by Adams, Scott
Throughout my corporate years I used a serious-sounding tone of voice whenever I was in “professional” mode. I was literally acting, but it didn’t feel disingenuous because the business world is a lot like theater. Everyone tries to get into character for the job they have. When I was a bank teller, I was obsequious to customers. When I managed people, I spoke in a way that I thought sounded authoritarian and reasonable. In meetings with higher-ups I lowered my tone and spoke with the sort of self-assurance that only the insane come by honestly. I’m reasonably sure that my fake voice, with its low notes and artificial confidence, made me appear more capable than I was, and that wasn’t difficult because I was largely incompetent at every corporate job I held. Despite my obvious lack of ability, nearly every boss I had—and there were many—identified me as a future corporate executive.
Keep in mind that I was poorly dressed, five feet eight inches tall, and prematurely balding in my twenties. I certainly didn’t look like CEO material, and while I’d like to think my interior brilliance sometimes shined through, I doubt that was the case. I think my fake professional voice and body language were at least half of the reason I was seen as having management potential.
I also noticed during my corporate years that women who had never met me in person flirted like crazy on the phone whenever I used my fake professional voice. I assume the same voice qualities that indicate potential for leadership also influence potential mates.7 My fake confidence, along with my fake low voice that screamed “testosterone,” worked like catnip on the ladies. Unfortunately the flirting stopped as soon as anyone saw me in person. That’s why I assume my fake voice was the secret sauce.
At least one voice expert believes that my fake voice, with its artificially low tone, was a cause of my later voice problems with spasmodic dysphonia. I don’t know that to be true, but it’s worth mentioning.
This book isn’t designed to give you voice lessons, but I’ll include a few common methods for developing your best “success voice.”
For starters, it helps to learn to breathe from the bottom of your lungs, not in the upper chest area. Proper breathing has lots of other benefits, including stress reduction, increased and more efficient metabolism, and better physical stamina, so it’s worth learning.8 If you put your hand on your belly button and breathe correctly, that’s the only part of your torso that should be rising and falling. If your upper chest is expanding when you breathe normally, you’re doing it wrong. When you get your breathing right, your words will come out sounding more confident.
Next, you need to pick a tone. Some voice experts will tell you that your best and most natural tone is probably higher than the way you normally speak. Many people have a natural tendency to speak lower to other humans than they might to a pet, for example. On some level, we all understand that lower voices confer some weight to what we say.
The downside of a lower voice is that it’s difficult to hear words that match background noise. In my fake-voice era no one could hear me above crowd noises. It was hard to order a drink or make conversation in any noisy situation. I’ve since learned to penetrate background noise by using a higher-pitched voice. It’s great for communicating, but I don’t expect to get any CEO offers. It’s a real trade-off.
Another common speaking trick is to hum the first part of the “Happy Birthday” song and then speak in your normal voice right after. You’ll notice your posthumming voice is strangely smooth and perfect. The effect won’t last, but it gives you a target voice that you know you can get to with practice.
Posture is also important for good speech. If you don’t sit up straight or stand straight, your vocal equipment will be pinched, and it will sound that way even if you don’t notice it yourself.
When you’re trying to convey a fake sense of confidence—which is often handy—you need to tell yourself you’re acting. Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try.
You want to get rid of the hemming and hawing, the “ums” and “uhs,” and anything that disrupts your flow. That takes practice. The quickest fix is simply to substitute silence where you once had “ums” and “uhs.” It will feel uncomfortable at first, but you’ll get used to it. I also like to form full sentences in my head before I start them, at least whenever that’s an option. And when I know a topic is likely to come up in the near future, I practice entire conversations in my head until I can speak my thoughts fluently.
My list of combinable skills isn’t meant to be comprehensive. And every person is in a unique situation. For you, maybe the right skills are photography and botany. You’ll recognize them when you see them now that your mind is tuned to think in that way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Pattern Recognition
One of my systems involves continually looking for patterns in life. Recently I noticed that the high-school volleyball games I attended in my role as stepdad were almost always won by the team that reached seventeen first, even though the winning score is twenty-five and you have to win by two. It’s common for the lead to change often during a volleyball match, and the team that first reaches seventeen might fall behind a few more times before winning, which makes the pattern extra strange.
If the volleyball pattern is real—and that is far from settled—I would assume there is a normal explanation for it. Perhaps seventeen just feels so close to twenty-five that the team that is behind feels deflated and the team that is ahead feels extra confident. Perhaps at the high-school level the coach who is behind feels the need to give the bench players some time before the end of the game. Whatever the reason, the pattern seems to hold. Perhaps it will change before this book goes to print. I’ll keep tracking it.
In amateur tennis one of the oddest patterns is called the 5–2 curse. In tennis, the first player to win six games, by at least two, wins the set, so you would expect the player who first reaches five to win most of the time. What happens instead, far more often than common sense would predict, is that the weekend player who is ahead feels he can coast, while the player who is behind feels he can play relaxed because the outcome seems predictable. That sort of thinking leads to a psychological advantage for the player who is behind, who often closes the gap to 5–3 without much effort. Now the player who is ahead starts to think the lead isn’t so secure. Perhaps he feels that the momentum has shifted. It only takes a few good shots from the opponent in the next game to reinforce that impression. The player who first gets to five games against a similarly skilled amateur will still win most of the time, but not nearly as often as you would predict. If you are an amateur player with only two games compared with your opponent’s five, it helps a great deal to know you have something like a 40 percent chance of prevailing. Knowing the pattern changes how you think about your chances, and that change in thinking can then improve your performance.
Successful People
Countless self-help and business books have tried to find the patterns of behavior that make people successful. If we can find out what successful people do, so the thinking goes, we can imitate them and become successful ourselves.
Stephen Covey was probably the most famous of the success-by-pattern gurus. His book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People sold more than twenty-five million copies. I think Covey described a good set of patterns for people to follow, but they are only a start. I’ll summarize his seven habits and suggest you read his books if you want more.
Be proactive.
Begin with the end in mind. (Imagine a good outcome.)
Put first things first. (Set priorities.)
Think win-win. (Don’t be greedy.)
Seek first to understand then be understood.
Synergize. (Use teamwork.)
Sharpen the saw. (Keep learning.)
The holy grail of civilization is to someday make all people successful by discovering the formula used by successful people and making it available to all. As far as I know, Stephen Covey’s seven habits d
idn’t budge the poverty rate, so there are probably deeper patterns at play.
Here’s my own list of the important patterns for success that I’ve noticed over the years. This is purely anecdotal. I exclude the ones that are 100 percent genetic.
Lack of fear of embarrassment
Education (the right kind)
Exercise
A lack of fear of embarrassment is what allows one to be proactive. It’s what makes a person take on challenges that others write off as too risky. It’s what makes you take the first step before you know what the second step is. I’m not a fan of physical risks, but if you can’t handle the risk of embarrassment, rejection, and failure, you need to learn how, and studies suggest that is indeed a learnable skill.1
As far as physical bravery goes, I don’t know anything about it. But I’m glad some people have it so they can shoot the other people who have it before those people shoot me. I recommend that you improve your psychological bravery but say no to anything that has a strong chance of killing you.
Then there’s education. Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It is nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do, despite what you read in Dilbert comics. And the ones who are unhappy with work can change jobs fairly easily. Generally speaking, the people who have the right kind of education have almost no risk of unemployment.
Education and psychological bravery are somewhat interchangeable. If you don’t have much of one, you can compensate with a lot of the other. When you see a successful person who lacks a college education, you’re usually looking at someone with an unusual lack of fear.
The next pattern I’ve noticed is exercise. Good health is a baseline requirement for success. But I’m not talking about the obvious fact that sick people can’t get much done. I’m talking about the extra energy and vitality that good health brings. I might be getting the correlation wrong, and perhaps whatever motivates a person to succeed also motivates that person to maintain an exercise schedule. But I think it works both ways. I believe exercise makes people smarter, psychologically braver, more creative, more energetic, and more influential. In an online article about twenty habits of successful people, the second item on the list is exercise five to seven days a week.2 Other studies back this notion—physical fitness and daily exercise are correlated with success in business and in life.3
There’s one more pattern I see in successful people: They treat success as a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it. If you’ve read this far, you’re one of those people. You’re reading this book because it offers a nonzero chance of telling you something that might be helpful.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Humor
If you see humor as an optional form of entertainment, you’re missing some of its biggest benefits: People who enjoy humor are simply more attractive than people who don’t. It’s human nature to want to spend time with people who can appreciate a good laugh or, better yet, cause one.
Take it from me when I say a good sense of humor can compensate for a lot of other shortcomings in one’s looks and personality. Humor makes average-looking people look cute and uninteresting people seem entertaining. Studies show that a good sense of humor even makes you seem smarter.1 One study showed that women seek out men with a better sense of humor because it can signal that they may be “amusing, kind, understanding, dependable.”2
Best of all, and central to the theme of this book, humor raises your energy, and that can reverberate into everything you do at school, at work, or in your personal life. The boost of energy will even make you more willing to exercise, and that will raise your overall energy even more.
Humor also transports your mind away from your daily troubles. Humor puts life in perspective and sometimes helps you laugh at even the worst of your problems.
Because humor directly influences your energy levels, it touches every part of your life that requires concentration and willpower. And for the most part, humor is free and easily accessible. The Internet is full of humor. If you don’t have funny friends, find some. If you’re a reader, choose funny books. If you go to movies, choose the funny ones first and avoid anything you know will end on a sad note.
Sometimes you want to dispense a bit of your own humor. That comes naturally to some people but not most. In my experience, most people think they have a sense of humor, and to some extent that’s true. But not all senses of humor are created equal. So I thought it would be useful to include some humor tips for everyday life.
In two of my other books I talk a bit about my formula for writing humor, so I won’t repeat that here. If you’re interested in creating written humor, check out The Joy of Work, Dilbert 2.0, and Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! In those books I talk about the tricks and mechanics of writing humor.
You don’t have to be the joke teller in the group in order to demonstrate your sense of humor. You can be the one who steers the conversation to fun topics that are ripe for others to add humor. Every party needs a straight person. You’ll appear fun and funny by association.
When it comes to in-person humor, effort counts a lot. When people see you trying to be funny, it frees them to try it themselves. So even if your own efforts at humor fall short, you might be freeing the pent-up humor in others. People need permission to be funny in social or business settings because there’s always a risk that comes with humor. You will do people a big favor when you remove some of that risk by going first. For in-person humor, quality isn’t as important as you might think. Your attitude and effort count for a lot.
Obviously you want to avoid the label of “tries too hard” when it comes to humor. That’s generally a problem only if you laugh too vigorously at your own jokes or other people’s jokes. So-called dry humor is the best strategy if you plan to go for quantity.
I say quality is overrated when it comes to humor, but you do need to achieve a minimum threshold. And that usually means avoiding a handful of traps. If you avoid the traps, you’re golden. Allow me to map the traps for you. I’ll start with a summary then explain.
Overcomplaining is never funny.
Don’t overdo the self-deprecation.
Don’t mock people.
Avoid puns and wordplay.
Some people—and I was one of them—believe that humorous complaints about the little aggravations of life constitute humor, and sometimes that is the case. The problem comes when you start doing too much gripe-based humor. One funny observation about a problem in your life can be funny, but five is just complaining, no matter how witty you think you are. Funny complaints can wear people out.
Self-deprecating humor is usually the safest type, but here again you don’t want to overshoot the target. One self-deprecating comment is a generous and even confident form of humor. You have to be at least a bit self-assured to mock yourself in front of others. But if you do it too often, you can transform in the eyes of others from a confident jokester to a Chihuahua.
Don’t make fun of people too often. If that starts to look like a pattern, people will assume you’re talking behind their backs as well.
Beware of puns and other clever wordplay. The only people who appreciate puns are the people who can do them. It’s like water polo; it’s hard to appreciate the sport unless you’ve played it. If you don’t know for sure that you’re dealing with hard-core pun lovers, avoid puns completely. Otherwise you’re just begging for a courtesy snort or an eye roll.
Humor also makes you more creative, at least in the short run.3 I think it has something to do with the fact that humor is a violation of straight-line thinking. Humor temporarily shuts down the commonsense program in your moist robot brain and boots the random idea generator. At least it feels that way to me, figuratively speaking. Perhaps all that is happening is that humor makes one feel energized and relaxed at the same time and that is bound to help creativity.
Tailor Your Humor
One of the m
ost reliable, albeit sexist, generalizations I’ve noticed over the years is that women tend to laugh at stories involving bad things happening to people, such as an attractive girl taking a face-plant into a mud puddle on the way to the prom. Guys like that sort of humor too, but my observation is that men are far more likely to enjoy traditional jokelike stories that are more engineered than organic.
Know your audience. Some people believe that bathroom humor and references to genitalia are the only valid forms of humor. Others look for cleverness. You won’t win anyone over to your preferred brand of humor. It’s better to adapt to what others want to hear, assuming your goal is to be liked.
People generally broadcast their sense of humor from the moment you meet. You can observe what people laugh at, what sort of stories they tell, and whether they have an edgy personality. If I hear someone say “Gosh” or “Holy mackerel,” I leave out the profanity from my stories. If I say something mildly clever and get a reaction, I know I can turn the cleverness spigot on full. It’s a good idea to test an approach before committing.
Jim’s Colonoscopy Story
My friend Jim tells a funny story about his colonoscopy appointment. Per his doctor’s instructions, he purged himself the day before the appointment by drinking a powerful laxative and spending the better part of the day in the bathroom. As Jim tells it, he was “squeaky clean” in his backdoor region by the time he visited the doctor.
At this point in the story you can see the structure developing. As the listener, you already know something bad is going to happen to Jim, and it will somehow involve his anal area. That’s the sign of a good story. Now back to it …