Persuasion is much more important than having vision when starting a company. In fact, it’s what is necessary to get the money, people, and processes behind you, in order to make your vision a reality. In order to learn how to be persuasive, you need to know several things. First, it’s important to understand how people’s brains work. The way that the brain processes information can be broken down into two camps, System I and II. System I is the part of the brain that handles automatic things such as scratching your nose. System II is the part of your brain that handles things that require logic and higher-level thinking. It’s important to understand this, because when most people are trying to persuade others, they tend to try and appeal the System II side of the brain. However, this is the side that is most likely to question what you are saying. It’s much more important to try and appeal to the System I side of the brain. Second, it’s important to use the brain’s biases to your advantage. The brain’s biases can be broken down into five categories: availability (which is the idea that the things that you are most familiar with, will be the things you are most likely to agree to), anchoring (which is the idea that the first thing people see or hear is the reference point from which they will view everything else), representation (which is the idea that you should only focus on the best parts of your product when pitching it, as no one is going to remember every little detail in your pitch), coherence (this is the idea that people always like things being the same. This can be seen in the Halo effect, where a person will tend to like many aspects about a product if they already like one thing, and confirmation bias, where a person is likely to only see evidence as supporting something they already believe), and framing (where we reason using example). As you can see, persuasion requires you to take into account many things.