picture how they might unfold and evolve. Armed with these observations, you can start making predictions. Make a lot of them, but do it quietly, informally, and on a small scale. Remember, you are still conducting tests of your ideas. Most of the predictions you make at this early stage will be wrong. As such, you’ll want your numerous bad calls to fade away and be forgotten. Even if you do miss the mark, a self-styled prophet can always recover. When his “scientific” system failed spectacularly to predict the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, Nate Silver’s confidence never wavered. When one reporter asked him what had happened, the “Stats Wizard” looked at him and replied, “The models are right. It’s the voters who are wrong.” His stance paid off. In 2018, both Georgetown University and Kenyon College honored him with the prestigious Doctor of Humane Letters degree. As for his fans, they are as devoted to him as they ever were. But when one of your quiet predictions does turn out to be right, that’s when it is time to ramp up both the volume and the boldness. Go public. Share what you prophesied far and wide. Create the impression that you knew what was coming all along. This is what most people want. The majority of us know, deep down, that no one can actually predict the future. What we crave is the feeling that there is someone more knowledgeable than we are who can show us where to cast our lots. Making prophecies is just another method for giving people a solid foundation in the face of uncertainty. The more ways you find to do this, the more your power to influence outcomes in your own life and career will grow. Putting It into Practice •   Take stock of changes in the world that are especially disorienting. Research which groups of people feel the most affected by them. If whatever you’re selling addresses any of these changes, you’ve found your target market. •   Whether you’re writing articles, speaking, giving interviews, etc., tell people exactly what they must do to be successful, happy, or fully realized. Whatever specific tactics you land on, the important thing is that you speak about the new reality with complete confidence as the only solution to their problems. •   Make lots of predictions—quietly, informally, and on a small scale. When one of your forecasts pans out, trumpet your success on a wide scale. Don’t forget to say “I told you so.”