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Note: I have written about two of these topics before, and here are the links to those posts:
Time to Put the 7% Myth to Rest
Time to Put the Learning Styles Myth to Rest
The Only Time the AVK Myth Applies
In addition, two useful articles and one book about the Myers-Briggs myth can be found here:
Myers-Briggs: Does It Pay to Know Your Type?
Goodbye to MBTI: The Fad that Won’t Die
The Cult of Personality Testing, by Annie Murphy Paul
Last week, I was privileged to be asked to speak to a group of aspiring entrepreneurs embarking on a 10-week course called StartUp Quest. Each team in the course is assigned an actual patented technology supplied by a Florida university and prepares a business plan to pitch to an investor panel.
The course is well-designed and very detailed, so my goal was simply to provide a way to keep everything they will learn in the proper perspective. I told them I would destroy a harmful myth, suggest the right mindset for success, and equip them with a mantra to discipline their approach.
The myth
The myth that entices and destroys most entrepreneurs is the one that says if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.
Thousands of would-be millionaires have taken this literally: mousetraps are the single most-patented devices in history. The first important patent for mousetraps was granted to William Hooker in 1894, and then it was slightly improved by John Mast in 1903. Since then, the US Patent office has granted over 5,000 patents for new mousetraps, of which about 20 have made any money—and the original version still outsells all others combined by 2 to 1!
This may be because not one of those 5,000 designs made any improvement that customers would pay for, or because not one of the 5,000 inventors figured out a way to sell the value of their innovation. Either way, it is a failure of selling, not of technology. I reminded them what Peter Thiel said: “If you’ve invented something new but haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”[1]
If you want to be an effective entrepreneur, you must eradicate the myth that the product is the main thing. Don’t get me wrong: you still need a better mousetrap, but that’s only half the battle. Life is not like a Kevin Costner movie: if you build it, they won’t come—unless you sell the hell out of it.
The mindset
Destroying the myth is not enough; even if I convinced every one of the 90 people in the room that they had to put just as much thought into the selling process as into the technology, selling is not something you learn overnight. Those of us who make a living selling professionally know that it takes more than “natural talent” and that there is a wide range of skills needed to be consistently successful. That said, the quickest way to learn to sell is to first adopt an outside-in mindset.
As they strive to build their businesses, they must keep in mind that the most important asset they need to acquire and grow is not technology or people—it’s customers. Rather than starting from the technology and projecting forward, they have to start from the customer and work backward. They have to ask: Does the customer have a mouse problem?
That means they have to learn to think like their customers. Customers don’t care what their product does; they care what the product does for them. The best way to answer that question is to approach their strategy, their marketing and design from the point of view of what will make their customers’ lives better: solve a problem, take advantage of an opportunity, adapt to change, or contain a risk.
The mantra
An outside-in perspective is a great place to start from, because it’s essential to understanding the needs of the only people who count: those who will be willing to pay money to fill those needs. But understanding is useless until you can effectively communicate how you will do that.
As they carefully craft their business plans and put together the presentation for their investor pitch, it’s easy to get carried away with unnecessary detail that clouds their central message. They have only one shot where they have the full attention of the people that matter, so they’ll need ruthless discipline to make every word count.
The critical filter that strips away clutter is the essential mantra of persuasive communication:
SO WHAT?
By applying SO WHAT? to every slide, every visual, and every word that they put in their investor pitches, they answer the single most important question in the minds of every single listener. When the panel has to sit through nine pitches of varying quality, the one who best addresses what matters most to them will shine through—I’ve seen it in every one of the previous competitions.
When I had finished speaking, one of the participants asked a question that exposed the fundamental flaw in my whole talk. She asked, if everyone in the room was going to apply the principles I had talked about, how could her team be sure of winning? My simple answer to that question is the topic of my next post.
[1] Peter Thiel, Zero to One, p. 130.
This blog post could change your life—maybe even prolong it.
If you get stage fright before a presentation (and who doesn’t?), if you are under stress (and who isn’t?), if you think stress is bad for you (and who doesn’t?), then I strongly recommend that you read and take to heart the central message of The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It
Whether you think stress is bad for you or good for you, you’re right.
To put that last statement in a less cryptic way: stress can improve your performance, make you stronger, and even make you a more caring person—as long as you believe it can. In fact, the best way to succeed in stressful situations is not to try to reduce your stress, but to embrace it as a resource to propel enhanced performance.
I realize that sounds like superficial motivational hooey, brought to you by the same people who tell you that you can do anything you set your mind to, but McGonigal, a psychologist at Stanford, backs up her assertions with extensive research and a few eye-opening studies.
In some ways, The Upside of Stress does not tell us anything new. We’ve all heard the meme that what does not kill you makes you stronger, and I have long been telling students in my presentations classes that anxiety before a speech means that you care and that you are gearing up for superior performance. So, yes, we have heard some of this before, but this is the first book I’ve come across that backs that up with research and explains the biology behind these ideas.
What is also new is that we learn that there is more than one possible response to stress. We’ve been taught that stress is caused by the activation of the fight or flight response in our minds and bodies. That response is a natural reaction to threat, which prepares our minds and bodies for superior performance, but it evolved many millennia ago in a far different environment than our modern world. So, according to the mismatch theory, our stone-age brains respond to modern circumstances in ways that can hamper performance and over time can severely damage our health.
That makes sense if fight or flight is our only option, but McGonigal explains that there are actually three different possible responses to stressful situations. Besides the familiar threat response, we can have a challenge response or a tend-and-befriend response. Although both possible responses are equally important to well-being, my focus in this blog is on the challenge response.
The difference between the threat response and the challenge response lies in our estimation of our ability to meet the situation that faces us. When we’re fearing for our life, our body does the sensible thing: it goes into defensive mode and sends out hormones that cause a lot of changes; one of the most important is that it constricts blood vessels around our heart, because it might reduce blood loss in the event of severe injury. When we’re not in fear, different hormones cause the blood vessels to relax, which allows for greater blood flow and more energy to rise to the challenge and drives better performance, not to mention being better for us in the long run.
Evoking the challenge response does not reduce stress, but it does make the stress work in our favor. In studies, it has been shown that simply informing people that stress can help them perform better, can lead to improved performance on standardized tests, for example. One reason may be that the threat response narrows our attention and places greater focus on signs that things are going badly, but the challenge response opens our attention to more positive possibilities and opportunities. In numerous studies, those primed to generating a challenge response through prior education led to better performance. Even better, the benefits tend to last far beyond the initial priming.
So, how do you generate the challenge response? The most obvious first step is to avoid the threat response by creating the conditions so that you are not actually in danger. If you are well prepared for a presentation, you should take comfort in the fact that you are equipped to handle any difficult questions that might come up. (Or as I tell my students, if you’re nervous because you haven’t prepared well, you deserve to be!)
You can also activate the challenge response by viewing the stressful situation as an opportunity for learning and growth. As I’ve written before, this mastery mindset has been shown to improve performance in several different areas, including sales.
Actually, you’ve already completed one of the most important things you can do to generate the challenge response and benefit from stress: simply by reading this article, you are more likely to bring a different mindset to your next stressful situation!
You should have no trouble figuring out what he’s saying
One of the favorite statistics cited by communication “experts” is that only 7% of the meaning from spoken communications comes from the actual words spoken. As the story goes, 55% comes from facial expression, and 38% comes from body language, tone of voice, etc.
It has been around ever since Albert Mehrabian cited those statistics in a book entitled Silent Messages, published in 1971.
These experts use it to stress the importance of paying attention to non-verbal signals, whether you are the listener or the speaker. It’s a good statistic to cite because it’s appropriately surprising and it lends an air of science and precision.
The problem with the statistics cited is that it’s mostly false; in my own very unscientific estimate, it’s probably about, oh, let’s say 7% true.
If it were actually true, then when I was in Italy last week, I should have had no problem understanding 93% of what the taxi drivers told me (I didn’t). Plus, I could save a ton of money not buying headphones to watch airplane movies. If it were actually true, then listening to an educational podcast or talking on the phone garners you less than half of the message. And of course, you probably would not be able to understand this article unless I filled it with emoticons, which I refuse to do. It’s so patently untrue that when I read or hear that from someone, I automatically disqualify them as a credible source.[1]
But most people aren’t that simplistic. Some who cite the study come closer to the truth by qualifying it to the part of the message that contains feelings and attitudes. And that definitely makes sense in a lot of communications. If I ask someone how their meeting went, and they answer “great”, I can instantly tell whether they are sincere or sarcastic. In that situation, 0% of the message came from the actual meaning of the word; they could have answered me in Swahili and I would have understood.
But of course it gets more ambiguous as messages get longer, and it definitely does not apply when the speaker is deliberately trying not to show their true feelings. It also does not apply when someone is explaining factual or technical information. If I ask someone for directions, their facial expressions won’t make much difference in my understanding.
So, what did Mehrabian actually measure, and what did he say? Three female speakers were recorded saying one word, “maybe” in either a like, neutral or dislike tone of voice, and then 17 subjects listened to the recordings and were asked to infer what the attitude of the speaker was to a third party to whom they were presumably speaking. A follow-up study was then done with 30 subjects, using nine different words grouped according to the same three attitudes, and the results of both studies were combined to arrive at the statistics cited.
It’s fascinating to me that a study using 10 total words, 47 subjects, conducted in 1967, is still so influential today. As my friends on Sports Center would say, “C’Mon, Man!” (and you can imagine my tone of voice as I say it).
[1] Note: I do not mean to imply any disrespect to Mehrabian or his study, just to people who try to sound scientific without checking their facts.
