Manufacture the Enemy, Earn the Tribe

Here’s your latest issue of Influence Anyone—where you get a playbook each week to shape decisions, change behavior, and become impossible to ignore, from Howie and the Behavioring Company team.

🚨 NEW! I have a new SPLURGE section at the end, where I share a recent favorite purchase of mine.

Michael Schein wrote a short and spicy article about Gary Vaynerchuk for a magazine column almost nobody was reading. But Gary saw it and he lost it on camera at midnight, called Schein out by name, and his fans piled on.

Schein expected that to be the end of something (maybe his career.) Instead it became the start of something else, where a group of readers thought “finally, someone said it out loud.”

Today: the oldest trick behind every tribe that's ever formed, every cult that was ever built, and how to use it to introduce yourself in a way that actually wakes people up. Not the same forgettable line that puts them right back to sleep…Zzzzz.

Let’s get into it.

Quick one before we dive in.

Some of the sharpest people you know never get quoted, or referred, or the limelight they deserve and it has nothing to do with how good they actually are. There's a specific reason for it, and it's almost never the one people guess.

Take three minutes and find out if it's happening to you.

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Most professionals think their job is to get more people to like what they do, agree with their take, follow along.

That's necessary. But it doesn’t get people to look up from their phones and turn people who couldn’t care less to people who would burn with passion.

I asked business ghostwriter Michael Schein — author of The Hype Handbook — what actually separates a following from a fan base. His answer: give people a shared enemy.

"It's much better to be against somebody than to be for stuff," he told me. "Human beings are very tribal."

Here's what that looked like in practice. When Gary Vaynerchuk publicly attacked Schein for an article, Vaynerchuk's fans piled on — and Schein watched something happen he didn't expect. Everyone who quietly agreed with him now had each other. "All those people now had a tribal leader," he said. The backlash didn't just make Schein visible. It handed a scattered group of people a reason to recognize each other.

That's the mechanic: name the thing you're against, out loud, and the people who already agree band together and start being a tribe.

One condition though: the enemy has to be real — something you already believe is wrong, not something invented for effect. Manufactured outrage reads as manufactured. A real belief, stated plainly, reads as leadership.

Try this: next time you introduce yourself or your work, name what you're against before you name what you offer — "Most people in my field think ___. I think that's actually the problem." Watch them look up and then watch for those who lean in.

As promised, influence in 60 seconds.

If you want the deep dive 👇🏽

🎧 This week on the Influence Anyone podcast: the full conversation with Michael Schein covers the actual story of the rock band that got him started (yes, there's a nun costume), the "personal arbitrage" move he used to get into $5,000-a-ticket rooms with no money in his account, why he thinks most advice about "niching down" is wrong, and what he tells his clients about writing books for authority.

Listen to the full episode →

That may get nods. It may even build an audience. But it doesn't build a tribe.

The mechanism nobody names. Schein spent years building a marketing agency the conventional way — SEO, funnels, the whole playbook — and it barely worked. Then he wrote one article disagreeing with Gary Vaynerchuk, expecting nothing. Vaynerchuk saw it and lost his composure on camera. "Here I am at midnight hustling," Schein remembers him saying, "and this Michael Schein character..." Vaynerchuk's fans piled on.

Here's the part that mattered. The people who quietly agreed with Schein didn't just read the pile-on and move on. They found each other in it.

"It's much better to be against somebody than to be for stuff," Schein told me. "Human beings are very tribal. And that was the start."

Why the brain does this. For most of human history, knowing who your group stood against was about survival. A shared threat told you who to trust, who'd cover you, who belonged. That machinery didn't disappear, it just moved into comment sections and industry conferences. Researchers who study how relationships form have found something almost identical at a much smaller scale: two strangers who discover they dislike the same thing bond faster, and rate each other as closer, than two strangers who discover they like the same thing. A complaint in common builds trust quicker than a compliment in common.

That's the whole mechanism behind manufacturing an enemy. But make sure it’s honest. You're not inventing a reason for people to unite. You're naming the one they already had.

It doesn't require a person. Schein's cleanest example has no human villain in it at all. Basecamp, a project management company, could have marketed itself the boring way — simpler, cheaper, easier than Salesforce. Instead they wrote a book called Rework that barely mentions their own product. It picks a fight with an idea: "fire your workaholics... if someone stays in the office every weekend, that means they're not efficient enough." "When your clients say jump, do not say how high."

Nobody got hurt. Nobody got humiliated. Basecamp just said, in public, what they believed was wrong with an entire way of working, and everyone who'd been quietly exhausted by that way of working had, for the first time, a name for it and each other.

"You don't have to pick a fight with a person," Schein said. "You can pick a fight with an idea."

Salesforce actually did the same thing when they launched and declared “software” the enemy as they were solely based in the cloud.

The line that keeps it honest. This only works because the enemy is real. Schein tests it with two questions before a client writes a word:

The first answer is never the real one, he warned me. "Everyone always gives the generic answer first," he said, describing how he pushes past it — "you keep going down and down and down and putting your thumb in the wound until they finally say something that's at the root." Whatever surfaces at the bottom of that dig is the only thing worth building a tribe around. Anything invented for effect gets sniffed out fast, and it loses more trust than it gains.

Where most people stop themselves. As a professional of influence, you already have that belief. You've probably had it for years. You just learned that saying it out loud in a professional setting reads as unprofessional, so you water it down into something nobody could object to… and nobody organizes around it either.

Schein gave the line for the sticky note himself: "What you're against is just as important as what you're for." He pointed to FDR — "I welcome their hatred" — and the litany that followed: "I hate greed. I hate hunger. I hate this." Naming what you stand against, he said, "is an inherently positive act — it clarifies what you're for more effectively than just talking about how great your ideas are."

An audience gathers around what you offer. A tribe gathers around what you both refuse to accept.

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Hit reply and tell me: "Most people in my field believe ___, and I refuse to go along with it. Instead, I think____"

You don't need permission and you don't need to be right. You just need to mean it. I'll feature a few of the sharpest ones in the next issue.

Professionals of influence, I’ll see you next Sunday! 😉

Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽

Howie Chan

Creator of Influence Anyone

P.S. One caution before you go looking for your villain to stand out. Schein: "If you go to a business conference dressed like a clown, you're just a clown... are you going to pay that clown money? I mean, no." A real enemy earns a tribe. A stunt just gets you remembered for the wrong reason.