The Real Trick To Long Term Motivation: Daniel Pink | E130

Key Takeaways

could you do me a quick favor if you're listening to this please hit the follow or subscribe button it helps more than you know and we invite subscribers in every month to watch the show in person no one ever teaches us how to deal with negative emotions that's the big problem i think i've watched daniel pink's videos as a way to inspire me for years the world is littered with people who have a decent amount of innate talent who didn't put in the work here's the thing about us human beings we stink at solving our own problems we fear that when we share our stakes our vulnerabilities our regrets people will think less of us the fact that those regrets stuck with me for 10 years that's telling me something real courage is staring your regrets in the eye and doing something about them we are on this planet for a vanishingly small amount of time and you're not using that time wisely the best way to improve is to so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] daniel yes you've um you've lived a really remarkable life and obviously the the most remarkable thing that from my perspective that i've seen from your i don't know the last 20 years of your life is you became a person who's really remarkably good at communicating and understanding um complex ideas and then conveying them in a way which is really engaging is there anything and i was i was looking through your childhood as much as i possibly could it sounds creepy right is there anything from your early years that when you look back set you up to become the man you are today are there any moments or experiences or traumas dare i say yeah well i mean thanks for that thanks for that nice compliment um i'm probably the worst person in the world to psychoanalyze me but um i would say if there's anything is and it just shows you in some ways the circumstances of birth i happened to live in a part of the united states that had one of the best public library systems in america i lived walking distance to an excellent public library and i lived a bus ride away from a giant downtown cavernous cathedral-like library and so i spent an enormous amount of time as a kid in libraries i always loved reading i always loved words i always loved books and my hunch and it's just a hunch steven is that had the circumstances of my birth been different had i been born in another city or another country you know maybe i would be just a really excellent dentist but at some point you became this al gore speech writer and i look at when i look at people's skill stacks you can sometimes point at the thing you're really looking for the quite unique but complementary skill right and for me it's all well and good knowing a bunch of stuff being it but being able to communicate that intelligence in a way that's engaging and compelling is a very unique part of your skill stack which is probably the reason why your books do so well your ted talk was a smash hit and everything in between where did that skill come from you know i i i don't know i think a lot of it comes but i think it comes from perhaps from two things okay one of them is something that i feel like a lot of other people don't do which is think about things from another person's perspective what do they understand what do they know what are their reference points i think that's extraordinarily important it's something that i learned how to do probably a little bit later in life the other thing i mean is work for instance i give you so so for my books for instance i will do multiple multiple drafts of every chapter i will read aloud every chapter to my wife often multiple times what's even worse my wife will read chapters aloud to me so i can hear it to try to essentially make every word that i write fight for its life that is that word has to look at me and say i deserve to live before i knock it out and so i think that that simplicity and conciseness that come just from effort are really the key and that's so evident especially in the book that i just read which is the power of regret your new book and even harry who read it as well in my team when he walked into my office about an hour ago he goes he's very very succinct with his points i think harry said there's like no fluff thank you harry yeah that's my goal truly and why is that important because i hate reading fluff myself i mean you know truly stephen i want to write books that the kinds of books that i want to read and what i what i don't like is when i read a book and it is let's say 60 000 words long and there's 4 000 words of ideas in here it's like hey why don't you just write me a 4 000 word article there's so many nonfiction books i think that would be twice as good if they were half as long and so i try to make it as lean as possible and make it as fluff free as i possibly can and okay let's start then with the some of the things that you've written going back to 2001 sure free agent nation why did you write that book well you know i think you might if you want to see a theme emerging here you'll see the theme that all researchers me search and so how did i how did i how did i become a how did i write free agent nation i i went and started working for myself this is like 1998-99 and i noticed that a lot of people were doing it was the first stirrings of that i thought it was something big going on and i decided to write about it by traveling around just the u.s and interviewing people who had gone out on their own saying i think this is going to be a bit this is an emerging big deal and that a lot of people are going to work this way and we better understand what it means how it happened what the implications are one of the key themes in that book that i i found particularly i mold over that's the thing that i stopped on and i was thinking a little bit about is this idea that persistence trumps talent what do you mean by that here's the thing the world is littered with people who have a decent amount of innate talent who didn't put in the work and the people who really flourish are the people who show up and they show up the next day and they show up the next day and they do their work and they don't get freaked out by setbacks and they show up the next day and the next day and the next day they're consistent they are they are tenacious and they just worry about each day doing the work and to me that is how the best creators are the best business people are the best contributors of any kind are if i had if i sat around and waited to be inspired to write i don't i wouldn't write a syllable you know i show up to write because that's my freaking job and that's how you create stuff you show up and you and you work and you show up and you work and so when i was starting out in writing i looked around and i noticed that there i felt like there were people who were more innately talented than i was definitely but i had to decide no one's going to outwork me it's so funny because i obviously agree i'm going to play devil's advocate here but yeah because the thing that i always try and get to the heart of when i talk about consistency and persistence and i i've seen your examples about compounding returns yeah as it relates to finance etc is why aren't some people persistent i know there's many many factors yeah is it self-belief is it is it not being intrinsically motivated by the task itself and doing it for the wrong reasons is it a combination of all these factors i think that it's a combination of all of those factors i think it's i think it starts at a pretty high level i think part of it is that is that people don't know they actually believe the opposite that talent is more important than persistence and so they believe they're talented and they think that great things will happen to them simply because of their status as a talented person so they're wrong at like a meta level right the other thing is that um i do think that part of it is a miss of of intrinsic motivation uh but it's it's different um it's intrinsic motivation not because every day is joyful uh but because every day is necessary and every day is at least somewhat meaningful you know and so there's an adage that being a professional is showing up um to do something you love even on the days you don't feel like doing it and and that to me that to me is is is the key like like i like writing some days but not every day some days it's a gigantic pain in the ass some days it's really really hard but i have to show up and do the work that day too and that's what being a professional is it's showing up and doing the work even on the days where you know what i'm not that into it today in the self-development community i think that there's been this growing feeling that you can like wake up in the morning say some nice things in the mirror i'm gonna be a millionaire i'm amazing and then life will somehow bring about all of these wonderful things that you've manifested and honestly when i when i hear people talking about manifestation i feel quite in the in the in the cultural context they're almost like spiritual cultural context and personal development they do i it's almost comical and i i am i feel sorry for them and their chances of achieving any of those things what's your view on manifestation in the like i'm not talking about setting yourself a goal and then going after it i'm just like just kind of like fluffy say it to yourself write it in your notebook and then it will happen type stuff i don't know and have you seen that am i just i mean you know they're yeah i'm i'm skeptical i'm skeptical now we there is some now there's some interesting stuff there's some interesting research on this question that we can go to because i always like things that are evidence-based and i haven't seen a lot of evidence that manifestation is a is a winning technique my view is like if it works for you you like it god bless you go for it do it just but you're still going to need to show up to work um but there's some other very interesting research um uh in what's called uh in certain kinds of self-talk okay so what you're talking about in in some ways is self-talk so how do we talk to how do we talk to ourselves and there's some interesting research showing that if you say to yourself before a big encounter you can do it you got this okay so let's say i'm going to pitch a new book i can say to myself you got this you're going to crush it no that that's actually better than not doing anything okay that kind of self-talk but it's not the best thing you can do the best thing we you can do is something known as interrogative self-talk interrogative self-talk where you turn it into a question now the manifestation people hate that all right but instead what you say is can you do this and if so how can you do this and if so how you ask a question rather than make that bold assertion and now here's the interesting thing questions by their very nature elicit an active response or you know i ask a question you ask me a question my my my wheels have to turn but we ask ourselves a question the wheels also turn so if i say to myself let's say i'm pitching a new book can you do this well yeah i can do this because i've pitched books before but this time i have to think about it because harry over there there's never liked an idea that i want so i got to make sure that i really focus on harry last time i talked too much and listened to poorly so i gotta chill out a little bit what am i doing i'm rehearsing i'm preparing i'm practicing and that's actually more muscular than the nominally muscular thing of you can do it you got this which is not terrible so um so that's my view on that's my general view on on manifest on manifestation manifestation without work is a is delusion yeah okay but um manifestation with work isn't the worst thing in the world and self-talk rooted in evidence especially interrogative self-talk can be really smart drive that was the the gateway piece of content that um put me onto your work specifically the ted talk me and my girlfriend watched it uh together and we weren't planning on watching it i think i clicked on it and then it was so engaging and delivery that it held us for the entire i think it was about 20 minutes yeah wow and it's done some 10 million views and then there's been you know i saw the illustrated version of it which i think is done 18 million views it's crazy the numbers on that um the base premise of that is obviously kind of debunking this thesis we had about how to motivate people and keep them engaged in work and you you are certain you prove that autonomy mastery and purpose are a much more compelling formula sure that journey of writing that book and um going on yeah the journey of doing the research how did it change your view on how to keep employees engaged and if you i don't know if you if you build companies now but on how to treat people because i came away from it thinking i understand but what are the things i can do now as a employer to to make sure that the team you see around me today are motivated sure yeah sure so so what it so again i can summarize i can i can summarize the that book it looks at about 50 years of science in what really motivates people but i can summarize the main point very very simply which is this there's a certain kind of motivator we use in organizations psychologists call it a controlling contingent motivator again let's go back to simplicity that's a lot of syllables let's just call it an if then reward right makes a lot more sense if you do this then you get that if you do this then you get that 60 years of science now tells us that if then rewards are actually pretty good for tasks that are simple to do and that have a short time horizon human beings love rewards you dangle a reward in front of in front of anybody myself included you've got their attention been in that very narrow way but if then rewards the science tells us are less great for more complex tasks with longer time horizons tasks that require judgment creativity discernment conceptual thinking and the reason is the same if then rewards narrow our focus for a lot of tasks particularly the tasks that most people are doing most creators are doing most people in the creative economy are doing you want to have a more expansive focus and so so we got to get rid of that way of motivating people for the bulk of things that people are doing today and what the research tells us is you got to pay people fairly and pay people well you got to pay people fairly and pay people well and then you want to offer as exactly as you say some autonomy some some control some sovereignty over what you do how you do it when you do it where you do it mastery which is a chance to get better at something that matters to make progress and meaningful work and a sense of purpose do you know why you're doing it are you making a contribution are you making a are you making a difference so we can talk in a more granular level about what specifically to do did you ever figure out from your research why autonomy mastery and purpose why they are the things that motivate us and keep us most engaged in work why why those things it's a great question and and it's a question that i think is embedded in that work that most people don't see embedded in there because that's who we are as human beings we are innately autonomous i'll give you give you an example the best example go find me a two-year-old anywhere on the planet she's going to be self-directed she's going to be resisting control she's going to be engaged and interested and curious about stuff that's autonomy she is going to want to get better at something she's going to want to learn and grow that's who she is right two-year-old why why is this why am i doing this why am i doing this for you it's the same thing that's who we are that's why these things are so important they're part of what it means to be human and so that's why they're so powerful and i think what's interesting stephen is that for a long time in organizations of any kind but certainly the the business most businesses today certainly the business that you've built what you have for a long time we've had to run organizations that went against the grain of human nature because that was efficient that efficiency was the highest thing and the only way to achieve efficiency was actually through some mechanisms of control by saying ah it doesn't matter why we're doing this just freaking do it all right so control and and um and those kind of those are very very tight measurements those tight uh mechanisms now i think the best businesses the best organizations go with the grain of human nature that's the key that's why these things are so powerful because it's part of who we are and organizations that build contacts that go with the grain of human nature are going to be better they're going to be better places to work because people aren't going to be miserable but they're also going to be more effective i guess so i get the autonomy point right i understood mastery what does that mean it means that people have an innate desire to get better at stuff to learn and to grow i'll give you an example think about i mean the most mundane example any weekend anywhere here in london in washington d.c where i live what are you gonna have you're gonna have people who are playing musical instruments on the weekend why are they making any money off of it no are they planning for a career as professional musicians no why are they doing it because they like it and it's fun to get better at qatar it's fun to get better at violin in my neighborhood in washington dc there is a big soccer field a big soccer pitch about two blocks away why on weekends are those things swarmed with guys my age running around in shorts are they going to be playing professional soccer no are they going to get famous as soccer players no why do they like it because it's interesting because it's fun because i like getting better at it that's why that is an innate part of what it is to be human human beings innately want to learn and grow now here's the thing i think that's our nature this is important i think that certain institutions can change the default setting on that nature i think that when we ship all right let's think about human beings as products all right the default setting of human beings is autonomy master and purpose i am convinced of that i think that sometimes in school or other kinds of experiences that default gets flipped and people learn compliance they stop caring about mastery they care they don't care as much about why but i think that is because the context that they're in has thwarted their natural their natural state and what's the consequences of when that dial is turned and they become compliant and because that must be them going against their human innate wiring so there must be a consequence of that right i think the consequence is dull misery in some cases i think the consequence is under performance and i think that there is a significant meta-consequence that people aren't reckoning with which is that we are on this planet for a vanishingly small amount of time and you're not using that time wisely and at a certain point in your life you're going to say oh my god i totally messed up and you know one of the things you see let's take autonomy for example the thing about these words stephen is that they're they're they're abstract so so a way that i try to think about abstract questions sometimes is to think about what's the opposite of a concept so let's take the opposite of autonomy help us understand the opposite of autonomy is control human beings have only two reactions to control they comply or they defy that's it i mean in some ways the history of human civilization is that human beings trying to control other human beings they comply until they can't take it anymore and they defy but if you're building an organization do you want people who are perfectly compliant you want some compliance and certain things but you don't want people who are 100 compliant all the time they're not going to do great work you want people who are defined no you want people who are engaged and the way that human beings engage is by getting there under their own steam the way that human beings engage is through self-direction and then the last point about purpose yeah when people think about purpose especially i think younger generations they always think about trying to save the world or doing something which is going to help others it's a really weird thing that's happened to these this to my generation where we all want to like we all i don't know whether we want to save the world or whether we want to be seen as someone that wants to save the world it's i'm not sure if it's virtue signaling or if it's an innate desire i'm not either i think that there is a lot of virtue signaling there and let me social media let me tell you yes let me tell you about let me tell you about purpose though because and forgive me i might owe you some money because i didn't get it quite right on that book drive what i've discovered since is that purpose is not one thing it's two things and it goes exactly to the question that you're asking so one kind of purpose is what i like to think of as capital p purpose large p purpose and that is what you're talking about i'm feeding the hungary i am solving the climate crisis whatever and there's no doubt in the in the research that that's that can be a very powerful motivator that people who are animated by that sen that kind of purpose do good work that's that's very very clear but day to day it's hard to get that every single day it's hard to get that kind of purpose on wednesday and thursday and friday and then show up again the next it's hard to get that every single day now it's still important and but this is what i missed there's a second kind of purpose that i call small p purpose and that's just making a contribution right capital p purpose is making a difference small p purpose is making a contribution did you help a teammate get the product out the door did you help this customer resolve its problem there's a great piece of research i love this out of harvard business school where they had a cafeteria in boston and in the cafeteria you know the customers went through the line in the cafeteria putting food on their trays and being served food but the people cooking the food were in the back you couldn't see them the cooks couldn't see the customers and the customers couldn't see the cooks so these researchers rigged up an ipad just like the one you have in front of you that allowed the cooks to see the customers and what they were measuring and this is forgive me for getting in the weeds here this research but what they were measuring the dependent variable was not whether the cooks were satisfied with their jobs when they saw the customers they were measuring the customer evaluation of the food and so the question they were asking is when the cooks can see the customers does the quality of the food change customer ratings of the food change and the answer was yes customer satisfaction went up 10 percent when the cooks could see the customers even though the customers couldn't see the cooks really yeah so that's what i'm talking about here so those cooks back there they're they're not feeding the the the hungry i mean people are hungry because it's lunchtime in boston but they're not feeding people who are destitute what's going on here that cook looks at somebody moving through the line and says well wait a second another human being is going to eat my cheese omelet so wow i i know why i'm doing what i'm doing it's not changing the world but it's affecting one person's life so i'm going to up my cheese omelette game 10 and and i think that that small p purpose is extraordinarily important and so again purpose is not one thing it's two things and for organizations listening or for anyone in a team i guess that the key takeaway i had then is how can i make my teams more connected to the impact they're having with the work they're doing because if i do that then their work will improve and they'll find more meaning and purpose in their work and they'll yeah can i can i give you a couple of ideas so one so so one thing is that is i think woefully underused our testimonials and things we we often we use companies use testimonials from customers in an outward-facing way for marketing they should use them as an inward facing way to motivate employees so if i see if i'm working for a um let's say i'm working for a software company and i am working on a team of of of coders and i never i very rarely see customers i'm just working on my part of the code and as part of this team but i start seeing letters from someone who said oh my gosh this this software transformed my life it made me run my business a lot better oh my gosh this software was so incredible it allowed me to it the efficiency was so great it allowed me to hire three new people showing the individuals those letters it reminds them of the impact of what they're doing so that's one very powerful thing to do the second thing as a leadership technique and something i've been doing i don't have the kind of operation that you do but i work with often like networks of people on projects and things like that is this is again going back to the simplicity i like interventions that are quick and cheap and actionable okay not well go take my eight-week course on autonomous leadership you know that's i don't or on purpose-driven leadership you know here's here's a here's a simple technique which i've been doing for probably eight or nine years each week try to have not try do have each week have two fewer conversations about how and two more about why when we're leading people we tend to over index on how conversations and we don't realize it so we say okay all right here's how you make that sales presentation okay okay here's how you deal with that customer and just twice flip it just change it stop yourself i mean i literally stopped yourself so when you say here's how stop yourself and say here's why we're making that sales presentation here's why we're dealing with that that vendor just twice a week and what you'll see it becomes habitual it becomes habitual you have more you have more why conversations how conversations are still important but you sprinkle in a few more y conversations and you almost always see an uptick in performance that's really really fascinating um berta and my team who's actually sat over there um one of the things she suggested doing was we added a section to our company chat just called impact and we we did that so in the impact chat it just shows feedback from people that listen to this podcast perfect and all that enjoy our content or whatever else and it's a really you're right it's a really nice feedback loop because it's very easy to slip into the the belief that this is actually just a bunch of numbers we see on the screen a million people listen this week or two million people and that's good that's useful yeah but it doesn't it doesn't hit like hearing jenny who was going through a divorce and was really suffering with her mental health and then she listened to a certain episode which actually sometimes it's interesting because it might be a certain episode that might not have had as many listeners another one and to hear that that episode just impacted one person in such a profound way really does provide a huge sense of meaning to the whole kind of digital you never get to see who we're impacting you know we're the we're the chefs in the kitchen that never get to see the food being consumed right exactly exactly that's it yeah it's such a small thing but i think it's had such a significant impact and the thing is we it's interesting we do it already you see you know you the sales people in any kind of company are toting around these customer testimonials in an outward-facing way so yeah shine a few of them shine a few of them inside and again these are these are we don't have to we don't have to reform and change everything we don't have to pull up the roots entirely we know how to do these things and by starting small and establishing them as habits and and and regular practices they are transformative quick one as the seasons have begun to change so has my diet and um right now i'm going to be completely honest with you i'm starting to think a lot about slimming down a little bit because over the last couple of probably the last four or five months my diet has been pretty bad um and it started to show a little bit really over the last two months i go to the gym about 80 of the time so i track it with 10 of my friends in a whatsapp group and this tracker online that we all use together we call it fitness blockchain and i'm currently at 81 percent um so 81 of the days i've done a workout in the last 150 days right so i'm going to the gym about six times a week that's been a little bit impacted by the derivatio live tour but i'm trying to stick to it and so one of the things i'm doing now to reduce my calorie intake and trying to get back to being nutritionally complete and all i eat is i'm having the heel protein shake thank you hill for making a product that i actually like the salted caramel is my favorite i've got the banana one here which is the one my girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel is the one one of the things you said there um as you as you finished that piece was was for me the point about why instead of how was also a really good piece of sales advice right and you wrote a book about sales to sellers human 2012 you wrote that book um when you write a book i know because i've written one myself not written as many best-selling ones as you have or as many as you have but even the journey of writing the book changed me because you do so much research that you you absolutely it almost seems like it does more for you than it does the reader but um what did you learn about sales that you took away and that stayed with you for the rest of your life from writing that book i mean so much on both like the the big picture and on the and on the tactical level so so one thing is that you know the the thesis of that book is the sort of the animating ideas of that book are that like it or not we're all in sales so to some extent i'm selling right now i'm not necessarily selling a book i'm selling saying hey i have something interesting i'm making these claims and i think they're more right than wrong and you should believe them all right so no money changes hands but that's a form of sales all of us are doing that when we're leading people we're selling when we're dealing with our kids we're selling all you know but the thing is which most people haven't realized is that sales has changed more in the last 10 years than the previous 1000 because everything we knew about sales sales sales has come from a world of information asymmetry where the seller always had more information than the buyer in all commercial transactions since the beginning of civilization the seller had more information than the buyer this is why we have the principle of buyer beware buyer beware is entirely the result of information asymmetries where the seller has more information than the buyer the buyer doesn't have any choices and the buyer doesn't have a way to talk back that's how commercial transactions were since there were commercial transactions and then boop ten years ago it all flipped because now we have something closer to information parity and most people haven't wrapped their minds around what a significant change that is and to me it's not a difference in degree it's a difference in kind and so to sell today where we're in this landscape where we're selling all the time and we're doing it in this remade landscape calls for an entirely new approach and what's caused that that shift is it because of the internet yeah totally and you can find out anything about what you want to buy reviews that you know absolutely absolutely if you look at say even buying a car in the united states in the last 15 years um you know literally 15 years ago you go into a car dealer that car dealer knows more about toyotas more about camrys more about cars than you ever will all right buyer beware now literally the last car we bought i mean my wife walked into the car dealership with the factory invoice price of the car hello i know how much you paid to to purchase this car for yourself and i know what the going margin is for dealers in this area therefore but that's true in everything it's true in b2b it's true in in hiring um you know i i early in my life i took a couple of jobs that were really stupid to take and if had there been something like linkedin or glassdoor i would have known in advance what a hell hole that those places were you know and so you know and so so this world of from information asymmetry to information parity is is huge and and it calls for a different set of skills um the skills of again simplicity if you look at the research right and you pound on it for a year trying to make sense of this research you find that there's three key principles and they start with a b and c that was basically that was luck um attunement which is can you get out of your own head into someone else's head hugely important buoyancy um you know from from being an entrepreneur that when you're selling anything you're getting rejected all the time one seller told me that he says i live in a sea i live in an ocean of rejection so buoyancy is how do you stay afloat in a notion of rejection and then clarity is how do you go from solving existing problems to identifying hidden problems because here's the thing problem solving as a skill totally overrated because if your customer or prospect knows exactly what its problem is they don't need you very much they can figure it out themselves where do they need you more when they don't know what their problem is or they're wrong about their problem so this premium has shifted from problem solving to problem finding can you surface problems can you identify hidden problems um and then also just think about information it used to be that the very nature of expertise was that expertise meant you had access to information nobody else had now everybody has the information so instead of being a good information access you have to be a good information curator a very different set of skills can you see the big picture can you synthesize can you simplify can you find the hidden patterns um you can you know detect what's really going on beneath the welter of information and so these are the skills that matter most in any kind of persuasive job which is all jobs interesting it's it's i was thinking about the importance of being being a bit of a chameleon when you're talking about empathy and being able to find out what the unknown unknowns about their challenges and stuff like that there is okay so let's let's go to a tournament here for a second so a two minute is perspective taking um can you can you get out of your own head and see things from someone else's point of view and there are some really really good science behind that what it shows is that actually being a chameleon is helpful and in this in this regard you've all we've heard okay so let's let's let's talk about this is like the first cousin of manifestation okay okay so it sounds like bs but this one isn't it's mimicry mimicry so let's say okay i'm gonna i'm coming in to make a sales call on steven i'm gonna sell you my you know you know lifetime subscription to rutabagas or something like that all right and i'm looking to see how you're sitting and i'm saying okay you're sitting like this yeah and then and then okay here are his hands classed like that and then like you're smiling and then maybe you lean back in your chair and i mirror okay and you're told to do that it seems like complete bunk uh-uh there is a pile of research showing that the ability to chameleon like that to reflect back people's words and gestures is powerful not as a way to [Music] deceive people but as a way to understand where they're coming from that is the way we understand where people are coming from is in some ways to inhabit them fully by appropriating their gestures in language and so this is one of those and there's a really famous paper by adam golinski at columbia university about the advantages of chameleons in negotiating being able to shift your colors shift the way you do things um in order but again not to deceive to understand um and so there's some really powerful research in that one of the best things you can do is again i mean i see i keep coming back to the theme that you sort of struck at the beginning which is simplification is a lot of times especially in technical sales so we get in the weeds here a little bit the reason technical sales people go awry is they use their own specialized lingo in their own specialized language because they love it and it makes them feel proud and they feel like it makes them experts and the customers and prospects have no idea what they're talking about and the customers and prospects use simpler less precise language but you should use the customer's language rather than your own when you use even even something like i hear i remember being in one circumstance where somebody was talking about trying to sell somebody something i was talking about kpis key performance indicators the person clearly did not know what a kpi was they didn't know the difference between kpi and kfc and you know and and i'm like okay like let me i think i need to intervene here and say okay keep performing kpi is key performance indicator but had that guy not done that he would have completely lost the person he was trying to persuade because he wasn't using he wasn't using that person's language he was using his own specialized lingo super interesting i was thinking then as well as you said that when you're talking about mimicking about a technique that's really proven to work when i'm in conflict resolution with my girlfriend which is if i repeat what she just said back to me it seems to defuse the situation remarkably so she says because usually when people have arguments it's kind of you're not listening to them and you're not being listened to so you're just kind of shouting on repeat like a broken record but one thing that i've learned over the last i think six months that when we do have a an issue and it's clear that she doesn't feel heard if i just say to her i'm gonna like i don't know how i say i usually say um can i just repeat back to you what you said so i'm so i'm clear that i understand it the broken record thing stops but but part of it also is that it's that's also that's not i think i think sometimes we position these kinds of things as as tricks yeah but when you say what she said you better understand what she means yeah exactly it's not a trick it's actually an act it's an act of perspective taking and i'm not doing it to trigger yeah yeah yeah yeah i'll say i just want to be clear babe this is basically how you feel you're saying that and the minute i do that she goes yeah and that's it and then she'll listen to my response because i think she now feels understood and i think there's kind of synergies with what you're saying with me oh there's no there's no there's no question but that's basically this is one of the areas where people go awry they have a hard time getting out of their own head and seeing things from someone else's point of view it's something we're not innately great at it's something that i'm not innately great at it's something that i've really really worked on i think it's central in any kind of persuasion and it's it's obviously huge in any kind of in any kind of writing because i'm dealing with this vast army of people who i don't even know i can't even see i can't you know the the scary part is that if i am not attuned and if i don't take people's perspective in a book i can't see them shrink their face and look confused i've lost them forever you also talk a lot about pitching and pitching is a huge part of yeah i mean pitching is everything yeah you know to get people to come on this podcast sometimes we have to pitch and to get you know someone to want to date you you're doing a pitch to raise investment i pitch so what have you learned about the art of someone that's good at pitching and a good pitch okay this again you asked earlier what this taught me this this line of research taught me and one of the biggest things it taught me was about what i'm about to drop on you which is that i had gotten pitching completely wrong right there's some really interesting research out of stanford and out of uc davis where they followed around movie producers who were going to studios to pitch and they were they actually recorded these pitches a few hundred of them i think and looked to see which were successful and which were not and the most important criterion the most important thing was was the following is was that the people who were successful looked at the people that they were pitching as partners all right and so instead of so i used to think pitching was like this kind of song and dance like i do a little tap shoot and they like take out their checkbook no what you what you that's not the response that i mean that's great if you get that response you don't get that response the response you want is this hey that's interesting have you thought about x y or z that the goal of pitching is to invite in the other side as a collaborator that's the key for any kind of pitch uh at a at a macro level and that's totally changed the way that i pitch i pitch in a much more collaborative way in the past when i was younger i you know had this elaborate dog and pony show in my head thinking that if i executed that performance perfectly i would get a cent and that didn't happen i remember it just reminded me of a time when i was running social training i remember pitching to we just launched in america and i was pitching to i think it was uber for their global account and um one day late at night i was looking at the email thread and i saw at the bottom of the email thread that we called ourselves people salespeople and i remember thinking like is that should we really be calling ourselves sales p people all like should we be calling ourselves because in the us i think people call themselves like partnership manager because the the term sales it's kind of like i don't know if it's giving the game away but it sounds transactional like i'm trying to give you you know so what do you think about that should we be changing our titles to like something else such an interesting question so i intentionally because this is sort of the way i like to do things i intentionally put the word sell in the title of that book because that's what we're doing but i faced some resistance because what i did some survey research in the u.s showing that when you ask people when you think of the word sales or selling what's the first word that comes to mind and people had all these horrible words pushy sleazy pressure easy pressure um so it has a bad association so but i i wanted to try to win back the word probably didn't do it that successfully but for years i don't think people like being sold to i mean i think one of the interesting trends i see is is when they is referring to those folks as customer success they're we're in customer success i want someone to help me succeed yes oh that's good news we use that in our company in san francisco at the moment we have a customer success manager and that's in fact all of our terminology is your job is to get customers from the door to success so that's good to know and we did actually kill the the sales title yeah i think that i i think customer success is better than sales i think that account executive is sounds like someone trying not to say sales yeah and their job is to retain you yeah yeah and the other thing that really like stood out to me and i i didn't delve further into it because i wanted to explain it was this this story about the blind man with the sign and the sign said i am blind and when it changed from i am blind to it's springtime and i am blind people donated more to this homeless man yeah yeah that's a story that's not a study yeah okay so yeah yeah yeah but the idea is is that the idea is is that we need we need context and and in some levels we need a why that is um that p that people said that the fact that he was the fact that he was blind is significant and there was some degree of empathy but when people were reminded that it's springtime in new york city and he couldn't see anything that changed the emotional tenor of it and this is this is this is the thing about about about stories that we sometimes miss is that we sometimes think about oh should i go with the story i should go with facts and the answer is yes because stories are facts in context delivered with emotional impact so adding that it's springtime is a fact because it was springtime it's a fact we added a fact but what you also did is you enriched it with context and delivered it with some emotional impact and that's what made it persuasive i literally think the reason why my company was successful and my company grew from like zero people to 700 in about six years was because from and we never had a sales team ever until the point i resigned like last year and i say this to entrepreneurs when i meet them all the time can you give me one piece of advice i'm starting an agency business i'm trying to win clients my one piece of advice was from day one i told stories and the story that i told when we started in 2014 was um we are the social media illuminati we're the kids that decide what all the kids talk about and i would go around the world and the country showing this presentation which showed that we could make anything the number one trending topic in 30 minutes and it was all this story and i never ever in my life felt like there was one occasion where in that six years i pitched to anybody i was just this storyteller it was my full-time job go around and tell stories that make people feel uncomfortable to the point that they think we've got a power that they need so when i when i meet entrepreneurs these days my singular piece of advice is like please never pitch if you get a chance to speak on stage [ __ ] graphs right don't try do everything don't no one cares about your [ __ ] business but find a story and it's funny in my last three years at social chain every single presentation i did no matter what this stage was no matter if there was 15 000 people in obama was on stage or if it was 20 people i opened up with the same thing which is i walked out and went and that's exactly why she stopped talking to me she put the phone down and told me she would never talk to me ever again that's the first two lines i say i don't say hi my name is steve and i'm from social chain and then people sit on the edge of their chairs and they start with this story about my mum which is incomplete exactly till the end exactly because so and i i think that's so unappreciated because and i almost don't want to say it because now i'm like my life's going to get harder because everyone's going to but it just works so well for me and but this is this is this is this is true for everything i mean one of the things that you want to do as a writer is you want to keep people turning the page and what the way a way to keep people turning the page is to say what's going to happen next so you you lead with those two sentences i'm like okay what's going on and what's going to happen next yeah that's all i want to know yeah exactly now if you don't have something at the end that makes the customer's life better all you have is a you know you're you're a you're a wandering minstrel telling stories you're not a business person but if you have something that can land with an impact that can transform that person's life then you then you win and then your other book before we get on to your new book when timing is a science not an art i was i was really reading through all of the the summary pages of that book um and i was reading about chronotypes which i thought was a really interesting concept that there's because it kind of challenges a lot of the conventional thinking my understanding of chronotypes please correct me if i'm wrong here is that different people are motivated and awake and alert and do their best stuff at different times in the day is that accurate or is it slightly different no that's exactly right i'm motivated they're motivated in part the motivation comes from the fact that there are some people who naturally wake up late and go to sleep late naturally there are some people who it's biological right there's some people who naturally wake up early and go to sleep early and then there are plenty of us in the middle and what the distribution tells us is that about 15 of us are very strong morning people larks naturally get up early and go to sleep early about 20 of us are very strong owls we naturally wake up late and go to sleep late and about two-thirds of us are in the middle and the this our chronotype changes over time somewhat so little kids very very lucky wake up early start running around like crazy people from the get-go teenagers as you might remember in general have a big shift toward lateness we you know parents think teenagers are being lazy when they're sleeping in when in fact they're actuall