51–60 of 106 posts
4) Gauge the reaction 5) Go back to Step 1
Nobody just comes up with a persuasive message and delivers it in one-shot. These people are good at iterating conversations towards a goal.
I think I'm like most people here that are happy to argue to correct someone's factual mistakes. The hard part for me is to persuade someone on a grey area, or more importantly to get them to do something that directly benefits me with no benefit to them. Ie "use my app its just what you want", when I know there are a bunch of better or cheaper options.
I highly recommend “The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking” by Barbara Minto. It will change the way you think about communication, especially in a business context.
The most important thing goes first. If your reader doesn't care about it, they will move on anyways.
It is also a pyramid because the editor is likely going to have to cut it to fit in an allocated space, and as the writer you didn't know where that was going to happen.
Now that I think about, without the physical space restrictions 'modern' internet journalism doesn't have the same concision and I wish it did.
Key things I'd say are:
- Prep what you're going to say in your mind before you say it.
- Where to load infomation in a sentance and then paragraphs is crucial. Like if it's a joke keep the key piece of info at the end, that is like how jokes work. If it's a story, pepper info throughout to keep interest. If it's work and you're trying to communicate big ideas, cover key topics at the start and build on them.
- Smile, be what you imagine a charming person to be like, and then act like that and you'll be a charming person, sounds silly but that's the way to do it. I wave my hands about a lot too, which seems to help.
- Taylor your vocabulary to your audience. I love using big words, but they're pointless if the person your talking to doesn't know them or more importantly may feel alienated by not knowing the words. Unless of course this is work and you need to teach key terms to people to understand the concept you're on about.
- It's difficult to say "be funny", that's so subjective. What I would say on that is do what makes you laugh, make yourself laugh at your own jokes, and if people enjoy them than that's good. Don't try and make other people laugh. If you view their laughter as an accidental by-product of making yourself giggle then that's great.
Most important thing of all - practice. Just keep chatting away to everyone and try and be better and better at it, it's one of those things that takes time to refine.
Typically, when someone has a crisp response / point, it is something they’ve honed, battle tested (even subconsciously), or heard from others and it resonated (memetic).
When you listen to presentations/lectures/speeches by effective orators, you’ll often hear the same phrases or concepts tuned over time. I can give lots of examples but a recent one was David Sedaris where he told a story on MasterClass in a way more compelling way than the exact same story he delivered years ago in a late note show.
A room full of persuasive bullshitters is loud and tedious and unproductive, and many disciplined, talented people are very quickly turned off by that kind of character and refuse to trust them or cooperate with them.
Rather than trying to become somebody else, it might do you more good to focus on things you already have a knack for (you have many): figure out how to hone them, figure out where they’re especially beneficial, and figure out how to get yourself in those environments.
Your confidence will soar and you’ll feel like yourself rather than an imposter. And you’ll almost certainly become a more natural communicator simply by way of that confidence.
I used to take the Chicago Metra and ride in the vestibule to exit the train quickly. The same 8 people would always be there every day but this gentleman, "Gary", would always carry the conversations. People were just drawn to him and I was in awe of how he captivated us with his stories. I was able to study him for a couple of years and came up with a list of how he was able to hold our attention: 1) Gary spoke lou…
I used to take the Chicago Metra and ride in the vestibule to exit the train quickly. The same 8 people would always be there every day but this gentleman, "Gary", would always carry the conversations. People were just drawn to him and I was in awe of how he captivated us with his stories. I was able to study him for a couple of years and came up with a list of how he was able to hold our attention: 1) Gary spoke lou…
1. Leslie Lamport: "Learning to write well will improve your thinking." Link to resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnY5iJea5ww
2. Paul Graham: "Work on hard problems and talk to smart colleagues." Link to resource: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1553711250382524416?s=20&t=...