Allgemein Archive - Page 52 of 158 - The Art of Communicating

You better pay attention

Andy Miller, who after he’d sold his company to Apple reported directly to Steve Jobs, explains what it was like when he wasn’t paying attention for a brief moment. Jobs pulled him out:

“You weren’t paying attention. If I’ll ever notice that again, you’ll never again sit in one of these meetings.”

It sounds harsh but it makes sense when you turn it into a bidirectional deal: You must pay attention. But at the same time you get the right to demand that the content is worth paying attention to.

Essentially, as the leader you not only demand attention but you also demand to make good use of the attention, e.g. you guarantee everyone the right to point out when someone (including you) speaks a lot without saying much.

When you demand that everyone pays attention it means that there’s an incentive for everyone to prepare their material in a way that makes it worth paying attention to. (That’s, basically, how Amazon’s study hall approach to meetings works.)

It’s not how good you look or feel

A lot of speaking advice is about feeling good and looking good, e.g. how to feel more confident, how to use convincing body language, how to find more beautiful words or design stunning slides, etc.

While all of this certainly helps, it’s never the point when you’re looking to make change happen.

It’s not how good you look and how well you feel but how strong you resonate.

The main difference is that “feeling good and looking good” is concerned with the speaker while “resonating” is concerned with the audience and how it relates to the speaker.

In order to resonate strongly you need to empathize with how the audience feels. You need to understand what matters to the audience.

It’s about seeing and hearing your audience and caring for their struggles and desires.

It’s about doing the work of figuring out a path and lighting it so that your audience doesn’t have to.

Ironically, my clients tell me that this posture leads them to actually feel good on stage. By shifting the spotlight away from themselves and onto the people they seek to serve, they let go of the heavy weight of being the star of the show. They merely help their audience make change. And that feels good.

The best part is that adopting that shift ripples into everything you do because you can’t unsee the audience in anything you do.

The (real) importance of the first impression

Every once in a while a study pops up that proves the importance of the first few seconds of a speech. Often, the conclusion is that the first impression would be the most important part of your speech.

Yet, one crucial aspect usually gets overlooked by these studies: Great speeches are often great from the start. Not the other way around.

As humans, we’re quite good at estimating the quality of a talk from a few impressions. Body signals, voice signals, but also the clarity in the text. We’re super quick to make first estimations based on these signals. Amazingly often, these estimations prove to be correct.

Here’s the pitfall: The speech is not great because it begins great. The beginning is just an accurate snapshot that we base our estimation on. Judging from a short snapshot of the middle or the ending of a great speech would quite likely predict the quality of the speech just as accurately.

Great speeches are usually great throughout the entire duration of the speech. (Because the speaker cares, actually knows what they’re talking about, prepares well and rehearses thoroughly.)

It’s a mistake to focus on the beginning of a speech as the deciding factor (if only because great speeches exist that started poorly and vice versa).

The better strategy is to make a great speech and make it great from the start.

How Spotify chooses the price it’s willing to pay for success

Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, had this to say during a company wide town hall about the Joe Rogan controversy:

“If we want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with,” he says. “Not anything goes, but there will be opinions, ideas, and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even makes us angry or sad.”

The crucial word in this statement is “if”. It’s a choice. In many ways. You choose your goals (what Ek calls “ambition”), and you choose the conditions which you are not going to sacrifice to reach the goal (in other words: the price you’re willing to pay to reach the goal).

For Spotify, the ambition Ek is speaking of is named later in the meeting (emphasis mine):

“So I think ultimately, this really comes down to two things. First, do we believe in our mission: 50 million creators and 1 billion users? And finally, are we willing to consistently enforce our policies on even the loudest and most popular voices on the platform? And I’m telling you, I believe both.”

Their mission is “50 million creators and 1 billion users”. That’s the goal they’re trying to reach. That’s the ambition that motivates the company. Together with the first quote, it’s clear that the policies are a servant to this mission. They are designed so that they get out of the way of reaching the mission as much as possible. For example, the policies ensure legality, not pride.

That is a valid stance and Spotify is free to choose that stance.

But the takeaway here is that it is a choice. Spotify can choose to have different policies, e.g. policies that ensure that they would be proud of any content that’s on Spotify.

Spotify can also choose to have a different mission, e.g. related to the quality of the content, the kind of content, the kind of relationship they have with their customer, or a vast number of completely different takes.

They choose to make their ambition purely about numbers. As a price to achieve this mission, they choose to accept to be associated with content that many will “not be proud to be associated with”.

Knock, knock! Here’s your passion!

For most people, passion is not something that just comes along and says “hello”. It’s not something you wait for and suddenly, it’s there and you’re going to lead a fulfilled life ever after.

Passion is a process. You become passionate about something because you do this thing, learn more about it, share what you’ve learnt with others, dig deeper, discover something other’s haven’t discovered, yet, get frustrated with it, pick it up again, discover yet another new corner you haven’t explored, …

The more it becomes a part of your life, the more passionate you become.

There are very few people like filmmaker Werner Herzog who calls filmmaking an uninvited duty that gave him no choice other than to become passionate about it.

For most people, passion grows out of curiosity and play.

If it doesn’t, then change a thing or two and watch what happens. Repeat.

PS: There’s no law of nature that requires you to have a passion as strong as music was a passion for Mozart or football is for Messi even if motivational coaches try to make us believe otherwise. If you don’t have that passion, you still have a life. And that is quite something.

Pitching to the masses

With Apple’s massive success over the years, it’s easy to miss that Apple’s greatest pitches were not to the masses.

Quite the opposite. Many observers dismissed the iPod initially (“A Firewire interface?”). Many ridiculed the iPhone initially (“No keyboard?”). Many laughed at the MacBook Air initially (“No DVD drive?”)

Steve Jobs embraced that fact. Knowing that he couldn’t sell a billion iPods right from the start, he didn’t even try to.

He didn’t speak to the masses. He spoke to the people who got it. Those who care for the same things Apple cares about.

That’s a crucial insight to understand the “reality distortion field”. This term was crafted by people who “didn’t get it” to make fun of the people who “did get it”.

Of course, what really happened was that Jobs intentionally resonated strongly with what mattered to the latter while – again: intentionally – dismissing the rest.

Jobs didn’t bother to make everyone fall in love. He gave the fans a reason to love the new product. He gave them a reason to be a proud early adopter. He gave them the feeling that Apple understood their struggles and built a solution that smoothly solves them.

And then, the fans spread the word. Slowly. The iPod took years to become a mass phenomenon.

What matters to your fans and how can you speak their language so clearly that it appears to outsiders as a reality distortion field?

The complete picture

Many communicators struggle with the challenge to convey a complete picture of their topic to their audience. After all, it’s quite a complex topic to understand if you care for the details. Also, your product is a masterpiece of craftsmanship.

Yet, the actual challenge might be much simpler than that.

Because effectively, all you need to do is to tell me one thing that makes me curious to hear the next thing.

When you’ve achieved that, all you need to do is to tell me one more thing that makes me curious to hear the third thing.

Step by step.

When you do this repeatedly, eventually you’ll have told me everything but it doesn’t feel nearly as tedious as we’re used to from the usual approach to communicating.

When you want me to understand the complete picture of your idea, the challenge is not to tell me everything.

The challenge is to figure out what’s the one thing that makes me want to know more.

If you want me to get the complete picture, get me to want the complete picture. A much simpler approach. And much more related to what matters to your audience rather than to yourself.

Clarity takes time

But when it’s there, it’s an accelerator.

5 new clients every week

It’s easy to speak with clarity.

What’s hard is to speak with clarity about the things we deeply care about.

“This program will bring you 5 new clients every week.” is about as clear as it gets. This statement is also really easy to come up with if you don’t care about its truthfulness.

When you speak about the things you care about, you do care about truth.

… This new service you were building over the last three years. That product that demanded from your team months of blood, sweat, and tears. The lessons you’ve learned on your path to becoming the leader you are and that you want to share in a keynote. …

These things are complex. We know so much about them that we easily fall under the Curse of Knowledge. We struggle with what to leave out and what to focus on. We’re unsure about the promises we can confidently make. We use language and abstraction that might be hard to get for others. Ultimately, we are so deeply expert in our field that it’s hard to look with non-expert eyes.

And yet, it’s precisely these things that require clarity. If only because we must not leave the field to the bullshitters.

“I think; therefore I am right.”

That’s the sentiment we see in many public discussions where opinions are the premise rather than the result of a thinking process.

“I am right!” is a sentiment that you often find in people who believe that “being wrong” is a sign of weakness. Also in people who fear change and the consequences of not being right.

In the most extreme cases, it’s almost as if these people feel entitled to owning the truth. So that the truth would have to bend according to their opinion rather than the other way around.

“I think; therefore I am right.” is a huge stretch from Descartes’ famous original insight “I think; therefore I am”. Ironically, it was based on the insight that there’s really not much that he could be certain about.

It’s the doubt that opens up new ways and shows us new solutions to old problems. That’s why a better stance would be:

I think therefore I get it right.

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