Never Tell People What You Do

by Bruce Kasanoff

  Luis Benitez, who has thirty-two times summited the Seven Summits—the tallest mountains on each continent—told me that kindness and compassion are essential to overcoming the horrible physical and mental challenges he encounters while climbing.

  If, for example, you see someone limping on the day when you must reach the next camp, you can curse their weakness and ignore their pain—or you can stop for 20 minutes and bandage their feet so they can keep up with you for the rest of the climb.

  By the way, that second strategy is not entirely altruistic. If a member of your party loses the ability to hike, your group may have to turn around. Stopping to help a colleague may be the fastest way to ensure that you achieve your goals.

  It takes discipline and foresight to break your stride to help another, but helping a person close to you will almost always be in your long-term best interest. Here’s a personal example…

  Each day, in the #1 slot on my to-do list, I place kindness first. Before I do anything else, I take at least one action that has no purpose other than to be kind to another person.

  Here are some ways you could do the same:

  Praise another person to his or her boss, peers, family, or friends

  Share someone’s contributions privately or publicly, perhaps via social media

  Send a heartfelt thank-you note

  Offer assistance, whether that means teaching someone a new skill or picking up items for them at the store, saving them a trip

  Introduce two or more people with mutual interests

  Take the time to quietly and fully listen to another

  Show compassion and empathy

  Volunteer

  Kindness first is the single best way to connect with other people and lift my own spirits. The more unexpected my kindness, the more satisfaction I experience when offering it.

  If this sounds like some sort of overly altruistic endeavor, I’d like to confess that, to me, the kindness first strategy is one of the most selfish plans I’ve ever hatched. By reaching out to other people every single day, I strengthen my social network—and,  in effect ,  take out an insurance policy on my own health and longevity.

  The stronger your social connections, the happier and healthier you are likely to be. In my experience, strong social connections don’t come from asking people for favors or manipulating them to get what you want. They come from being genuinely interested in other people, and from cultivating an authentic interest in their well-being. They come from being willing to help others. They come from giving of yourself.

  By being kind, you can find success. I have seen your future, and it is…

  From now on, your kindness will lead you to success.

  I recently came across the word kindfulness , which is also the title of a new book by Ajahn Brahm; he’s a British Theravada Buddhist monk. He writes that while mindfulness merely observes, kindfulness offers an active practice of compassion. He offers a simple suggestion:

  Be kindful to everyone and everything.

  While Brahm goes on to outline the stages of a kindfulness practice, that is not my intention here. I’m simply planting the idea in your head that you can adapt the kindfulness concept and use it with great success in your own career and business.

  Here are some possibilities to get you started:

  Be much more aware of opportunities to be kind. When confronted with obvious opportunities to be kind—an elderly person in need of help with a heavy door, for example—most of us take them, but we miss countless other opportunities…simply because we are preoccupied with our own affairs.

  Here’s the thing... the kinder you are, the better you feel. If you were thirsty, you’d look for water; so if you want to feel better, look for opportunities to be kind.

  Don’t just pause; pause to focus on kindness. Personally, I sometimes have trouble just sitting still and giving my thinking a break. I understand the benefits of doing this, and value them greatly, but there are times when it remains very difficult.

  When you have a specific purpose for being still, it becomes easier. You might consider pausing regularly to focus upon kindness. You don’t have to do anything. Just be quiet, and focus all of your senses on the concept or feeling or practice of kindness.

  Do a kindfulness review of your career and/or business. Where are the opportunities to be more aware (i.e., mindful) of opportunities to be kind? Make a list. Make it a long one.

  Depending upon your role, you might focus upon:

  colleagues

  subordinates

  partners

  vendors

  customers

  community members.

  The purpose of business is not to defeat others. On the contrary, it is to delight so many people that you can earn a good living and contribute to society.

  Kindfulness is a natural partner for anyone whose living depends upon delighting customers, engaging employees, or acting as a valued member of the community.

  Clarity : This is what separates people who mean well from people who do well .

  Clarity is getting the right balance between who you are communicating with right now (your audience), what you are trying to get them to understand (your message), and how you are sharing this information (the medium).

  Fit them all together well, and the result is clarity.

  For example, if you try to use a spreadsheet (medium) to convince your anecdote-driven boss (audience) to let you manage (message) a bigger team... you will fail. He doesn’t want a confusing pile of numbers; he wants a compelling story.

  Before you can be clear with other people, you have to be clear with yourself. You have to know what you want, and remain focused—over a very long period—on pursuing those goals, no matter if you wish to simply be of service to others…or to be a better parent…or to launch a startup.

  The secret to your success is to remember what you should be doing, and actually do it . If this sounds insanely obvious, let me ask you: Day after day, even when it gets hard, are you doing the right things?

  Most people aren’t.

  Most people try to be smarter or better or cleverer or more independent than everyone else. For many years, I fell victim to these traps, too.

  I spent a big chunk of my career trying to be (at the very least) one of the smartest people in the room. There was a good reason for this: it was my job.

  Long story short, technology companies love “thought leadership,” because it helps them sell tech. For many years, my job was to deliver “thought leadership” speeches and training programs, but eventually, it dawned on me that by trying to invent my own smarter version of the world, I was acting dumber than pretty much everyone else. It was all just words, all just one person trying to invent the Next Big Thing.

  One day, I had an epiphany: people don’t need the Next Big Thing. They simply need better ways to remember to do the right things.

  In other words, you know what to do—you just don’t do it. This may be because you lack willpower, clarity, or grit.

  The challenge, of course, is not simply remembering the solution. The challenge is remembering the solution when you really want to forget it.

  Simple example: If you want to lose weight…eat less and exercise more. You know this—but can you remember it when you are at a dinner with friends, on your second glass of wine, and everyone else orders dessert?

  To test my ability to solve this problem, I gave up alcohol for a full year (2016), largely because I eat less when I don’t drink. If I were still in the “thought leadership” business, I’d market this as the Alcohol-Free Diet, though no one but me would probably try it.

  Remembering to do what’s important often involves understanding your weaknesses, strengths, and environment.

  In the context of an organization—be it a small team or a public company—the same problem occurs. Someone has a vision, a practical one that makes sense. The team adopts it, but two months later, things are getting messy. Four months later, chaos
reigns.

  You can’t just state the solution. Identifying it is not nearly enough. You have to remember the solution, day after day.

  You have to help other people overcome their uniquely human challenges, which largely revolve around the fact that we lack willpower, clarity, or grit. Your organization probably lacks these things, too…especially clarity.

  Instead of giving all of your employees a book and saying, “Do this,” craft a plan to repeat the same message thousands of times. Yes, thousands. Turn it into pictures. Add it into conversations. Put it on forms, and weave it into processes. Hell, make your vision the name of a sandwich in your cafeteria.

  Do the same thing at home. Don’t buy books to find the Next Big Idea. Buy books to help you focus your energy and attention on what you already know you should be doing. Join groups and make friends for the same purpose. Get radical…if your neighborhood encourages too much eating, drinking, and lounging around…move. Yes, move.

  You know the right thing to do. Are you going to do it, or just look for an easier idea that you can pretend is right?

  By the way, once you know the right thing to do, it becomes very easy to tell other people what you want… and why they should help you get it.

  How to Tell a Story People Will Remember

  20 years ago, I followed the CEO of a major company up a treacherous path on Whistler Mountain in British Columbia. We had ridden the ski lifts as high as they went, then taken off our skis and hiked up even further, toward a chute filled with jagged rocks. It was his idea, not mine; I was a young guy just thrilled to be there.

  As I struggled to catch each breath, my heart pounding madly in my chest, he cut a path twenty yards in front of me. A former college athlete, the CEO was in great shape, and anxious to prove it.

  The slope was so steep, I was staring at the ground in front of me rather than looking up at him. His last word was, “Shit!” as he lost his balance, dropped his skis, and plummeted down the slope toward the razor-sharp rocks below.

  For a second, my brain couldn’t process what had happened. The path was so steep, I couldn’t turn quickly, or I would have also slipped and fallen right behind him.

  My first thought was: I just killed my client . I experienced that moment of horror, and I will never forget it.

  By telling this story from my point of view, my intention is to show you (rather than tell you) how memory works.

  If you don’t know how to tell a memorable story, you can’t be an effective leader, raise money for a startup, be a number-one sales professional, or even get your kids to listen.

  In the end, my client didn’t die; he slid 300 yards, regained his composure, and hiked back up the slope. After climbing a bit higher, we skied down without incident.

  Let’s expand further upon this concept. Dr. Carmen Simon is an expert in the science of memorable presentations. She and I pooled our efforts to create a visual catalog of ten techniques that make communication memorable—five of which I used in this story:

  Evoke emotion

  Spark mental images

  Be shocking and visual

  Tell a story

  Exaggerate (I accomplished this in the above example via the implication that my client could have died.)

  We are not just talking about PowerPoint decks. These principles apply to the way you present ideas to colleagues, friends, relatives and casual acquaintances. Whether you are trying to sell a new idea to your boss or raise money for a charity, your first challenge is always to have the other person remember what you said.

  Carmen reminds her clients that people remember just ten percent of what you tell them . You can’t change this retention rate significantly, but you can influence what other people remember. The way you do this is by using one or more of these techniques in association with the crucial 10% you most want others to retain.

  To make your life even easier, Carmen and I also came up with four essential tips to guide you anytime you’re pitching an idea, sharing knowledge, or otherwise communicating with a roomful of people:

  1.) Create a sense of anticipation : Whether you are pitching board members or convincing your kids to volunteer on the weekends, your first challenge is to get their full attention. If you skip this step, your words and best intentions will be wasted. Rookie do-gooder mistake: letting your passion blind you to the fact that no one is listening to you.

  2.) Be provocative : Many speakers—and people in general— try to fit in. But when you are asking others to support your cause, you need to stand out. You need to be unique enough to justify someone else’s investment of time and/or money. To do this, you must provoke others to feel emotions and take action. Be bold.

  3.) Ask questions : Carmen constantly reminds her audiences that most people only remember 10% of what you say. Whether your audience is around your kitchen table or packed into a conference room, by asking questions, you change the way they process information. Questions increase recall by involving different portions of the listener’s brain.

  This is really important: pause after you ask a tough or thought-provoking question. Give people time to let the question sink in, and to think about it. Again, most people skip this step.

  4.) Add surprise, conflict or tension : No matter how strong your case or how buttoned-up your facts, you can lose your audience…unless you do something to spark emotions or cause a physical and emotional reaction.

  Generic Thinking Can Wreck Your Career

  Imagine your dumbest competitor. This is a person or company who will do your job for a price so low that they may be living in poverty, but they will do it anyway. This is one of the traps that awaits you when you settle for generic thinking.

  One of the downsides of our digitally-connected world is that you’re now competing with people all over the world, and many of them would be thrilled to have 10 or 20% of your income. Others don’t even think that far ahead; they just want to make something— anything—today.

  Others are closer to your own circumstances. They are people in the next town, state, or province. They use the exact same words as you to describe what they do. Like you, they all have a few pretty good references. They’ve done some good things in their career, and they are doing their best to cover up a few gaps and/or disappointments.

  I don’t mean to be cruel—quite the opposite, in fact—but let’s be brutally honest: in many cases, these are generic professionals competing with you…and you’re just another generic professional. (I cringe even writing these words, but please understand that compassion underlies my tough words. It does you no good to offer a false sense of security. In fact, it’s better to run the risk of offending you—and, in doing so, provoke a change in your behavior—than to refrain from warning you about impending danger.)

  What’s the best way out of this trap?

  You have to be different in a way that offers economic value to others.

  It’s not enough to be quirky or unique. If your competitors (i.e., the other people who want your current or next job) can bring, say, $100,000 of economic value to your employer, you need to bring $200,000 or more. Or maybe a million dollars...it depends how high you are aiming.

  There are a number of ways to create economic value, but the best strategy for avoiding the generic-thinking trap is to customize the work you do for others .

  To use a personal example, lots of people will write a 500-word social media article for $25. I charge a lot more for the same task. The reason clients pay my higher price is because I make their article sound like them . The article has their voice, their opinions, and their unique approach...but I did all the work.

  Generic thinking isn’t just a problem for your individual career. If you work for a company, the odds are pretty good that its future is also threatened by this trap. For example, in most industries, companies are being pushed toward commodity pricing, which means that many buyers only care about getting a low price.

  The reason buyers don’t care about anything b
ut price is because there are so few apparent differences between each competitor. Sure, marketers try to tell us that their brand is “new and improved” or “twice as powerful,” but hardly anyone falls for that spin anymore, because few of these claims hold economic value for the buyer. If generic detergent gets my clothes clean, I will buy generic detergent.

  In industry after industry, profit margins are under siege…which also puts salaries and opportunities under pressure. Even if you know how to differentiate your career and your unique value, that alone won’t be enough if the perspective of your employer is drifting lower and lower.

  This is a complicated subject, but once you understand that generic thinking may be undermining not only your career, but also your company’s future, you can begin to think differently. Remember my words above...

  You have to be different in a way that offers economic value to others.

  Show Empathy When Others Are in Distress...

  You’ve heard this old saying before: give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime . You may even be nodding your head in agreement right now. Sorry, though— this saying is all wrong.

  When a person is starving, that’s not the time to fill their head with knowledge. The right thing to do is to first give the person a fish, banishing their hunger—and, only then, teach them to fish.

  Far too often, people ignore this commonsense first step. They see someone who is struggling, and rush to offer wisdom. “Let me tell you what I’d do in your position,” a well-meaning individual might offer.

  This rush to share your knowledge does everyone a disservice. It won’t help the person you are trying to help; and it will waste your skill, expertise, and effort.

  So pause first. Consider the other person’s state of mind.