No one likes feeling stupider than the next person. The trick, then, is to make your victims feel smart — and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.

This feeling is especially prevalent in the insecure who feel inferior to their surroundings. Many will condemn the skills and accomplishments of others by using justifications that placate their ego and satisfy their self-worth. They’ll say things like,

“She only has book knowledge, I got real knowledge.”
“His parents paid for his educational if only my parents had the money.”
“If only I was that smart.”
“If only I was as fast and athletic as him.”

We see this every single day, people will downplay the talents, skills and achievements of others to avoid the pain of feeling bad about their lack of character, skills and accomplishments. People do not like to feel like they are inferior to others.

What if we flipped it around? What if we used peoples achievements and skills to push us to greater heights, instead of using negativity to protect our self-worth. Once you figure out how to take positive inspiration from people who ‘make it’, you set yourself up for even greater heights of fulfilment and success. Find someone who looks like you who has what you have, and you grant yourself the mental fortitude and momentum of self-belief that it can be done. Everyone is their own unique individual and no situation will be exactly the same, but at least you have a rough blueprint to follow that may produce similar results to what you want.

In the late 1800s, two San Francisco con artists swindled a group of wealthy New York businessmen and financiers into buying a fake diamond mine from them for a large amount of money.

They seeded the mine with real diamonds and other jewels and had inspectors evaluate and authenticate the supposed mine. But what tilted the scheme in their favour was the fact that they came off as bumbling, naive rubes who’d stumbled on a fortune and didn’t know where to turn. The businessmen felt superior and never suspected them of having the intelligence and capability to pull off a sophisticated scam. Further, after several influential businessmen had signed off on the deal, no one in the financial world wanted to impugn their intelligence.

The con artists got away with the money, and the reputation of at least one of the businessmen was damaged beyond repair. These con artists knew to seem dumber than your mark.

There is, however, one situation where it pays to do the opposite— when you can cover up a deception with a show of intelligence. In matters of smarts as in most things, appearances are what count. If you seem to have authority and knowledge, people will believe what you say. This can be very useful in getting you out of a scrape.