Rhetoric once sat at the centre of elite education. Alexander the Great, Shakespeare and Martin Luther King, Jr. used it to build empires, write deathless literature and inspire democracies. Here, Heinrichs shows us how these persuasive tools, honed over more than three thousand years of use persuading others, can be turned on our most difficult audiences - ourselves. Using techniques invented by the likes of Aristotle and Cicero and deployed by some of history's most persuasive characters, we see how rhetoric can convert the gloomiest of situations into positive ones.