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The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade.
At Think Fast, Talk Smart.
We're taking this quote by Benjamin Franklin, the famous US inventor and founding father, very seriously.
As you know, our show strives to share tips and techniques to help you hone and improve your communication and careers.
These practices and approaches can be augmented with tools and technology.
I'm Matt Abrahams.
I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to this Tech Tools mini-series of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
In this multi-part mini-series, we'll introduce you to tools we use at Think Fast, Talk Smart to help us be better at our spoken and written communication.
And you'll learn best practices from the founders who created them.
Taken together.
We hope these communication tools will help you find new ways to think fast and talk smart.
I am excited today to speak with Max Litvin, who is one of the co-founders of Grammarly.
Max, welcome.
Thanks for being here.
I always love to learn, what was the origin of Grammarly?
What led you to create it?
First, my co-founder Alex and I previously ran a company that did plagiarism detection.
And we often had to answer a question, why so many people plagiarize?
And actually a staggering number of people plagiarize.
In our user interviews we learned that actually the biggest reason for plagiarism is the difficulty, and even perceived difficulty, of just taking thoughts from your head and putting them in writing.
So many people, most people who plagiarize, they actually knew what they want to say.
And it just putting it in writing was the barrier that they couldn't overcome because of lack of time or lack of confidence, or a combination of things.
And they resorted to plagiarism.
So that gives us an idea.
Why don't?
Instead of policing plagiarism, we just create a tool that makes it much easier to take your thoughts and put them in writing.
But in addition to that, we looked at where humanity and technology were going and we saw that people make fewer and fewer things and more and more knowledge.
What's knowledge?
Knowledge is essentially communication.
When you write a book, you're communicating.
When you make a video, you're communicating.
Pretty much any knowledge we create is communication.
And how do we create knowledge?
In process of creating knowledge, we collaborate through communicating as well.
So communication is both the process and the result.
If we can improve that by even a fraction of a percent for a couple billion people, it's tremendous impact on the humanity level.
And that seemed like a very compelling idea.
It is incredibly compelling and so important.
I find it really exciting that you're doing the work that you're doing to help people in this information-based world to communicate better.
Personally, I think it's great that, rather than just building a better plagiarism detection tool, you actually said what's causing all this plagiarism.
Turns out, people aren't comfortable writing or feeling competent in doing it, so you work to help them.
Some of our listeners might not know yet what Grammarly is.
Can you share what your product is using the elevator pitch structure I teach my MBA students?
What if you could so that, for example, and that's not all.
Absolutely.
What if you could transform every email document and post that you write into an effective Polish professional piece of communication without spending hours editing?
So that you could focus on what truly matters.
Sharing your ideas with confidence, building trust with your audience, achieving your career and professional goals through clear and effective communication.
With Grammarly, over 50000 teams and millions of individual users save time and mental effort by instantly catching any challenges with their writing, improving their tone, addressing their audience in a more collective way.
And that's not all.
Grammarly continues to evolve.
Soon you'll see even more support from real-time suggestions tailored to your unique personal style, to the standards and norms and benchmarks of your industry, your company culture and company style, and even compliance.
Wow.
So you get an A-plus on using the structure.
And it sounds like you actually used your tool to help you with that answer.
Can you share more about that?
Exactly.
I used some of the new AI-based features of Grammarly and essentially I pointed it to the structure that you suggested.
And I pointed it to some of the pitches I made earlier.
But also to make it a little bit more forward-looking, I pointed it to our roadmap.
And that's what it produced.
It took me about two minutes to accomplish it.
Now, you've spent a lot of time thinking about how to help people write better.
What have you learned that really seems to make a difference?
I spent literally years racking my brain on this very question, because Grammarly helps people to communicate better.
And what is better?
It's critical for our company's existence to be able to answer that question.
The answer we came to is it depends.
The definition of better or what makes writing better is very situational.
I think what really makes difference is starting with the goal, understanding what you want to accomplish with your communication.
And it can take a moment, just like, what do I want to do?
Do I want somebody to act or do I want somebody to know something?
Or do I want somebody to change their opinion?
Or do I just want to entertain people?
Having clarity on that before you start communicating, it helps to communicate better and faster.
I 100% agree.
And one of the foundational principles in all of the work that I do and many of our guests have shared on the podcast, is this notion of you have to understand your audience and you have to have a clear vision of your goal.
And once you have those two things, then you can craft meaningful communication for them.
And you're just echoing that.
So thank you.
We'll be right back to finish our conversation, but first we're going to take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.
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Before we end, I'd like to ask you two questions that I'm asking everybody who is part of this mini-series.
Are you ready for that?
Yes.
Great.
I would love to know who is a communicator that you admire and why?
This is a difficult question for me, because my personal philosophy is I can learn from everyone and I pick specific pieces that a person does really well or differently from everyone and learn these pieces.
But One name that comes to mind is Adam Grant.
What I like in his communication, and what I want to do better myself, is explain complex things simply, in a way that makes it easier to apply to practical situations, but without obscuring the nuances, without obscuring the depths of complexity.
Because it's easy to simplify things, But that sometimes does a disservice to your audience, because we just don't get the lead into the nuance.
But the way Adam does it is making it simple, but without hiding that there is more.
The notion of making things accessible is really critical.
So it's not about dumbing it down or oversimplifying it.
As you said, that can be risky.
In fact, what it's all about is finding ways to make it accessible so people can appreciate the depth and the nuance.
And Adam Grant does a great job with that.
Thank you.
Final question.
Question two.
Beyond your tool, beyond Grammarly, what is one communication hack or tool or shortcut that you use to be more effective in your communication?
Oh, I love this.
One thing that dramatically changed my communication for the better is whenever I'm in a contentious situation, an argument or just a high stakes discussion, and I have an instinct to attack somebody's point or start focusing on differences in opinions.
I just start my response with yes.
And not yes, but, but genuine yes.
And it's mostly for me.
It's not for the other person.
What it does?
It switches my brain into collaborative communication mode, where I focus first on things where there are commonalities, where there is mutual understanding, and then develop into things that we see differently.
And that is a simple thing, but it has such a dramatic effect in the results.
I'm sure you've dealt with collaborative versus competitive communication a lot.
In competitive communication, it's usually a zero-sum game at best.
And in many cases, it just destroys value.
In collaborative communication, it's one plus one equals three.
To explain it, I often use the analogy of Legos, that I have my Legos, you have your Legos.
Instead of arguing whose Lego pieces are better, we just put them in one pile and build something together.
That's how I can explain collaborative communication to people who are new to this concept.
But that starting answer with yes is a great tool to first switch your brain into collaborative communication mode, but then it also switches your audience brain into that collaborative communication mode and leads to better results.
People can't see this, but I'm smiling from ear to ear.
We have talked a lot on this podcast about the principle from improvisation of yes and and how it really brings you into collaboration.
And I love that you have found somebody in your role as a senior leader of a company that's doing really cool stuff, that you start from the yes and mentality and you personally see your benefit.
And I just want to highlight for everyone listening that what Max did was he actually followed some of the things he's talked about.
He repeated himself in a couple different ways.
He made something that's very complex, the notion of collaborative communication.
People have spent their academic careers studying this and, through an analogy of Legos, made it more accessible.
So Max, thank you so much for the tool that you've created.
Thank you for taking the time to share with us key takeaways that can make us all better communicators.
I appreciate your time.
And thank you, man.
That was very enjoyable conversation.
Thank you for joining us for one of our Communication Tools.
Episodes of Think Fast, Talk Smart the podcast.
Please be sure to listen to all of the episodes in this mini-series.
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This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams.
Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.
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