The 48 Laws of Power in Practice

Law 31: Control the Options. Get Others to Play with the Cards You Deal.

Give the illusion of choice by giving people options. In reality, you manipulate their choice to your benefit.

Tactics to Control the Options—

Color the Choices - present the choices so that one stands out as the obvious best.

Force the Resistor - know when people will do the opposite of what you say; use reverse psychology

Alter the Playing Field - when there is an established way of doing things, change up the game to your advantage.

The Shrinking Options - create scarcity to make people act.

The Weak Man in the Precipice - when a leader is weak, use tactic 1 but especially appeal to their emotions and insecurities

Brothers in Crime - if you go down, you take them with you.

The Horns of a Dilemma- all the options lead to impending doom.

Application -

Instead of asking your kid to do his chores, you can practice "Horns of a Dilemma" by asking him to choose between two chores. Also, small children tend to do the opposite of what they are told. Here is where you can use reverse psychology or "force the resistor". For example, parents force their kids to eat vegetables, which just ends up with their kids hating vegetables. But if everyone acted like vegetables were for adults only, the kids would probably ask to eat them.

And here is an example of altering the playing field. Companies like Tesla, Robinhood, and Instacart are labeled as "disruptors" because they changed the rules on how to win. When other businesses are focused on making one type of competitive product, these brands released brand new products that provided even better solutions for customers.

Ignorance in Trip Planning is Bliss - 

One of the reasons why I like to plan trips is because I've seen how it could go. Everybody thinks somebody else is planning the itinerary and are all anxiously checking in with one another, not knowing what to do. Or miss out on activities because tickets or reservations have to be made in advance. I've seen people clash with totally different ideas of what is fun to do.

My friend likes to wing it and talk to the locals on vacation. But what happens when the locals don't know? We ended up sitting in a long cab ride to go to a club that was closed for the summer and having to pay expensive cab fares for no reason. Honest mistake, or taxi swindle?

 Luckily, I did the research and had a backup place where we could go. I don't like to be bossy but I'll always prepare a list of things I'd want to do. And each morning in Cuba when no one knew what to do, I gave a couple of options from my list and everyone would choose one. I really wanted to ride horses through the tobacco farms in Cuba. And everyone else was happy to go along for the ride.