This was a hard pill for me to swallow:
People couldn’t care less how polished my words are.
I used to think my job was to be clear.
That I just needed to explain things thoroughly, with a well-structured argument, perhaps some beautiful slides.
And I think I was pretty good at it.
But at some point I started to wonder: Why then did the message still fail to click so often?
Well, because …
It’s totally not how polished your words are.
It’s not how well you structure your argument.
It’s not even how clearly you explain it.
The problem is people can understand perfectly and still not care.
As J.P. Morgan put it: “A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”
All your good reasons why they should embrace your message fall apart when they don’t align with their real reason for why they would embrace it.
Ignore the real reasons and everything falls apart.
It’s simply irrelevant how elaborate your argument is. As long as it’s not aligned, it’s pointless.
But when you touch on something they already feel, something “true” they couldn’t name until you said it, that’s when things start to shift.
And when that happens,
you don’t need yet another argument.
You don’t need to repeat yourself.
Actually, you don’t need to prove anything anymore.
When something truly matters, people feel it before you finish your sentence.
But before I tell you more, I’m curious about your thoughts: What do you think makes people embrace your ideas?
