597: Daniel Pink - The Art of Selling, How To Persuade Others, and The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

0:00Self-deprecation without confidence is self-flagellation. If you're not truly confident, don't be self-deprecating. You've been researching and writing about persuasion, speeches all over the world, big-time TED Talk, masterclass. We're all in sales now, and I wanted to make a very robust case for why that was true. We spend too much of our time trying to change people's minds, and not enough time making it easy for them to act. Wow, that really connects. When do you appeal to people's heads and when do you appeal to people's hearts? Bosses tend to group people into two categories. People who make my life easier, people who make my life harder.

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2:22Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text HAWK to 66866. Now, on tonight's featured leader, one of my favorites, the great Daniel Pink is back. The number one New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including To Sell is Human and Drive. These are two of the books that I gift the most to others.

3:05His books have sold millions of copies around the world, been translated into 42 languages, and won all types of awards. He also gave one of the most viewed TED Talks of all time called The Puzzle of Motivation. During our conversation, we discussed the three keys to delivering an excellent speech, why we should study stand-up comedy. Dan shares what he would change and update from his books to sell as human and drive. Then he talks about multiple examples for how you can persuade others in a genuine way. Then we closed by talking about how to become an idea machine. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Dan Pink.

3:54So you've been researching and writing about persuasion and motivation, books and speeches all over the world, big time TED talk, masterclass, all this stuff. And I'm curious from the beginning stages of your career, you're working as a speech writer for Al Gore. What did you learn from that experience about motivation and persuasion? Yeah, that's an interesting question. So I did sort of took a roundabout path to what I've been doing for the last 20 years and that I went to law school thinking I was going to get a job in politics and policy. And I ended up in that kind of a half-assed way as a speechwriter.

4:32And then having done that for a while, I realized that I didn't want to work in politics the rest of my life. And what I really wanted to do was write my own stuff. And so in the years that I was a speechwriter, I'm not sure I learned that much about motivation. I think that, well, maybe there's something personal motivation because one of the things about speechwriting is that you're frequently on deadline and you don't have the luxury to wait till you're inspired. And so the motivation is doing the job well, whether you're in the mood or not. And actually, that's a pretty important lesson in writing or in any other kind of endeavor.

5:09On the persuasion side, Yeah, there are probably a lot of lessons. It sounds simple minded, but one of them is the as obvious as this sounds is the importance of clarity and simplicity, clarity and simplicity, clarity and simplicity. um the there's there's so many speeches that i've heard from politicians so forth that really don't have a point that wander around uh that aren't uh concise and clear and um and and focused and you know and i think that working as a speech writer for several years made me perhaps a little bit more conscious of audience um and i say that and i i probably i might think about audience a little bit more as a writer writer than someone who came to this job without having that experience, without having the experience for years, writing something, seeing someone else deliver it, and being in the room to understand that worked, that didn't work, that made sense to people, that confused them.

6:15So having that sense of audience, I think, was really, really helpful for me in doing what I'm doing now. So there are, Dan, a lot of leaders listening who do QBRs, quarterly business reviews. They do town hall meetings with their entire companies. They're giving speeches. And I've been in those rooms. I'm sure you've probably sat in on some of those rooms, or maybe they've spoken before you at a company event where you're the keynote. And a lot of people, because they're focused on other parts of their job, they're not very good at that. They're not good presentation givers. They're not good speakers.

6:49Sometimes they're not prepared enough because they're doing other things. So knowing what you know about speech writing and delivering speeches and persuading people and moving them, at a high level, what are some of the general pieces of advice you'd give to that senior VP who's preparing for the town hall, who wants to move people in a positive direction, set the vision, and leave them leaving the room inspired to go do the work? Yeah. Well, I think there are a few things there, right one of them is again fairly straightforward fairly simple-minded it goes back at some level to stephen covey from 30 years ago which is to begin with the end in mind um that when you when you give a speech you typically unlike writing necessarily unlike writing prose writing for people to read on their own it's it's a different it's a different beast altogether and so when you give a speech, ultimately, you really want people to do something at the end.

7:49And doing something is not saying, hey, that guy's smart or that woman is smart. But especially in the role that you're describing, Brian, you want people to do something at the end of it. And going in with that at the outset, that is having that goal drive what you say. And what that does is that gives you a clarity that you wouldn't have if you just simply meander your way into it that's one thing that i would say the second thing you alluded to it is preparation don't i'm just i'm not a fan of winging it now i think one of the things that you've seen one of the things you see a little bit of lately is especially with like like ted talks is that they're so shellacked they're so prepared they're so rehearsed that you just want to gag and so that's you know i think you can go you can go too far on that but preparing preparing preparing preparing preparing is really essential and i guess the third thing would be to uh sound like yourself don't try to sound like somebody else.

9:09So, you know, you, you have these, you have a lot of like tech CEOs who go into these presentations and they try to be, you know, Steve jobs and they end up being like a poor man, Steve jobs that they're in their effort to mirror Steve jobs. They just, they only demonstrate how far away from being Steve jobs they are. And so what you want to do is you just want to be the best version of yourself. Don't try to sound like anybody else. And so I think those three things can be really helpful in any leader in giving any kind of speech. And this could be somebody who's giving some opening remarks at their local PTA.

9:51This could be somebody who is at their church or their synagogue or their mosque, you know, trying to get volunteers. You know, it doesn't necessarily, it's not anything that only a certain exalted people can do. It's for anybody who wants to give a speech in front of a large group, in front of, you know, more than two or three people and wants to get them to do something, wants to get them to act. Be authentic, sound like yourself, be you, be prepared and have a goal. Begin with the end in mind so people know what they are to do. Yeah, I don't even I think the word authentic, it sort of bugs me.

10:26I think the word authentic has been dumbed down. What you have now is you have a lot of manufactured authenticity. You have a lot of people calculating how they can sound authentic. My view is essentially is to sound is to sound like yourself. And one of the and don't try to sound like anybody else. Just sound like yourself. And I guess going back to your first question, it is something else that I've learned from writing speeches earlier in my life is that you develop a little bit, you develop an ear for how people really talk. And one of the things that I would do, we happen to be talking in the midst of a very politically newsworthy summer where there are all kinds of electoral developments.

11:15And one of the things that I've been thinking about, if I were in that world, which I left nearly 30, 25 years ago, if I were there today, and I was sort of parachuted in to help some of these people write speeches, the first thing that I would do would be to have a conversation with them and record it and listen to how they talk. Not how they give a speech, how they talk. and I think that's really, really important. It's really, I mean, and it's, and to me, unfortunately, the word authentic triggers for me right now a BS, my BS. You see this authenticity as being kind of fake. It's actually the opposite.

11:59Yeah, I think that authenticity has been hijacked by people who aren't authentic, unfortunately. Just talk, sound like you. Anyway, not to go too, yeah, not to go too far. Sound like yourself. But you know what, it's actually, I feel the same about writing, Dan, a little bit where there are some writers I'm really, like I had Morgan Housel on recently, Psychology of Money, his book's Crushed It. I'm sure you like all that stuff. Yeah, you have more of a great guy, yeah. He writes like he talks, and when you talk to him, he sounds like Morgan Housel. And you're like, this is just him, and he's amazing, he's very smart, he's great.

12:31But I think that's part of the allure, and it's very similar to it is to you. I was just rewatching your TED talk from 2009. You open with, it feels like you're standing. It feels like you're hanging out with your friends. You tell a joke about going to law school and being in the bottom 10 % and not practicing law. But I am going to present you with a case. And so it sounded this unique combination of self-deprecating humor, but an honest, real joke mixed with confidence in who you are as a person. And that's why it's got 30 plus million views and is one of the most watched TED Talks of all time.

13:10I'm curious what you were thinking before that moment. Like, how did you prepare for that? How were you like the right level of preparedness to go out and absolutely destroy that stage in England that day? Oh, God, I barely even remember that. Really? Now, remember, I want to say one thing. I'll answer that question. I'll think about it. But you mentioned self-deprecation. Self-deprecation without confidence is self-flagellation So don't forget that That is, if you're not truly confident Don't be self-deprecating Because it is going to And also, self-deprecation has You know, it's easier for me As a straight white man born in America To be self-deprecating I think it's a little dicier If the audience is looking at you And somehow assuming that you're less competent Than you would be Than a guy who looks like me would be So anyway, sorry So forget about self-deprecation for now.

14:05What was I thinking? I don't know. I think my hunch is that I was thinking two things. Number one is that I was talking about some ideas on a book that I hadn't finished writing yet. So that's difficult. And the second thing was that it's trying to keep a set of fairly complicated ideas within the boundaries of however long that was, 12, 13 minutes, whatever that was. And so I think that's what I was working on. The other aspect of it was that, and this is coaching they gave me, when I try to do a talk in a room in a particular place, I try to localize it and make it and have it meet the moment.

14:51and what they were encouraging me to do is not that but instead do something that was a little bit more evergreen because they were saying it's going to live on video far longer than it's going to live in the room i think that was good advice at the time but for a lot of what we do for a lot of what people do when they're out speaking to groups or they're leading i think it's really important to meet the moment so that the what you say on tuesday at 3 30 in the afternoon in a november is not exactly the same as you would say maybe thematically the same but not exactly the same as you would say at nine in the morning on a thursday in march so it's not candid It meets the moment.

15:38This is one reason why, you know, when I go out and do some, you know, in the years where I've gone out and done a lot of speaking engagements, all the folks, all the meeting planners and organizers, they want the slides and everything like four weeks in advance. And I have to say to them, it's like, it's four weeks from now. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do in four weeks because I don't know what the world's going to be like in four weeks. And so I think meeting the moment is just, again, trying to derive a lesson from that question, which is I think it's important to meet the moment, meet the people and meet the moment.

16:20That's why I think it's good for communicators to study stand-up comedians because they seem, I've seen some of the best ones, their sets, now they're working on stuff, but the best ones actually try to spend time in the current location and meet that moment of maybe creating a 10-minute bit on the fly out of something they happened to see when they were walking through that small town in the midwest and when they are able to do that you see documentaries or behind the scenes you're like wow that really connects with an audience when you can meet the moment in that sense so stand-up comics are a great example of this i think that they are a great example for i think for writers for any kind of of talker for any kind of performer in part because the really good ones intimately relentlessly workshop their material to the syllable sometimes and i find that really inspiring the other thing about stand-up comics that are worth studying in a way that writers of prose like people like me who write books and articles and things like that, they get an immediate audience response, which is revealing.

17:33And the audience is usually right. The audience isn't always right, but the audience is, I should say, often right. You got to take what the audience says seriously. You can't simply dismiss it. So now, again, going back to your very first question, this is also something I learned in speech writing. so one of the things that we would do this is back especially when i was working on let's say that i was i was working for i mean back when i was working for al gore and maybe he was you know they were running for re-election he and clinton were running for re-elect this is a long time ago uh running for re-election and he would go to um i don't know sheboygan wisconsin and what we would do is we would do some due diligence on Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

18:24So he could say something like, you know, I knew it was going to be a good morning when I woke up and smelled the aroma of coffee at McGillicuddy's Cafe, you know, or it's like, I may be boring, but I'm not as boring as insert name of someone only people in Sheboygan would know. And we used to call those how the hells because we want the audience to say, how the hell did he know that? I love it. I told you before we started recording, the book that I've recently over the last probably year or so been gifting the most is The Cell is Human. I've actually said it on this podcast probably quite a bit when anybody brings it up because my first 12 years of my career, I legitimately had a quota, carried it back, had to hit it every week, month, quarter, year.

19:19You know how it goes. And To Sell as Human is great for a sales professional, no doubt. It's a great book for that. However, it's great for people in general because we are all in sales every day. And sometimes the people who say, I would never work in sales. I hate sales. I hate salespeople. I'm not in sales. I will never do that. And I said, you actually do it every day. And that's the person I will hand your book to. And it's been too long since you and I have talked about selling. Now that time has passed since that's come out, I am curious about some of your ideas when it comes to updates, things you've learned from speaking about it on the road, people you've interacted with, maybe things you've changed your mind on.

19:57I'm curious now to get an update on to sell as human and how you feel about that and the impact it's legitimately had on the world. Well, I don't know what kind of impact it's had on the world, but one of the things that I think was interesting in the reaction to that, because in that book, which is like eight or nine years old now, what I did is I made an argument at the outset, as you said, about how we're all in sales now. And that if you look at the guts of what white collar workers do, a huge portion of it is convincing, cajoling, persuading, and all that. And I wanted to make a very robust case for why that was true.

20:34And what I found was almost no resistance to that case, truly. I mean, it's almost zero resistance, which surprised me, because I was sort of, in a sort of lawyerly way, geared up to sort of meet people who would argue with me and who might say, no, you're wrong, you don't know what you're talking about. And there was very little of it. There was more than anything else was, okay, yeah, I get it. What do I do? And so I guess if I learn anything, if I had to do that over again, I would have the book, right? That book is balanced, maybe one third argument and two thirds, you know, news you can use.

21:15I think what I would do if I had it to do over again was closer to, you know, 85, 10%, 10 to 15 % argument and 85 to 90 % news you can use because I got so little resistance to that. As for what I have, as for other things that I've learned out there, I think one of the among the things that have stuck, seem to have stuck really well among the most important lessons there is the importance of making it easy for people to do things. That is, if you want someone to do something, we spend too much of our time trying to change people's minds and not enough time making it easy for them to act. and and i think that's a really powerful i think that's a really powerful lesson on everything for design for leadership for marketing for anything um you know and again it goes to one of what we were talking about before which is beginning at the with the end in mind what do you want people to do and before you start doing what i do as an instinctively as a writer is start marshalling the arguments in favor of it the better thing to do at the outset is to say I want them to do this.

22:30What can I do to make it as easy as possible for that person to do what I want them to do? And I think that's one of the really enduring lessons of it. I think going back to Bob Cialdini's work, I don't think we have a good enough understanding of the importance of what he calls social proof, which is that when people are deciding what to do in anything, they don't only look into themselves, they look around to others for cues on how to do that. And so if you bring social proof into the room, this is Cialdini, one of Cialdini's big points. If you bring social proof into the room, you can be more persuasive.

23:17I think one of the interesting things is when do you appeal to people's heads and when do you appeal to people's hearts? And there's some nuance in that, but it isn't always one or the other. One isn't better than the other. There's another important principle also comes out of Cialdini and some other more contemporary work about that when people make that you have to trigger in some ways that compared to what question in any kind of persuasive encounter people don't make decisions in absolute terms they make decisions in relative terms so they need a point of comparison they need something to you know they say you know compared compared to what so uh so i think there are all kinds of really interesting lessons there for, going back to some language, you see a little bit of it in speech writing happen naturally is the importance of processing fluency in getting messages to stick.

24:22So processing fluency, does it go down easily? And so there are things that will increase processing fluency, rhymes, increase processing fluency, lists, increase processing fluency, repetition increases processing fluency repetition increases processing fluency repetition increases processing fluency so that there are various things that make it easy when it goes down easier it the message is better understood and more likely to adhere to lots of i didn't think there was lots of really interesting i think there's so much interesting stuff in there the i mean i'm biased obviously because i wrote the book but i think there's a lot of good stuff Like I said, dude, there's no reason.

25:02You could pick any book in the world. It's been, again, the one I've been giving away and recommending the most. The people of all ages, definitely people newer in their career because they didn't say they don't want to work in sales and they're going to work in sales. So I'm going to drill down on a few of those, though. It's funny, the social proof one. It's like if an event planner books Dan Pink, they're going to look really good to their boss and to the event people because you've created so much social proof and you're so good at speaking. I don't know how much speaking you're doing now, but I would bet there are large portions of your career where you've literally lived out the social proof.

25:36Because if someone can say, well, we booked Dan Pink, then they're like, oh, this planner is awesome then. They're great because you created so much. But you could use it in sales too. So if you say you're selling computer systems and you're like, oh, well, yeah, no, it's proven pretty popular. Accenture just bought the system. Yeah, people put the logos on their own website. right here exactly precisely it's a better it's a better more vivid explanation of that how about the making it making it easy for people to do things because this one i 100 like because you have an example or a thought on how someone let's say whether they're trying to actually sell something or just convince somebody or persuade making it easy for someone else to be like yeah yeah okay that makes sense let's do that there's all kinds of practical examples rooted in the research on this and they're fascinating.

26:28So one of them would be, there's an old study showing, let's say you want students at a university to donate food to the hungry. So it's a food drive at a university and you want them to donate food to the hungry. The best thing you can do is tell the students what kind of food you want, give them a map showing where the receptacles are and giving them a follow-up phone call. Telling them, tugging their heartstrings about the importance of hunger or anything like that, not that great. Think about voting. There's some good research on voting. You can tell people, oh, it's important to, you know, you can make the argument for why it's important to live out America's democratic creed and to exercise your rights of self-expression, or you can work with people to develop a plan for what they're going to do on voting day.

27:22What time are you going to vote? How are you going to get there? Okay. Oh, okay. Do you need a ride there? Oh, you need a ride there. Okay. That's it. So we're not making arguments about civic responsibility. We're making it easy for them to do things. Another really great example having to do with choice architecture is a famous example of 401ks where people would go into a company, they'd be offered a 401k with a match and they wouldn't sign up for it. And so you had all this exhortation about the importance of saving for retirement, of why you needed to prepare for the future, of why you should put money away.

28:00And still it didn't really work. And what worked was changing the default. So people were opted in. you could still opt out, but basically we'll check the box for you. You know, it went up from something, my numbers aren't quite right. They're directionally right. Something from like 60 something percent of people contributing to the 401k to 90 something people contributing from the 401k, not because of what we think of as persuasion of, hey, here's a catchy jingle. Here's an argument. Here's, you know, a compelling chart, but essentially saying, we'll check the box for you. So I think that is an incredibly important lesson.

28:40And it goes back again, as I said, to working backwards. What outcome do you want? And thinking about it in those terms. Make it easy. The heads and hearts. So how do you know when to appeal to what? What's an example of the head or heart and or both? How does that work? It depends. So there is, as a rough guide, I think there's an argument for using your heart, is using sort of emotion and empathy when you're persuading down and using a more hard-headed approach when you're persuading up based on some research here. So one of the things that you see is, and it really has to do with the effect of feelings of power on people's perspective taking.

29:32In general, the more powerful somebody feels, the worse their perspective taking abilities are. And perspective taking is essential in any kind of persuasive effort because I need to understand where you're coming from so I can find common ground. I'm not trying to coerce you to do something. I don't have any coercive power. What I want to do is say, where are you coming from? What are you thinking? What are you feeling? What are your interests? What are your emotions? And what do you want? And can I find common ground with you? And we know that power can distort those perspective taking ability.

30:04So what you see now is that, for instance, in general, high status people tend to be pretty bad perspective takers in general, and low status people tend to be very good perspective takers because they don't have the power, they don't have the resources. And so in general, this is a very, rough rule of thumb is that if you are a boss persuading down, you should sort of lower your feelings of power in order to increase the acuity of your perspective taking. So if I were to try to persuade you to do something and I were your boss, instead of kind of saying, Ryan, I'm your boss, is actually lower your perspective taking, you know, at certain times, lower your perspective perspective taking and say, hmm, Ryan doesn't seem like he wants to do this.

30:49You know, I really need Ryan. Ryan is really good. We need him on our team. What can I do better to make this in Ryan's interest? And you can lower your perspective, you can lower your feelings of power, find that common ground. You don't do this all the time in every single thing, but it is a technique. When you're persuading up, I think there's a strong argument for focusing on interests over emotions. my view is that bosses tend to group people into two categories, people who make my life easier, people who make my life harder. And you want to be in that first category. That's advice I give to my own kids when they have bosses.