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Hi, Matthere. Welcome to a best of episode of ThinkFast, TalkSmart, thepodcast.
This is one of my favorite episodes where I get to have a conversation with DanPink, so many practical and tactical bits ofadvice.
One of my favorites is talk like ahuman.
Enjoy. Communication is aboutrisk-taking.
Many of us are held back by our fears and concerns about what mighthappen.
Today we'll explore having a bias for action and being direct and immediate with ouraudiences.
I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School ofBusiness.
Welcome to ThinkFast, TalkSmart, thepodcast.
Today I am super excited to chat with DanPink.
Dan is the author of five New York Times bestsellers including his latest The Power ofRegret, how looking backward moves usforward.
Early in hiscareer, Dan served as a political speechwriter, including being Chief speech writer to Vice President AlGore.
WelcomeDan, I am so looking forward to ourconversation.
Matt, it is great to be here a long time listener first timeguest.
Thankyou. There's so many things that I want to talkabout.
I just want to jump rightin.
Many of our listeners find themselves preparing presentations and structuringspeeches.
Here in yourcareer, you served as a speech writer and I'mcurious, what two or three lessons can you share for how to prepare and deliver a greattalk?
Well, I mean political speech writing and political speechgiving, I think it can be different from giving a sales presentation or giving a lecture at auniversity.
However, I do think that there are some principles of that realm that we can extract for otherrealms.
So one of them would be audiencefirst, allright?
You got to think about theaudience, what do theyknow?
What don't theyknow? What do they careabout?
What don't they careabout?
And one of the things that we did if it allowed me a small tangent here is back when I was working for as a chief speech writer for Vice President Al Gore is that when he went out intoAmerica, outside of Washington to dothings, we would always work massively to find what we called how thehells,okay?
How the hells and how the hell would be something likethis.
It's like he would get up there andsay,man, you'rein, I'm making thisup.
You're in Treboig andWisconsin.
It'slike,sorry, I'm a little bitlate, but I wanted to have a second cinnamon roll atMcGillicutdies.
And people in the reactions for the crowd wouldbe, how the hell does he know aboutMcGillicutdies?
Everybody in Treboig knows aboutMcGillicutdies.
So but the idea of thinking of the audiencefirst, I think is a really importantprinciple.
Another one wouldbe, which I'm violating right now is sayless.
There has never been aspeech, certainly a politicalspeech, where people at the end of itsaid,gosh, I wish he or she would have talkedlonger.
Sayless. I remember one timeseeing, a lot of times in the WhiteHouse, these speechescirculate.
And so there was a speech notours, it wascirculating.
And it was a draft of aspeech, it was a Clintonspeech, where the draft of the speech literallysaid, and my plan has 14pillars.
And I'mlike, this is not going to stand up with 14pillars.
That's about 11 pillars toomany, allright?
And then the final one isthat, especially for politicalspeeches, but I think it's true for otherrounds, is thatultimately, you have to think about thepurpose.
The purpose of the speech is to galvanizeaction.
It's not to show how smart youare.
It's not to sort of give your own wizardry about your mastery of atopic, especially in politicalspeeches.
You want them to dosomething.
You want them to go andvote.
You want them togo, Kate for a higher minimumwage.
You want them to try to stop the other side from doingX, Y orZ.
And so when you think about thesethings, audiencefirst, sayless.
And ultimately you want the audience toact.
I think those are helpful lessons for anycommunicator.
Absolutely, theyare. And they have been echoed in many different ways across thispodcast.
But having a cleargoal, knowing what it is youwant, being veryconcise, and connecting your content in a way that's relevant andmeaningful.
And I love the how to hellpoint.
And I think that's a great thing for people to thinkabout.
It's a little specific details that demonstrate you've spent time thinking about and appreciating who you're speaking to can go a longway.
I really appreciatethat.
I know that one of your mantras is that yourepeat, speak like a human when youcommunicate.
What do you mean bythis?
And in a world where AI is taking over in terms of what we hear about all thetime, how do we soundhuman?
Imean, this mostly in the realm of corporatecommunication, which includes speechgiving, but includes theway, in manyways, the ways that companies interact with their employees and interact with theircustomers.
Tome, the embodiment of how to do it wrong is thephrase, we apologize for any inconvenience this might have causedyou.
Now, thatphrase, which all of us haveseen, has been said by facelesscorporations, but it has never been said by a humanbeing.
Human beings don't talk thatway.
You and I happen to be conversing right now via the magic of theinternet.
We are not in the same physicalspace, but suppose that we were in the same physicalspace, we were in the samestudio.
And I am a clumsyguy. I guarantee I will knock over the microphone at some point during thisconversation.
So let's say you and I were together and I had a cup ofcoffee.
And because I talk with myhands, because I'mclumsy, maybe I spill coffee onyou, or you're wearing a nice graysweater.
I spill my dark black coffee on your beautiful graysweater.
What would I say under thosecircumstances?
I would notsay,oh,Matt, I'm sorry for any inconvenience this might have causedyou.
I wouldsay,oh, myGod,Matt, I'm sosorry.
I can't believe I didthat.
I'm sosorry. What can I do to make itright?
And so I think that the more we just forget the performative side ofsaying,oh, this is how official languageis.
This is how companiestalk.
This is how a smart person is supposed totalk.
And we just talk like wetalk.
I actually think that it's morecompelling.
Youknow, and what you'redoing, especiallywith, let's go back tospeeches, or and I think a lot of written communication aswell.
You're trying todo, you're not trying to sound like somebodyelse.
You're trying simply to sound like a better version ofyourself.
That's thekey. Youknow, and we can goback,like, I was incollege.
I was a linguisticsmajor.
And one of the few things that you learn in linguistics is the ability to go very meta veryquickly.
And I can go very meta very quickly onyou.
When we think about this just in terms of the humanspecies, human beings have been conversing as you and Iare.
Human beings have been conversing forit's, youknow, 200,000years,right?
It is not anything welearned.
We didn't learn how toconverse.
It is who weare. It's part of our evolution as aspecies.
And we've been doing it for 200,000years.
We have beenwriting, youknow, written communication for only5,000.
It's like a fraction of thattime.
Written communication is aninvention.
It is not something we donaturally.
Andso, and then if you think about the distribution of writteninformation, the printingpress, that's only 500 years-ishold.
Andso,this,so, youknow, we're learning how to do this kind of writtencommunication, that's formalcommunication, and for whatever weird reason we have diverged from what we already do as an evolutionaryability.
Andso, the more youcan, Iguess, solet's, let's be practicalhere.
The goal has to be to sound like a better version ofyourself, not to soundofficial, not to sound like somebodyelse, but to sound like a slightly moreorganized, more coherent version ofyourself.
Clearly, when wecommunicate, we want to avoid distancing ourselves from the people we're talkingabout.
Youknow, in myfield, we talk a lot of what you said resonates in is captured by this idea ofimmediacy.
You want to connect and you want to beimmediate.
And you use language that is inviting topeople.
I recently coached a very senior leader at a techcompany, and he was giving a presentation for3,000, 5,000people.
And he started bysaying, knowledge workersmust.
And I stoppedhim. Isaid, who's in theaudience?
Hesaid, knowledgeworkers.
And Isaid, so why don't you justsay, youall,right?
Imean, we need to communicate and use language that invites people in and doesn't distanceourselves.
I do think many of us think that to soundsmarter, we have to use big words and formal ways ofspeaking.
Exactly. And what I'm hearing you say is being a better version of yourself is not using bigwords.
Just connecting and really thinking about your point and how it canresonate, is thatright?
Yes, being a clearer version ofyourself, not having this kind of fantastical notion of what official speak is or what smart speakis.
And the thingis, it's like we have in our brains literally the programming that allows us to dothat.
Thatit, like tome, it takes more cognitive effort for a company to come up with thisridiculous, we're sorry for any inconveniences might have caused you rather thansaying, oh myGod, we're sosorry.
We messedup.Absolutely, I love themantra, speak like ahuman.
And I think all of us can take the time to practice and run our communications by other people and have as the firstthreshold, did it make sense and does it soundconversational?
In your writing andspeaking, you've studied a lot about persuasion andselling.
You talk about focusing on problemfinding, not problemsolving.
Can you define these two concepts and explain how to leverage problem finding in being persuasive andselling?
So problem solving is addressing a clearly stated issue that already exists and likely has asolution.
Problem finding is actually surfacing that when people don't know that it exists rightnow.
Why is one now more important than theother?
This is a big deal because problem solving is becoming acommodity.
And this is particularlytrue.
This is true throughout white collarwork, but this is particularly true insales.
If I am in the marketfor, I'm looking around my officehere.
If I'm in the market for a vacuum cleaner and oh myGod, my floor isdirty, I need a vacuum cleaner and you're a vacuum cleanersalesperson.
I don't really need you verymuch.
I know what Ineed. I need a vacuumcleaner.
I can goonline. I can find the bestprice.
I can find the best model for that vacuumcleaner.
You're not very useful tome.
I don't needyou,right?
Your ability to solve thatproblem, get down a vacuum cleaner ismeaningless.
However, where are you moreuseful?
You're more useful if that's not actually myproblem.
If I'm wrong about myproblem.
And so maybe the problem is that I have crappy screens on my windows here and all this kind of gunk is getting in here and it doesn't matter whether I have a vacuumcleaner.
So if you can sort of surface a problem that I don't realize that Ihave, that is more difficult to commodify and therefore there's a greater premium on problem finding rather than onproblem,solving.
I love this notion of really flipping thescript.
It's not about giving thesolution.
It's about finding what's the right problem and it gets back to something you said earlier about really knowing your audience and understanding their needs can help you find the problems that can be beneficial tothem.
I first came to know your work through your bookDrive.
I recommend that book to everyone and in it you talk aboutpurpose.
Can you share with us what the value of purpose is in our personal and professional lives and how can wefind, grow and harness ourpurpose?
Well, that's a huge question and I don't have to offer at thestart,Matt, a mea culpa because in that book I don't think I really got purpose quiteright.
I think about it differentlynow.
I want to wrote thatbook.
No refunds for anybody but I still think about itdifferently.
Stillvalue. There's stillvalue.
Yeah,yeah. And so what we think of aspurpose, particularly when it comes to on the job is that I'm going to be more motivated to do something if my job is connected to something larger thanmyself.
So not only am I filing this report or doing this audit but I'm doing it in the service of stopping the climatecrisis.
And we have a lot of good evidence in organizational behavior that that is absolutely a performanceenhancer.
If you go to say university fundraisers and show them letters from people who are on the receiving end of the money that they were raised or have them meet people who benefited from the money that theyraised, they raise moremoney.
So purpose is an inherent performanceenhancer.
But there's also a quieter kind of purpose where you're not only making adifference, you're just making acontribution.
We can think of one as capital Ppurpose.
My work is solving the climatecrisis.
I'm feeding thehungry.
But there's another one where you're just making acontribution.
There's a great study out of Harvard Business School showing that in a cafeteria when they rigged up an iPad that allowed the cooks to see thecustomers, the quality of the foodimproved.
And what that meant was that the cooks were not getting paidmore, the cooks were not feeding theunhoused.
The cooks simply saw the purpose of what they weredoing.
They were making acontribution.
So when we think of a capital Ppurpose, I'm making a difference in theworld.
Small Ppurpose, I'm just making acontribution.
I'm cooking a cheese omelette and someone's going to eatit.
I'm going to up my cheese omelette game abit.
My colleague is having difficulty getting a report out thedoor.
I'm going to help her dothat.
It's not going to change theworld, but it's a contribution to another humanbeing.
I'm going to call center and somebody calls in and they have this problem with their headphones aren't working properly and I'm going to solve theirproblem.
I'm not changing the world in anyway, but I'm making acontribution.
And what wesee, it's reallyexciting, is that a lot oftimes, especially inleadership, we're over indexed onhow.
Leaders always tell people how to dostuff.
They don't explain enough about why people are doing isimportant.
Why itmatters, why it connects to making a contribution or making adifference.
And as gooey as thatsounds, I think there's almost incontrovertible evidence that why that sense of purpose is the most cost effective performance enhancer that organizationshave.
It's really acatalyst,right?
By helping peopleunderstand, but it also surfaces why people are doingthings, why what they domatters, why it connects to somethingelse.
And by empowering people with thewhy, you can motivate the behavior that you'reseeking.
Many of those listening get very anxious and nervous about theircommunication, be itpresenting, making smalltalks, speaking up in ameeting, asking somebody out on adate.
In your newestbook, The Power ofRegret, you discuss the role of risk as it relates toregret.
Can you talk about how our perceived risk often does not match the actual risk and the implications that it might have for our motivations and our anxieties and maybe even specifically tocommunication?
Thisis, Ithink, a big takeaway from thatbook.
In thatbook, I looked at this misunderstood emotion ofregret.
And among the things that I did is I collected regretsnow.
We have about 25,000 regrets from around theworld.
And I also did a big survey of the US population about their attitudes onregret.
And one of the things that yousee, let's go start with the US public opinionsurvey.
We did this very large sample to try to find demographic differences in what peopleregret, how they regret it soforth.
So we oversampled in every demographiccategory.
We spent a lot of money to try to find these demographicdifferences.
And there weren't thatmany.
But there was one big one that goes directly to yourpoint, which isthis.
In the architecture ofregret, you can have regrets about action andinaction.
Regrets about what you did and regrets about what you did anddo.
People in their 20s had about equal numbers of action and inactionregrets.
But as peopleage, almost like into the30s, but certainly40,50,60,70s,80s, the inaction regrets tookover.
There's about a three toone, two toone, three to one ratio of regrets of inaction overaction.
What people regret over time are things they didn'tdo.
They didn't take thattrip.
They didn't ask that person out on adate.
They didn't start thatbusiness.
And I think it's because we are just a slightly over indexed onrisk.
We overstate the risk in manycircumstances.
Now, this is not a lesson to take risks all thetime.
You want to take smartrisks.
But I feel like we need to adjust the dial one or twoclicks.
And this is particularly true when it comes to communication inthe, what I call the world regretssurvey, where it collected regrets from all over theworld.
One of the big categories of regrets were what I call connectionregrets, where you have a friend or someone you care aboutdeeply.
Maybe you haven't talked to them for 10 years and you want to reachout.
But it feels really awkward and you think they're not going tocare.
So youdon't. That is a colossal mistake because it's a colossal forecastingerror.
Because what happens is that when you do reachout, it's way less awkward than peoplethink.
To yourpoint, we're over assessing therisk.
Second, the other side almost always welcomes theoverture.
They don't think it'sweird.
And so I do think that there is some pretty goodevidence.
And we look at regret and what people who have over time to have that bias foraction.
To speakup, to reach out to thatfriend, to ask somebody out on adate, to sort of be a little bit more risk prone than we might naturally be because over time what you're going to regret is not doing thatstuff.
Sofirst,Dan, you could have collected all of those regrets just by talking tome.
I've got about 25,000myself.
So I could have saved youtime.
I really see in my own work and then the work of others that I know who help people feel more confidentspeaking, that virtually everybody after thefact, after they've taken thatrisk, say it wasn't as bad as I thought in the rewards far outweighed myconcerns.
So I just wanted to echo what you saidthere.
And yet we are often burdened by our fear of that risk so that we end up ultimately regretting what could havebeen.
And I hope everybody takes a moment to think of an upcoming situation where you might be hesitant because you're afraid of the risk and take it from DanPink, go doit.
It is worth it in terms of yourcommunication.
I think there's an important lessonhere.
It'slike, just have that slight bias foraction.
Youknow, Nick Eppley has researched about no one thinks that talking to strangers on atrain.
And if you go up to somebody on atrain, are they going to welcome theoverture?
And the view islike, noway, they're going to hateit.
I'm going to hateit. It's going to be totallyawkward.
And then when he did research in the Chicago public transportationsystem, he found that the people who were on the end of the overturesaid,yeah, that was kind of interestingconversation.
I'm glad the person reachedout.
The person who was instructed to do thatsaid,oh, that was way less awkward than wethink.
So bottom line here is just have a slight bias foraction.
I have found in this regretresearch, especially this emotion of awkwardness is a papertiger.
Push through that feeling of awkwardness and any dimension of yourlife.
And as you're saying from the people you've workedwith, when you get to the other side ofthat, you're typically going to befine.
Absolutely. And awkwardness is a big impediment tocommunication.
And if we just tryit, we often find it's not as bad as wethought.
In yourbook, when the scientific secrets of perfecttiming, you give a lot of advice on how to maximize our motivation and take care of ourselves in this incredibly fast paste always on world that welive.
What are two bits of advice you might have for us for how to thrive and sustainourselves?
Well, I guess the first one would be onceagain, the light researchbase.
We have some pretty good evidence that our cognitive abilities do not remain constant over the course of theday.
Theychange, they change in materialways.
And so being conscious and intentional about doing the right kind of work at the right time of day can make ahuge, hugedifference.
Andunfortunately, we're often very intentional about what wedo, we're intentional about how we do it and who we do itwith.
But when it comes to when we dostuff, we're notintentional.
And we should be because it actuallymatters.
The second thing that I would say is take morebreaks.
I initially in that book ontiming, I was going to write about maybe two pages on breaks in the chapter on this hidden pattern of theday.
And there were so much research and so good research that I ended up writing an entire chapter onbreaks.
And what we should bedoing, it's a reframing ofsorts, we should be thinking of breaksdifferently.
We should be thinking of breaks as part of ourperformance, not as a deviation from ourperformance.
We have been sold a bill of goods by the Puritans who said that the only way to get more work done and better work done is to powerthrough.
And that when you powerthrough, that's also morallyvirtuous, that's completenonsense.
What we know from many domains is that professionals takebreaks.
It's not let amateurs take breaks and professionalsdon't, it's the exactopposite.
Professionals takebreaks, amateurs don't takebreaks.
So be intentional about your breaks and where youcan, the best kinds of breaks are when you're inmotion, when you'reoutside, when you're detached from your phone or even from your work and often when you're with somebodyelse.
So even taking like a 15 minute walk break every afternoon can be powerfully helpful in sustaining your intellectual and physicalenergy.
I think taking a break in conversation and in the work wedo,very, veryimportant.
And this notion of timing of when things work best for you is reallypowerful.
We've had BobA.Schiff, who is one of our faculty here at Stanford's BusinessSchool, who has studiedthis.
And it's fascinating that we are more collaborative andcreative.
It's certain times of the day and it's better to try to harness the type of activity we do that fits with thoserhythms.
And absolutely takingbreaks, taking time to disconnect can bereally, reallypowerful.
SoDan, before weend, I'd like to ask you the same three questions I ask everyone who joins me and I am really curious and excited to hear youranswers.
Are you up forthese?Yes.
Questionone. You were to capture the best communication advice you ever received as a five to seven word presentation slidetitle.
What would itbe? Decide the promise you're making thendeliver.
Okay.Okay, and then I'll unpack that veryquickly.
So years ago I was working on it back in the old days when there weremagazines.
I wrote a lot for magazines and I'd write these fairly long featurestories,4,000, 5,000words.
And at onepoint, I was stuck onsomething.
I submitted adraft, it was terrible and I was really stuck and my editor said tome, it'slike,okay, I know the problemhere.
You don't know what promise you're making to thereader.
What promise are you making to the reader in thispiece?
And I waslike,what? And that was really enlightening tome.
So I think that I think hard about that and what I'mwriting, what I'm talking islike, what's the promise I'm making to the reader or thelistener?
And am I fulfilling thatpromise?
So decide the promise you're making thendeliver.
I think that is reallypowerful.
Know yourgoal, know your intention and then act onit.
Verygood. You know so many people and you've had such a fascinatinglife.
Question number twoasks, who is a communicator that you admire andwhy?
Okay, so I think my choice is not somebody Iknow.
Not only is it not somebody Iknow, but it's not somebody who's alive and it's somebody who might not besomebody.
It might besomebody's.
No,Jack, I was thinking about this during mywalk.
I took a walk right after lunch and before I didthis, I'd talk with you and I was thinking aboutEsop.
When you think aboutit, Esop had theseparables, thesefables.
They were probably 150 wordslong.
Theyhave, we stood the test of time to put it mildly and theyoperate, they've lodged in our brain so powerfully that you can use phrases like tortoise in the hair or sour grapes or youknow, ant in the grasshopper and it sticks and that's prettygood.
So I'm going to vote forEsop.
You have truly gone oldschool.
You have brought up theoldest,suggested, great communicator and you clearly have highlighted some things that are important for goodcommunicator, something that'smemorable, beingconcise, creating something that has theimpact.
Question numberthree, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communicationrecipe?
Numberone,simplicity.
Numbertwo,brevity. See what you didthere?
And I'm not even going to use mythird.
Iknow. I sawthat. Simplicity andbrevity, make itaccessible, make itunderstandable, make itmemorable, all verypowerful.
Bits of advice and guidance andDan, everything you've shared with us has beenpowerful.
It has been such a pleasure to chat withyou.
Thanks. Thank you for being human and connecting with humans knowing our purpose and really understanding our promise and having a bias foraction.
All of these are reallypowerful.
Thank you somuch. I wish you well on your newbook, The Power of Regret and I appreciate yourtime.
What apleasure,Matt. Thank you for joining us for another episode of ThinkFast, TalkSmart, ThePodcast.
To learn more about communicating withimpact, please listen to Episode 103 with CarmineGallo.
And to learn more about word choice and how to leveragelanguage, please listen to Episode 80 with JonahBerger.
This episode was produced by JennyLuna, RyanCampos, andme, MattIbrahim's.
Our music is from FloydWonder.
Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get yourpodcasts.
Be sure to subscribe and rateus.
So follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out fastersmarter.io for deep-divevideos, English language learningcontent, and ournewsletter.
Hi, Matthere. Think Fast Talk Smart listeners often ask how they can learn more about the topics we cover and deepen their impact asleaders.
A great way to do this is through Stanford Graduate School of Business's Lead Online BusinessProgram.
In this year-long onlineprogram, participants hone fundamental businessskills, connect with and tap into a global network of amazing fellowparticipants, and emerge with countless practical skills and an innovationmindset.
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