Always Eat Left Handed: 15 Surprisingly Simple Secrets of Success (4 page)

Coaches talk about that in terms of controlling your own destiny.  Winning teams earn that control.  If they win, they get in.  The importance of controlling your own destiny is hard to overstate.  Yet whether or not you have the chance to do it has less to do with your performance in that final game.  Instead it has everything to do with your performance and choices leading up to that final moment.

In other words, you have usually
earned
your situation before you ever move into that last competition.

How To Control Your Own Destiny

Chances are that you probably aren’t a professional athlete.  Still, the importance of controlling your own destiny can make a huge difference in moments far more important than selecting a good seat for a flight.  Here are a few tips for ways that you can get better at controlling your own destiny.

1. Choose to lead instead of follow.
   It is no secret that controlling your own destiny from the back seat is tough.  Sometimes you have the role you have, and there’s no way around it.  Other times, however, there is an element of choice.  You can choose to lead an initiative or a project – or remain in the background.  When you get those moments of opportunity, take them.  There is never going to be a better way to control your own destiny than actually to be in charge of something.
   
2. Pay attention to symbolic choices.
   Every day we make symbolic choices that affect the way people see us and our own emotional and physical wellbeing.  If you work at a desk, do you turn your computer so you face outwards or inwards?  Do you include your personal Twitter handle on your business card or not?  Will you attend an event you have been invited to, or skip it to do something else?  We all have moments when we feel powerless to change the world that spins around us.  The truth is, sometimes the big choices do get made for you.  But the more tiny yet symbolic choices you can see around you, the more likely you are to make them deliberately.  And that’s ultimately what controlling your own destiny is really about.
   
3. Walk Away.
    Several years ago there was  collection of stories about the inhumane working conditions in multiple factories in China that were building iPhones and iPads.  The articles described long working hours, cramped living quarters and demanding bosses.  What struck me, though, was a moment in one of the articles where a worker talked about the overwhelming sense of hopelessness that came from working in an assembly line job that would never change.  It was the repetition and lack of control that was really killing him.  Most of us don’t live with a situation like that … but sometimes it might feel like it.  If that lasts for a long time, you have an option that solitary desperate factory worker probably doesn’t.  You can walk away and start something new.
   

Chapter 7 - Use A Sharpie

Lesson - Simplify Everything

In 1713, the King of Sweden figured out something it would take the people of the United States nearly 300 years longer to discover.

At a time when the world’s dominant superpower was little more than a group of colonies squatting on Native American lands, King Charles XII made a declaration that would change the way the Swedish government would operate for hundreds of years afterwards. 

His Majesty the King requires that the Royal Chancellery in all written documents endeavor to write in clear, plain Swedish and not to use, as far as possible, foreign words.

Today more than half of all Swedish government authorities are involved in plain language projects.  In contrast, the United States finally in 2010 managed to pass the Plain Writing Act which required all federal government agencies to use plain language in every document and train workers on how to use plain language.

But why is speaking plainly so hard?  And now that we’re on the topic, why is simplicity so hard too? 

Sharpies And Post-Its

One of the most prominent people trying to answer this question is a fellow named Dan Roam.  While he may not be a household name outside the business world, his best selling book
Back of the Napkin
is required reading for all my students at Georgetown University.  In it, he proposes that the toughest challenges you will face can be simplified and overcome if you just learn how to draw them onto paper (or a white board!).

He travels around the world teaching workshops on the topic of how to solve problems with pictures and has trained thousands of professionals on how to go from an “I can’t draw” mentality, to picking up a Sharpie and starting to sketch. 

One of his biggest lessons, though, is one that I uncovered quite by accident years before reading his book while I was working on the storyboard for a big pitch. 

I was trying desperately to simplify our argument and decided to write a sequence of arguments on some small Post-it notes.  The only pen I had close by was a Sharpie – so I started to write.  I quickly realized that the combination of a thick Sharpie and limited space on a Post-it meant I could only fit a few words on each page. 

All of a sudden, the way I described vague ideas mattered.  I had to pick the right words, because I had no room for rambling.  It forced me to simplify and suddenly I realized the truth …

Using a Sharpie changes everything.

The Simplicity Advantage

The power of simplicity, it turns out, isn’t just limited to how you might describe words or ideas.  Some of the most successful products and companies of our modern era owe at least a part of their success to an unwavering focus on simplicity. 

Apple.  The Flip Camera.  Twitter.  Each are brands or products that have simplicity in some way built into their experiences.  They stand out for being simpler than their competitors.  And in an increasingly complex world – that may turn out to be the ultimate competitive advantage.

How To Simplify Everything

If you have ever tried to explain a complex topic to someone completely unfamiliar with it, you’ll already know the unfortunate truth about simplicity … it can be a surprisingly tough skill to master.  While there is an element of natural ability that helps, anyone can learn some techniques to help in any situation you may encounter.  Here are three:

1. Beware the curse of knowledge.
    Often the toughest things to explain are the ones we know most intimately.  In
   Made To Stick
   , authors Chip and Dan Heath called this the curse of knowledge.  They note, “We start to forget what it is like to
   not
   know what we know.  Simplifying, we fear, can devolve into oversimplifying.”  We all may suffer from this at one point or another.  While you can’t remove your knowledge, you
   can
   start to overcome it by becoming more conscious of the things that you might take for granted.  One great way to do that is to force yourself to explain what you know to more people.  The more you practice, and the more understanding people get from it, and the more you can grow your ability to simplify.
   
2. Draw instead of talking.
     We already talked about the power of drawing to understand concepts, but research studies have shown that there are plenty of people who learn better from visuals than they do from words as well.  This means that drawing may not only help you to visualize a solution to a complex problem … it may also be the
   only
   way that some people will hear and understand your message. 
   
3. Use plain language.
     Each of us as we go through school learns some very bad habits about writing.  Don’t use the first person.  Maintain formality.  But chief among bad learned habits comes from your high school English class, which most probably taught you to use bigger words to demonstrate your vocabulary.  Having a vocabulary is great for high school English, or poetry, or even reading.  It’s probably great for winning Scrabble too.  When it comes to interactions at the workplace, though, your vocabulary doesn’t matter.  Instead, it’s your ability to use plain (but not condescending) language to describe ideas that will stand out.  After all, no one ever complained about getting an email that was too short.
   

Author’s Note:
  Parts of this section were excerpted (and edited) from my second book 
Likeonomics
, which focused on the principle of Simplicity in Chapter 7.

Chapter 8 - Keep It Emotional

Lesson - Tell Better Stories

There is a reason we remember movies.

For thousands of years, history was told and recorded through stories.  And for all that time, we learned to respond to stories.  We learned to remember them.  It is only a modern belief that bullet points and logical descriptions will be enough to compel people to buy or believe in something.

A host of best selling books over the past several years, from
Sway
to
Predictably Irrational
all point to the fundamental truth about people – that we all make decisions based on emotions far more than logic.  In his groundbreaking book
The Political Brain
, noted psychologist Drew Westen proved the same conclusion powers who we choose to vote for as well. 

Stories are emotional.

Some of the most admired leaders in the world, from Nelson Mandela to Bill Clinton are gifted storytellers.  They use stories to create emotional connections.  When Pixar tells a story in a film, they create moments for the audience to connect with each character.  They show the vulnerabilities that cause you to empathize with the main characters, so when the character fails or succeeds - you
care
about their outcome.    

Beyond films or books, stories have the ability to bring any kind of ideas to life. They create understanding.  And when used in the right moment, they can even help you to make a lot of money too.

The $580 Million Dollar Story

In what may go down in financial history as one of the worst deals of the dying dotcom era, a company named Intermix (which owned social networking site MySpace) sold in 2005 to media magnate Rupert Murdoch.  Years later Myspace founder Richard Rosenblatt recalled that meeting with Murdoch when he pitched the company. 

Rather than focus on financials or assets, he told a story to Murdoch of why he needed to add Intermix to his already vast portfolio of media brands that was, at the time, missing an online element.  To sum up his pitch, he predicted that if Murdoch did the deal, he would be on the cover of
Wired
magazine.  He bought the vision, and signed a deal for $580 Million.

And a year later, almost to the day, Murdoch was indeed on the cover of
Wired
.*

Why People Follow Stories

Can you really tell a million dollar story and expect it to sell?  One of the most interesting truths about leaders is that the higher up you go, the more likely the person sitting across the table from you will trust something other than what you put on paper in order to inform their decision.  Despite our world of virtual connections, your pitch delivered in person for whatever you believe in still matters a lot.

Of course, you won’t always have a meeting with the CEO of a large global empire.  Maybe you never will.  But to understand the power of storytelling, you don’t need to grace the inside of a boardroom.  Just look at one of the most common behaviours in social media and you’ll see this principle in action every day.

What is the #1 item shared on Facebook consistently? Stories – from the news media or elsewhere.  It highlights one of the most important things the social psychologists who study the transmission of ideas find over and over again.  People share stories, not facts. 

Telling better stories changes everything.

How To Tell Better Stories

When it comes to being a better storyteller, the best thing you can really do is pay closer attention to the great stories all around you.  They may be in the media told through a piece of investigative journalism.  Or a new film that comes out.  Learning from professional storytellers of all types is always a great thing to do.  Aside from that, here are three other suggestions that will help you hone your storytelling skills:

1. Show don’t tell.
   It really is true that the more you can paint a picture of something, the more powerful the story could be.  When I read about the story of Costco founder James Sinegal – whose warehouse store has one of the lowest employee turnover rates in all retail – you could just say he believes in a flat style of management.  Or you could tell a story about how every day when he goes into stores around the country, he always wears his Costco nametag which say simply “Jim” – and greets employees by first name while asking them about their families.  From that story, you can easily get a sense of his management style – but the story brings it to life.   
   
2. Make it personal.
     Stories need real characters, and one of the biggest mistakes that people often make is working hard to remove all traces of humanity from what they produce.  Do you describe yourself in the third person in online profiles or  as a real person?  One of the most basic ways to bring more of the human element of storytelling back is to switch back to the first person – and to make sure that the stories you are sharing have actual characters in them.
   
3. Offer some context.
     The best stories offer a way to connect people to the narrative by giving them a way to participate.  When you can offer context behind a story, you can help someone take that story and apply it to their own situation or their own lives.  What are the emotional qualities that your story helps inspire?  That’s the key question to think about answering, and the one that can help you create more context to help your story influence others more powerfully.