Table of Contents

The Preamble

Science and Popularity

Hope for the Average Joe or Jane

Purpose and Method

The Active Keys

Eye Contact

The Smile

Empathic Listening

Patience

The Passive Keys

Staying Fit

Proper Hygiene

Spirituality

Conclusion

Part I - The Preamble

Let’s face it. We all want to be popular. Popular with friends, relatives (well, maybe not relatives—just kidding), coworkers, bosses, and so on. Popularity is associated with fun times, success, prosperity, and a whole array of other positive thoughts and emotions. After all, when you think of the most popular boy or girl in high school, what pictures come to mind? In the case of the girl, you might envision the prettiest girl with the best smile and personality, perhaps captain of the cheerleaders.

For the boy, you might think football quarterback, best athlete, or just plain best looking kid with the highest academics. Granted, these descriptions might not match exactly what came into your mind, but I think you get the point: when people conjure up images of the "popular ones," they tend to think "the best looking," "the best dresser" or something along this line. None of us though has any control over the genetics part, and therefore we may not have been born one of the so called "beautiful people," who are paraded like starlights on the covers of magazines; nor fortunate enough to have been endowed with unrivaled athletic talent.

However, it is indeed true that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." After all, have you not had the experienced of meeting a very handsome man or woman of such abrasive qualities that you would not think to be associated with this person, despite all the good looks? On the contrary, have you not met people who, despite just average looks, average physical builds, or average talents, possessed some magnetic charm that forced you to absolutely fall in love with them, if even in a platonic way?

Being born beautiful, rich, or with exceptional talent does not guarantee popularity. Having these attributes certainly gives you a huge advantage, but how many times have you come across or read about someone who is beautiful and talented, yet is an absolute boor: crude, ill-mannered, excessively self-centered, egocentric? Any or all of the these? You would think that such individuals would get down on their knees everyday and thank God for having blessed them beyond measure; yet often thankfulness is severely lacking in these individuals, and they are the epitome of recycled dross. True. Rich people can buy others and even buy popularity—to a certain extent. Nevertheless, what you will gain from reading this booklet is something that cannot be bought. The old cliche is appropriate: "Money can’t buy class."

In its deepest sense, that saying is true. To drive my point home, I refer to the blockbuster remake of the movie "Titanic." In that movie the character Cal, Rose’s fiancé, was rich, educated, and even dashingly handsome. He had it all—on the surface. Yet as the plot developed and the successive layers of his personality were revealed, something of a different ilk was exposed: boorishness. Cal did not impress favorably, neither did his character bespeak popularity. He was beyond arrogant, and his demeanor was downright irritating. In the end, he lost it all including his life. As Rose recounts the history, we learn that during the Great Depression Cal committed suicide after he lost the only things that made him feel a sense of worth—his material possessions.

In this work, we will be discussing seven keys that can be possessed by anyone—no need to be born rich, beautiful, or overtly talented. Also, these are keys that cannot be bought with money as they are gratuitous. Their worth, however, is potentially so great as to make them non-assessable. You need only the knowledge of these keys and a thorough mastery of their uses. The keys have been cut with common sense and age-old wisdom. Their proper use have the power to make you instantly popular with everyone you meet.

Now that’s a nice payoff! But exactly what are these keys? Would it not be wonderful to know the secrets that could afford you instant popularity, make you irresistibly likeable, and allow you the chance to become, in the minds of others, one of the "beautiful people"? Attaining this desirable state will be the focus of this booklet, and as such, we will be examining the ingredients that you need to get there. Toward this end, you need to become aware of qualities that all popular people possess and the habits they put into practice to win friends and influence others in a positive way. Once aware of these qualities, you need to start implementing some simple strategies which underlie these attributes, modifying only slightly—in most cases—your current behavior patterns.

After all, the difference between a huge success and a huge failure is often minor; yet the size of the outcome is enormous. This booklet has been put together after hundreds and hundreds of hours of painstaking observation by the author himself and has been distilled from the hundreds of books, articles, and other written information on the subject of life itself. As the saying goes, "If you want to become an expert on something, start observing it very carefully." If you want to become an expert on chimpanzee behavior, then go into their natural habitat and observe them attentively. If you want to become an expert on child psychology, assiduously observe many different kinds of children and their interactions with others. The theories, books, lectures and other fancy stuff all come later. All compiled knowledge starts with observation. You really can’t know about something until you have first observed it.

A keen sense of observation is a quality in and of itself that has strong potential to take a person far in life. If you possess this skill, you will be able to spot trends, to sense when an opportunity is near—even to ward off impending danger or harm. You will know the appropriate time to ask your boss for a raise and when to refrain from speaking to your spouse about a sensitive subject. You will know these things through your observation of others’ expressions and body language. From your experience, you will accurately catalogue facial and body expressions and then make an informed decision as to which type of action the behavior warrants. This ability comes from the power of observation and its intrinsic values. Look, study, observe, and you will know.

The empirical value of the methods outlined here cannot be overestimated. If something in reality is observed to work more than once under similar sets of circumstances, then our faith that it will work on a repeated basis becomes stronger. We can then form hypotheses which are subject to testing. Of course, there are no guarantees that such hypotheses will always be true. To wit, if we drop a glass on the ground, we observe it to break. That the glass broke once may not be enough proof for us to grow in faith that this will always happen. But if we do this again and again—maybe a dozen times or so—and the glass continues to break each time, then we become quite confident that this will always be the case. As a result of this experiment and our repeated observation, we might form the hypothesis, "If I drop a glass to the ground, it will break."

Now it is possible that under certain conditions the glass will not break. For example, let us say that when it was dropped, it bounced off of your foot, rolled on the ground, and came to rest unbroken. In this situation the glass did not break even though it was dropped. You can say, "Ah, this case is different because my foot intervened," but remember the glass was dropped and did not break. In this case, the empirical data suggests something different: that under certain conditions, the glass may not break. Of course, we can qualify the hypothesis and say that if a glass is dropped to the ground and lands without the intervention of some other object, then the glass will shatter. The preceding example demonstrates that we need to be precise in the formulation of our hypotheses.

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