To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is, you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that. —ARTHUR MILLER, Death of a Salesman (1949)

In Part One of this book, I lay out the arguments for a broad rethinking of sales as we know it. In Chapter 1, I show that the obituaries declaring the death of the salesman in today’s digital world are woefully mistaken. In the United States alone, some 1 in 9 workers still earns a living trying to get others to make a purchase. They may have traded sample cases for smartphones and are offering experiences instead of encyclopedias, but they still work in traditional sales. More startling, though, is what’s happened to the other 8 in 9. They’re in sales, too. They’re not stalking customers in a furniture showroom, but they—make that we—are engaged in what I call “non-sales selling.” We’re persuading, convincing, and influencing others to give up something they’ve got in exchange for what we’ve got. As you’ll see in the findings of a first-of-its-kind analysis of people’s activities at work, we’re devoting upward of 40 percent of our time on the job to moving others. And we consider it critical to our professional success.

But equally important, I hope you’ll see the very act of selling in a new light. Selling, I’ve grown to understand, is more urgent, more important, and, in its own sweet way, more beautiful than we realize. The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.

Norman Hall is a Fuller Brush salesman. And not just any Fuller Brush salesman. He is . . . The. Last. One.

If you’re younger than forty or never spent much time in the United States, you might not recognize the Fuller Brush Man. But if you’re an American of a certain age, you know that once you couldn’t avoid him. Brigades of salesmen, their sample cases stuffed with brushes, roamed middle-class neighborhoods, climbed the front steps, and announced, “I’m your Fuller Brush Man.” Then, offering a free vegetable scrubber known as a Handy Brush as a gift, they tried to get what quickly became known as “a foot in the door.”

And then, with the suddenness of an unexpected knock on the door, the Fuller Brush Man—the very embodiment of twentieth-century selling—practically disappeared. Think about it. Wherever in the world you live, when was the last time a salesperson with a sample case rang your doorbell? In February 2012, the Fuller Brush Company filed for reorganization under the U.S. bankruptcy law’s Chapter 11. But what surprised people most wasn’t so much that Fuller had declared bankruptcy, but that it was still around to declare anything.

After forty years, Hall has a garage full of Fuller items, but his connection to the struggling parent company is minimal. He’s on his own. In recent years, he’s seen his customers fade, his orders decline, and his profits shrink. People don’t have time for a salesman. They want to order things online. And besides, brushes? Who cares? As an accommodation to reality, Hall has cut back the time he devotes to chasing customers. He now spends only two days a week toting his leather binder through San Francisco’s retail and business district. And when he unloads his last boar bristle brush and hangs up his bow tie, he knows he won’t be replaced. “I don’t think people want to do this kind of work anymore,” he told me. Two months after Fuller’s bankruptcy announcement, Encyclopædia Britannica, which rose to prominence because of its door-to-door salesmen, shut down production of its print books. A month later, Avon—whose salesladies once pressed doorbells from Birmingham to Bangkok—fired its CEO and sought survival in the arms of a corporate suitor. These collapses seemed less startling than inevitable, the final movement in the chorus of doom that, for many years, has been forecasting selling’s demise.

Each day more than fifteen million people earn their keep by trying to convince someone else to make a purchase.7 They are real estate brokers, industrial sales representatives, and securities dealers. They sell planes to airlines, trains to city governments, and automobiles to prospective drivers at more than ten thousand dealerships across the country. Some work in posh offices with glorious views, others in dreary cubicles with Dilbert cartoons and a free calendar. But they all sell—from multimillion-dollar consulting agreements to ten-dollar magazine subscriptions and everything in between.

This study, dubbed the What Do You Do at Work? survey, was a comprehensive undertaking. Using some sophisticated research tools, we gathered data from 9,057 respondents around the world. Statisticians at Qualtrics reviewed the responses, disregarded invalid or incomplete surveys, and assessed the sample size and composition to see how well it reflected the population. Because the number of non-U.S. respondents turned out not to be large enough to draw statistically sound conclusions, I’ve limited much of the analysis to an adjusted sample of more than seven thousand adult full-time workers in the United States. The results have statistical validity similar to those of the surveys conducted by the major opinion research firms that you might read about during election seasons. (For example, Gallup’s tracking polls typically sample about 1,000 respondents.)15 Two main findings emerged: People are now spending about 40 percent of their time at work engaged in non-sales selling—persuading, influencing, and convincing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase. Across a range of professions, we are devoting roughly twenty-four minutes of every hour to moving others. People consider this aspect of their work crucial to their professional success—even in excess of the considerable amount of time they devote to it.*

top five responses, by a wide margin, were: “car salesman,” “suit,” “used-car salesman,” “man in a suit,” and our old friend, “pushy.” (The top ten also included both “car” and “used car” on their own.) The image that formed in respondents’ minds was uniformly male. The word “man” even made the top twenty-five. Very few people used the gender-neutral term “salesperson” and nobody answered “saleswoman.” Many respondents emphasized the sociable aspects of sales—with “outgoing,” “extrovert,” and “talker” all making the top twenty-five. Others settled on more metaphorical or literary images, including “shark” and “Willy Loman.” And some people still couldn’t resist offering adjectives: “slick,” “sleazy,”

Book, Edmunds, or AutoTrader.com to find out the price used Maximas are going for. And once she sees a car she likes, she can take the auto’s Vehicle Identification Number and, with a quick online search, find out whether it’s been in accidents or had major repairs. She’s not fully protected from unethical sellers, of course. But if she encounters any dirty dealing, or ends up dissatisfied, she can do more than simply gripe to a neighbor. She can tell a few hundred Facebook friends, all her Twitter followers, and the readers of her blog—some of whom may pass her story on to their own networks, undermining the seller’s ability to deceive again.

know because he told me. Then he sent me a few pages from Guinness World Records testifying to his achievement and confirmed by a major accounting firm. In one year, he sold 1,425 cars at Merollis Chevrolet in Detroit. These weren’t fleet sales either. These were one-at-a-time, belly-to-belly sales—several cars every day for an entire year. It’s a remarkable achievement. So how did he do

photograph above does it look like? The difference might seem innocuous, but the letter on your counterpart’s forehead offers a window into his mind. If the E resembles the one on the left, the person drew it so he could read it himself. If it looks likes the one on the right, he drew the E so you could read it.

Now try another test on yourself, one that doesn’t require anybody’s forehead. Imagine that you and your colleague Maria go out to a fancy restaurant that’s been recommended by Maria’s friend Ken. The experience is awful. The food stinks, the service is worse. The following day Maria sends Ken an e-mail that says only, “About the restaurant, it was marvelous, just marvelous.” How do you think Ken will interpret the comment? Will he consider the e-mail sincere or sarcastic? Think about it for a moment before reading further.

Other research demonstrates mimicry’s effectiveness. For example, a Dutch study found that waitresses who repeated diners’ orders word for word earned 70 percent more tips than those who paraphrased orders—and that customers with servers who mimicked were more satisfied with their dining experience.15 In a French study of retail salespeople, half of the store clerks were instructed to mimic the expressions and nonverbal behavior of their customers and half were not. When customers approached the salespeople for help, nearly 79 percent bought from mimickers compared with about 62 percent from non-mimickers. In addition, those who dealt with the mimickers reported “more positive evaluations of both the sales clerk and the store.”16 A Duke University experiment in which an interviewer presented what purported to be a new sport drink found that when people were subtly mimicked, they were more likely to say they would buy the drink and to predict that it would be a success.

Grant collected data from a software company that operates call centers to sell its products. He began by asking more than three hundred sales representatives to complete several personality assessments, including one that social scientists use to measure where people fall on the introversion-extraversion spectrum. This particular assessment lists statements such as “I am the life of the party” and “I am quiet around strangers” and asks participants to rate themselves on a 1-to-7 scale, with their answers resulting in a numerical measure of extraversion. Then Grant tracked the sales representatives’ revenues over the next three months.29 Perhaps not surprisingly, introverted sales reps didn’t perform as well as extraverted ones, earning an average of $120 per hour in revenue compared with $125 per hour for their more outgoing colleagues. But neither did nearly as well as a third group: the ambiverts. Ambi-whats? These are people who are neither overly extraverted nor wildly introverted.30 Go back to that 1-to-7 introversion-extraversion scale. Ambiverts sit roughly in the center. They’re not 1s or 2s, but they’re not 6s or 7s. In Grant’s study, these Goldilocks personalities—not too hot, not too cold—earned an average of nearly $155 per hour, easily besting their counterparts. In fact, the salespeople who had the highest average revenue—$208 per hour—had extraversion scores of 4.0, smack at the midpoint.

For guidance, look to Jim Collins, author of the classic Good to Great and other groundbreaking business books. He says his favorite opening question is: Where are you from? The wording allows the other person to respond in a myriad of ways. She might talk in the past tense about location (“I grew up in Berlin”), speak in present tense about her organization (“I’m from Chiba Kogyo Bank”), or approach the question from some other angle (“I live in Los Angeles, but I’m hoping to move”). This question has altered my own behavior. Because I enjoy hearing about people’s experiences at work, I often ask people: What do you do? But I’ve found that a few folks squirm at this because they don’t like their jobs or they believe that others might pass judgment. Collins’s question is friendlier and more attuned. It opens things up rather than shuts them down. And it always triggers an interesting conversation about something.

Discussion Map In your next meeting, cut through the clutter of comments with a map that can help reveal the group’s social cartography. Draw a diagram of where each person in the meeting is sitting. When the session begins, note who speaks first by marking an X next to that person’s name. Then each time someone speaks, add an X next to that name. If someone directs her comments to a particular person rather than to the whole group, draw a line from the speaker to the recipient. When the meeting is done you’ll get a visual representation of who’s talking the most, who’s sitting out, and who’s the target of people’s criticisms or blandishments. You can even do this for those increasingly ubiquitous conference calls. (In fact, it’s easier because nobody can see you!) Below is an example, which shows that the person with the initials JW talked the most, that many of the comments were directed at AB, and that SL and KC barely participated.

Find uncommon commonalities. The research of Arizona State University social psychologist Robert Cialdini, some of which I’ll discuss in Chapter 6, shows that we’re more likely to be persuaded by those whom we like. And one reason we like people is that they remind us of . . . us. Finding similarities can help you attune yourself to others and help them attune themselves to you. Here’s an exercise that works well in teams and yields some insights individuals can later deploy on their own. Assemble a group of three or four people and pose this question: What do we have in common, either with another person or with everyone? Go beyond the surface. For example, does everybody have a younger brother? Have most people visited a Disney property in the last year? Are some people soccer fanatics or opera buffs or amateur cheese makers? Set a timer for five minutes and see how many commonalities you can come up with. You might be surprised. Searching for similarities—Hey, I’ve got a dachshund, too!—may seem trivial. We dismiss such things as “small talk.” But that’s a mistake. Similarity—the genuine, not the manufactured, variety—is a key form of human connection. People are more likely to move together when they share common ground.

Devotees of Mandino, Hill, Robbins, and McKenna might shudder at allowing this shaft of doubt—questioning one’s ability?—to shine through our psychic windows. But social scientists are discovering that Bob has it right. Yes, positive self-talk is generally more effective than negative self-talk. But the most effective self-talk of all doesn’t merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questions. Three researchers—Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracín of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi—confirmed the efficacy of “interrogative self-talk” in a series of experiments they conducted in 2010. In one, they gave participants ten anagrams to solve (for example, rearranging the letters in “when” to spell “hewn”). They separated the participants into two groups, each of which was treated identically except for the one minute before they tackled their assignments. The researchers instructed the first group to ask themselves whether they would solve the puzzles—and the second group to tell themselves that they would solve the puzzles. On average, the self-questioning group solved nearly 50 percent more puzzles than the self-affirming group.

A few years ago, a team of behavioral scientists led by Shirli Kopelman of the University of Michigan tested this proposition by simulating a series of negotiations. In one experiment, they presented their participants, executives who were pursuing MBAs, with the following scenario. You’re planning a wedding. Several weeks ago, you made provisional arrangements with a catering company that had provided a good-faith estimate of $14,000 for its services. Now you are about to meet the caterer’s business manager, who’s come bearing bad news. Because of market fluctuations, the estimate has increased to $16,995. What’s more, the caterer has another client ready to take the date if you don’t sign the contract. Unbeknownst to the participants, they’d been divided into three groups. And while the “business manager” (a specially trained actor) gave each of the three groups precisely the same explanation for the changed price, and offered identical terms and conditions for the catering, she varied her emotional approach. To one group, she displayed positive emotions. She “spoke with a friendly tone, smiled often, nodded her head in agreement, and appeared cordial and inviting.” To another, she “spoke antagonistically, appeared intimidating, and was insistent.” To the final group, she “used an even and monotonic voice, displayed little emotion, and spoke in a pragmatic manner.”7 The business manager’s affect had a significant effect. Those who’d heard the positive-inflected pitch wer...

Positivity has one other important dimension when it comes to moving others. “You have to believe in the product you’re selling—and that has to show,” Hall says. Nearly every salesperson I talked to disputed the idea that some people “could sell anything”—whether they believed in it or not. That may have been true in the past, when sellers held a distinct information advantage and buyers had limited choices. But today, these salespeople told me, believing leads to a deeper understanding of your offering, which allows sellers to better match what they have with what others need. And genuine conviction can also produce emotional contagion of its own. For instance, Cory Scherer and Brad Sagarin of Northern Illinois University have found that inserting a mild profanity like “damn” into a speech increases the persuasiveness of the speech and listeners’ perception of the speaker’s intensity.11 “I believe in these products,” Hall told me. “I know damn well that when you buy one of these brushes you’re going to have it for years.”

What they found is that those with an equal—that is, 1 to 1—balance of positive and negative emotions had no higher well-being than those whose emotions were predominantly negative. Both groups generally were languishing. Even more surprising, people whose ratio was 2 to 1 positive-to-negative were also no happier than those whose negative emotions exceeded their positive ones. But once the balance between emotions hit a certain number, everything tipped. That number was 2.9013, which, for the sake of readers who don’t need the precision of the fourth decimal place, Fredrickson and Losada round up to 3. Once positive emotions outnumbered negative emotions by 3 to 1—that is, for every three instances of feeling gratitude, interest, or contentment, they experienced only one instance of anger, guilt, or embarrassment—people generally flourished. Those below that ratio usually did not.13 But Fredrickson and Losada also found that positivity had an upper limit. Too much can be as unproductive as too little. Once the ratio hit about 11 to 1, positive emotions began doing more harm than good. Beyond that balance of positive-to-negative, life becomes a festival of Panglossian cluelessness, where self-delusion suffocates self-improvement. Some negativity—what Fredrickson and Losada call “appropriate negativity”—is essential. Without it, “behavior patterns calcify.”14 Negative emotions offer us feedback on our performance, information on what’s working and what’s not, and hints abou...

Next time you’re getting ready to persuade others, reconsider how you prepare. Instead of pumping yourself up with declarations and affirmations, take a page from Bob the Builder and pose a question instead. Ask yourself: “Can I move these people?” As social scientists have discovered, interrogative self-talk is often more valuable than the declarative kind. But don’t simply leave the question hanging in the air like a lost balloon. Answer it—directly and in writing. List five specific reasons why the answer to your question is yes. These reasons will remind you of the strategies that you’ll need to be effective on the task, providing a sturdier and more substantive grounding than mere affirmation. In other words, ask and you shall receive. Monitor your positivity ratio. It’s the golden mean of well-being, the magic formula for flourishing, the secret numerical code of the satisfied: 3 to 1. What can you do to ensure your balance between positive and negative emotions reaches that elusive ratio? One way to begin is to visit Barbara Fredrickson’s website (http://positivityratio.com/). Take her “Positivity Self Test”—a twenty-question assessment you can complete in two or three minutes that will yield your current positivity ratio. Then establish a free account and track your ratio over time. (You can find background on the test in Fredrickson’s book, Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life, an excellent popular introduction to her ...

The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific, and external, the more likely you are to persist even in the face of adversity. As some positive psychologists have put it, the key is to “dispute” and “de-catastrophize” negative explanations. To dispute, confront each explanation the way a sharp lawyer would cross-examine a witness. Poke holes in its story. Question its premises. Identify internal contradictions. To de-catastrophize, ask yourself: What are the overall consequences and why are those consequences not nearly as calamitous as they seem on the surface? For more information, visit Seligman’s website (http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx), and take his Optimism Test to get a sense of your current style. And check out his classic book, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life.

Enumerate. Try actually counting the nos you get during a week. Use one of the many free counter apps available for smartphones and tally every time your efforts to move others meet with resistance. (You analog types can use a small notebook and pen, which work just as well.) By the end of the week, you might be surprised by just how many nos the world has delivered to your doorstep. However, you might be more surprised by something else: You’re still around. Even in that weeklong ocean of rejection, you’ve still managed to stay afloat. That realization can give you the will to continue and the confidence to do even better the following week.

2. Embrace. For the really big Nos, consider following the lead of Jay Goldberg, founder of the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse, an art gallery and memorabilia store in New York City. Early in his career, Goldberg was working for a prominent American political consultant, but what he really wanted was a job in Major League Baseball. So he sent letters to all twenty-six MLB teams asking for an interview, an internship, anything that would give him a chance. Twenty-five of the teams sent him rejection letters. (The New York Yankees never responded.) Goldberg kept those letters. And when he launched his own sports agency in the early 1990s, he framed each one and hung all twenty-five on his office wall. “It was my way of showing that I didn’t quit,” he says. “I got all these rejections, but kept going.” Even better, representatives of some of the teams that rejected him found themselves gazing at their earlier decision when they negotiated with Goldberg over one of his clients. “The letters gave me a little smile every time I looked at them.” These days, Goldberg has them in his office at his popular baseball retail space, reminding him daily that how you see rejection often depends on how you frame it.

Even in an age of text messages and Twitpics, rejection still often arrives in the form of a sheet of letterhead folded into a paper envelope. Nobody likes receiving rejection letters. But one way to reduce their sting, and perhaps even avoid one altogether, is to preempt the rejecter by writing the letter yourself. Say you’re interviewing for a new job or trying to raise money from an investor. Take an hour and write yourself a letter from the person you’re trying to move explaining why his answer is “Thanks, but no thanks.” List the reasons he’s turning you down. And, of course, include the irritating phrases—“After careful consideration . . . ,” “We regret to inform you . . . ,” and “We had many qualified applicants . . . ,” and so on—that are standard for this genre. When you read your letter, you’ll probably laugh. Once the rejection is in writing, its consequences can seem far less dire. More important, by articulating the reasons for turning you down, the letter might reveal soft spots in what you’re presenting, which you can then work to strengthen. And if you’re too lazy to write the letter yourself, try out the Rejection Generator Project (http://ow.ly/cQ5rl). Just choose your favored style of repudiation, type in your e-mail address, and in minutes you’ll receive a dream destroyer in your inbox. We regret to inform you that the site is designed for writers trying to sell manuscripts to publishers, but its results can apply to anyone, even you. We wish you well i...

It’s not entirely our fault. Partly because our brains evolved at a time when the future itself was perilous, we human beings are notoriously bad at wrapping our minds around far-off events. Our biases point us toward the present. So when given a choice between an immediate reward (say, $1,000 right now) and a reward we have to wait for ($1,150 in two years), we’ll often take the former even when it’s in our own interest to choose the latter.

But Hal Hershfield, a social psychologist at New York University, thought the barrier to moving people to save for retirement might be something else altogether. Working with six far-flung colleagues, he conducted a series of studies to test a different hypothesis. In one experiment, Hershfield and team had each of their participants strap on a virtual reality headset. Half the participants saw a digital representation of themselves—an avatar—for about a minute and then had a brief conversation with a digital representation of a researcher. The other half also saw an avatar of themselves through the headset. But for this group, researchers used a computer software package that ages faces to create an avatar that showed what the participant would look like at age seventy. This group gazed at the seventy-year-old version of themselves for about a minute and then had the same brief conversation with the researcher’s avatar. Afterward, the experimenters gave both groups a money allocation task. Imagine, they told the participants, that you’ve just received an unexpected $1,000. How would you allocate the money among the following four options? “Use it to buy something nice for someone special.” “Invest it in a retirement fund.” “Plan a fun and extravagant occasion.” “Put it in a checking account.” Those who saw images of their current selves (call them the “Me Now” group) directed an average of $80 into the retirement account. Those who saw images of their future selves (the “...

Finding the Right Problems to Solve In the mid-1960s, two soon-to-be-legendary University of Chicago social scientists—Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—began studying the elusive subject of creativity. For one of his first investigations, in 1964, Csikszentmihalyi went to the nearby School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recruited about three dozen fourth-year art students for an experiment. He brought them into a studio that had two large tables. On one table were twenty-seven objects, exotic and mundane, that the school often used in its drawing classes. Csikszentmihalyi asked the students to select one or more objects from the first table, arrange a still life on the second table, and produce a drawing of the result. The young artists approached their task in two distinct ways. Some examined relatively few objects, outlined their idea swiftly, and moved quickly to draw their still life. Others took their time. They handled more objects, turned them this way and that, rearranged them several times, and needed much longer to complete the drawing. As Csikszentmihalyi saw it, the first group was trying to solve a problem: How can I produce a good drawing? The second was trying to find a problem: What good drawing can I produce? Then Csikszentmihalyi conducted a mini art show of the student creations and asked a panel of art experts to evaluate the works. (These experts didn’t know what Csikszentmihalyi was studying, nor did they know the source of the art.) Whe...

Finding Your Frames Rosser Reeves, an American advertising executive from the middle of the twentieth century, has three claims to fame. First, he coined the term “unique selling proposition,” the idea that any product or service in the marketplace has to specify what differentiates it from its competitors. Second, he was among the first ad men to produce television spots for American presidential campaigns—including a 1952 ad for Dwight D. Eisenhower that included the singing refrain “I like Ike” (a forerunner of the rhyming pitch we’ll discuss in Chapter 7). Third, Reeves is the protagonist in one of the most famous stories in advertising, one that exemplifies the enduring power of clarity. The precise details of the story are somewhat in doubt. As it’s been retold over the past fifty years, the particulars often change. But the broad contours of the tale go something like this: One afternoon, Reeves and a colleague were having lunch in Central Park. On the way back to their Madison Avenue office, they encountered a man sitting in the park, begging for money. He had a cup for donations and beside it was a sign, handwritten on cardboard, that read: I AM BLIND. Unfortunately for the man, the cup contained only a few coins. His attempts to move others to donate money were coming up short. Reeves thought he knew why. He told his colleague something to the effect of: “I bet I can dramatically increase the amount of money that guy is raising simply by adding four words to his ...

People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain, the researchers argue. That uncertainty can lead people to think more deeply about the person they’re evaluating—and the more intensive processing that requires can lead to generating more and better reasons why the person is a good choice. So next time you’re selling yourself, don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.

Clarify others’ motives with two “irrational” questions. Michael Pantalon is a research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine and a leading authority on “motivational interviewing.” This technique, which originated in therapy and counseling but has since spread to other realms, seeks to spark behavior change not by coercing people, promising them rewards, or threatening them with punishments, but by tapping their inner drives. And the most effective tools for excavating people’s buried drives are questions. However, for the purposes of moving others, all questions are not created equal, Pantalon says. “I’ve learned that rational questions are ineffective for motivating resistant people. Instead I’ve found that irrational questions actually motivate people better,” he has written. So suppose your daughter is hemming and hawing, delaying and denying, and generally resisting studying for a big end-of-the-year algebra test. Using Pantalon’s approach, you wouldn’t say, “Young lady, you must study,” or “Please, please, please study for the test.” Instead, you’d ask her two questions. Question 1. “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning ‘not the least bit ready’ and 10 meaning ‘totally ready,’ how ready are you to study?” After she offers her answer, move to: Question 2. “Why didn’t you pick a lower number?” “This is the question that catches everybody off guard,” Pantalon writes in his book Instant Influence. Asking why the number isn’t lower is the catalyst. Most people who ...

Try a jolt of the unfamiliar. Clarity, we’ve learned, depends on comparison. But many times we become so rutted in our own ways that we scarcely notice what we’re doing or why we’re doing it—which can impair our ability to bring clarity to others. Sometimes, as Tufts University psychologist Sam Sommers says, “it takes the jolt of the unfamiliar to remind you just how blind you are to your regular surroundings.” So give yourself one of the following: Mini Jolt: Sit on the opposite end of the conference table at your next meeting. Travel home from work using a different route from normal. Instead of ordering what you usually do at your favorite restaurant, choose the eleventh item on the menu. Half Jolt: Spend a day immersed in an environment not typically your own. If you’re a schoolteacher, hang out at a friend’s law office. If you’re an accountant, take an afternoon and spend it with a lifeguard or park ranger. Full Jolt: Travel to another country, with a culture different from your own. You’ll likely return jolted—and clarified.

“Putting content curation into practice is part art form, part science, but mostly about daily practice,” writes Kanter. For more, see her “Content Curation Primer”: http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/.

Prioritize your questions. Choose your three most important questions. Think about why you chose them. Then edit them one more time so they are ultra-clear. Through this process you can identify a trio of powerful questions that you can ask the person on the other side of the table. And those questions can help both of you clarify where you are and where you should be going. Find more information on this at: http://www.rightquestion.org.

Read these books. Several books discuss some of the themes in this chapter—from framing arguments to finding problems to curating information. These are five of my favorites. Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. Cialdini has done more to advance the scholarship of persuasion than anyone in the world. This book is his classic. You need to read it. Seriously. Go get it now. His public workshops, which I’ve attended, are also excellent. More information at: http://www.influenceatwork.com. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers are worthy successors to Cialdini. Their first book, which came out in 2007, is a gem. It will teach you how to create messages that stick, through the principles of simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories. Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Three years after Made to Stick, the Heath brothers came out with another book that’s equally good. This one is about change—which they’ll tell you depends on the emotional elephant and the rational rider working in concert. (Trust me—it makes sense.) Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink. The opposite of clarity is murkiness. And murkiness’s close cousin is mindlessness—the state of being unaware. Wansink shows how mindlessness allows us to fall prey to hidden persuaders that make us overeat without even knowing it. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happines...

Find the one percent. A long time ago, when I was in law school, I took a course called “International Business Transactions,” taught by a professor named Harold Hongju Koh. I don’t remember much about the particulars of what we learned in class that semester—a few things about letters of credit, I think, and some stuff about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. But I’ve never forgotten something Professor Koh told our class one spring afternoon. He said that in an attempt to understand the law—or, for that matter, just about anything—the key was to focus on what he termed the “one percent.” Don’t get lost in the crabgrass of details, he urged us. Instead, think about the essence of what you’re exploring—the one percent that gives life to the other ninety-nine. Understanding that one percent, and being able to explain it to others, is the hallmark of strong minds and good attorneys. Clarity operates by the same logic. Whether you’re selling computers to a giant company or a new bedtime to your youngest child, ask yourself: “What’s the one percent?” If you can answer that question, and convey it to others, they’re likely to be moved.

At the time, many American buildings had elevators. But the mechanics of how these crude contraptions worked—a combination of ropes, pulleys, and hope—hadn’t changed much since the days of Archimedes. A thick cable pulled a platform up and down a shaft, which often worked well—unless the cable snapped, at which point the platform would crash to the ground and destroy the elevator’s contents. Otis had figured out a way around this defect. He attached a wagon spring to the platform and installed ratchet bars inside the shaft so that if the rope ever did snap, the wagon spring safety brake would activate automatically and prevent the elevator from plummeting. It was an invention with huge potential in saving money and lives, but Otis faced a skeptical and fearful public. So he rented out the main exhibit hall of what was then New York City’s largest convention center. On the floor of the hall he constructed an open elevator platform and a shaft in which the platform could rise and descend. One afternoon, he gathered convention-goers for a demonstration. He climbed onto the platform and directed an assistant to hoist the elevator to its top height, about three stories off the ground. Then, as he stood and gazed down at the crowd, Otis took an ax and slashed the rope that was suspending the elevator in midair. The audience gasped. The platform fell. But in seconds, the safety brake engaged and halted the elevator’s descent. Still alive and standing, Otis looked out at the shake...

The Six Successors to the Elevator Pitch Elisha Otis’s breakthrough had a catalytic effect on many industries, including the business of giving advice. Almost from the moment that elevators became commonplace, gurus like Dale Carnegie advised us to be ever ready with our “elevator speech.” The idea was that if you found yourself stepping into an elevator and encountering the big boss, you needed to be able to explain who you were and what you did between the time the doors closed shut and dinged back open at your floor.

1. The One-Word Pitch Pro tip: Write a fifty-word pitch. Reduce it to twenty-five words. Then to six words. One of those remaining half-dozen is almost certainly your one-word pitch. Your try: _____________________. 2. The Question Pitch Pro tip: Use this if your arguments are strong. If they’re weak, make a statement. Or better yet, find some new arguments. Your try: _____________________?

Likewise, video offers a way to combine the efficiency of electronic communication with the intimacy of seeing another person’s face and hearing her voice. One excellent technique on this front is sending short video messages by e-mail, which you can do almost effortlessly, and usually for free, on QuickTime (get the details at: http://www.quicktime.com).

Pay attention to sequence and numbers. The social science literature is full of interesting (and sometimes contradictory) findings about how sequence and numbers affect pitches. Here are two general rules that are backed by sound evidence. (I’ve included a link to the research papers themselves for those who want to dig deeper.) Go first if you’re the incumbent, last if you’re the challenger. In competitive sales presentations, where a series of sellers make their pitches one after another, the market leader is most likely to get selected if it presents first, according to Virginia Tech University researchers. But for a challenger, the best spot, by far, is to present last (http://bit.ly/NRpdp6). How widely this applies to other settings isn’t clear from the research, but in general, the middle is the place you’re most likely to get run over. Granular numbers are more credible than coarse numbers. A University of Michigan study asked participants to estimate the battery life of two GPS devices. One device claimed to have a battery life of “up to 2 hours”; the other had an identical, but more finely grained claim of “up to 120 minutes.” Participants estimated the first battery would last 89 minutes, but the second would last longer—106 minutes (http://bit.ly/yapcPA).

Take some time to find out what they think you’re saying. Recruit ten people—a combination of coworkers and friends and family. Then ask them which three words come to mind in response to one of these questions: What is my company about? What is my product or service about? What am I about? Make it clear that you’re not asking them for physical qualities (“tall, dark, and handsome”) but something deeper. Once you gather these words, look for patterns. Many people are surprised by the disconnect between what they think they’re conveying and what others are actually hearing. Knowing is the prelude to improving.

She runs a company called Performance of a Lifetime, which teaches businesspeople improvisational theater—not to secure them low-paying gigs in drafty Greenwich Village clubs, but to make them more effective in their regular jobs. And at the heart of what she teaches is listening.

Theater, for instance, has always relied on scripts. Actors have discretion to interpret material their own way, but the play tells them what to say and, in many cases, how and where to say it. America’s sales pioneers sought to replicate theater’s staged approach. One of the titans, John H. Patterson, who founded the National Cash Register Company in the late 1800s, required all of NCR’s salesmen to memorize scripts. Over time, as Harvard University business historian Walter Friedman has written, these scripts grew more detailed—morphing from a short primer called “How I Sell National Cash Registers” into a sales manual that ran nearly two hundred pages.1 The ever more detailed instructions, Friedman says, focused “not only on what salesmen should say, but also on what they were to do while saying it,” complete with NCR’s version of stage directions. Sprinkled into the company-crafted monologues were asterisks “that indicated that the salesman was supposed to point to the item he was referring to”—as in Now, sir, this register* makes the entries. The indication* of the transaction shows through this glass.*2 Patterson and his crew even produced a Book of Arguments so that if customers raised questions or concerns, its salesmen could respond with well-rehearsed lines.

Here theater offers some instruction on what comes next. For hundreds of years, except for the occasional clown or mime, most stage performances relied on actors reciting memorized lines written by someone else. Indeed, until 1968, the Lord Chamberlain’s office in the United Kingdom had to read and approve every play before it could be performed in the UK—and sent monitors to watch the plays to ensure performers were sticking to the approved text.3 But about fifty years ago, two innovators began to challenge the single-minded reliance on scripts. The first was Viola Spolin, an American who in the 1940s and 1950s developed a set of games—first for children, then for professional actors—centered on improvising characters, speeches, and scenes. In 1963, she wrote a book, Improvisation for the Theater, that encapsulated these exercises and quickly became a mainstay of theater programs. Thanks to her son, Paul Sills, who took up the family trade, her ideas eventually gave rise to the now legendary Second City troupe—whose alumni (from John Belushi to Stephen Colbert to Tina Fey) have shaped American popular entertainment with their mastery of off-script, real-time comedic performance. The second innovator was Keith Johnstone, a Brit who worked for years at London’s Royal Court Theatre. As he grew weary of conventional theater he, too, began devising his own set of looser, less traditional performance techniques. And in 1979 he wrote what many consider the seminal work in the fi...

Move from “upselling” to “upserving.” One of the most detestable words in the lexicon of sales is “upselling.” You go to the sporting goods store for basic running shoes and the salesperson tries to get you to buy the priciest pair on the shelf. You purchase a camera and the guy behind the counter presses you to buy a kit that’s no good, accessories you don’t want, and an extended warranty you don’t need. Once, when ordering something online, before I was able to check out, the site pelted me with about half a dozen add-ons in which I had no interest—and when I looked at the Web address, it read http://www.nameofthecompany.com/upsell. (I quit the transaction there—and never bought anything from that operation again.) Sadly, many traditional sales training programs still teach people to upsell. But if they were smarter, they’d banish both the concept and the word—and replace it with a far friendlier, and demonstrably more effective, alternative. Upserve. Upserving means doing more for the other person than he expects or you initially intended, taking the extra steps that transform a mundane interaction into a memorable experience. This simple move—from upselling to upserving—has the obvious advantage of being the right thing to do. But it also carries the hidden advantage of being extraordinarily effective. Anytime you’re tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you’re doing and upserve instead. Don’t try to increase what they can do for you. Elevate what you can do for them.

By reminding people of the reason for the rule and trying to trigger empathy on the part of those dog-walkers—making it purposeful—the sign-makers increased the likelihood that people would behave as the sign directed. Now your assignment: Take one of the signs you now use or see in your workplace or community and recast it so it’s more emotionally intelligent. By making it personal, or making it purposeful, you’ll make it better.