FirstName LastName
B.A., B.Sc., B.Com

A degree in three disciplines gave ZERO advantage to the person referred above. It was more of a liability than an asset.

Why?

While it appeared “cool” at first, it added no strategic value to anyone he was serving.

I was definitely puzzled a bit about this person but forgot about it after a while.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I get to witness a similar phenomena. It may not to an extreme like the above example but somewhere close. I have met people who have taken courses that makes no sense, spent a few hundred thousand dollars on an MBA program that they have leveraged very little or simply painted their entire home by hand because they wanted to show that they can do it.

That brings to the core question:

How do you know what to learn next?

The rest of the article provides an approach to find an answer for the above plus a few actionable tips.

Let’s get right to the core of it. Learning is not limited to what you do explicitly to become proficient on a certain topic. Every single day you are learning as you work through your projects. So “learning” encompasses both what you do explicitly and what projects you are engaged with.

It is always about the balance between increasing current leverage with “relevant” future capacity

Wayne Gretzky said it right – “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” It is not just relevant to the game but to all of our careers.

Ideally, your skill sets should be such that you need to stretch a “little bit” to get the better and faster results (compared to the majority of the available options). The reason for the need to “stretch a little bit” is mainly because that is where the growth is. This simply means that you need to pick projects that are one or two notches harder than before every single time.  The second reason for this is that alternatively you will be bored to death by doing repetitive work.  Most people get this part quite well.

The other aspect to “learning and working” is that both of them should lead to increasing your capacity to deliver stellar performance in the future. This is not easy because it requires deep thinking and reflection on what kind of skills will be required to deliver stellar performance in the future. This requires taking risks as you are probably not a “futurist” to predict how the world around you will evolve. Without the skills of a futurist, the alternate option would be to over-prepare with additional skills as backup. If you are not doing this right, sooner than later, you will face the Hemingway’s classic “Gradually.. Then Suddenly” surprise.

You can never go wrong with the fundamentals

Change is happening at a breathtaking speed but there are skills that are fundamental and an investment in them will never go wrong. A partial list of these skills is listed below:

(A detailed explanation of each is outside of the scope of this article)

• How to build and maintain meaningful relationships (Download Lasting Relationships eBook)
• How to tell a great story (Read: How to weave a story around your startup)
• How to build your brand (Download Personal Branding for Technology Professionals)
• How to craft a powerful narrative (Read: How to CRAFT a conversation that moves the needle)
• Learn to distinguish yourself (Download: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself)
• Creativity – you can never get enough of it (eg: How to design business cards that make you think)
• How to read a non-fiction book (blog post)
• How to check your ego at the door (Take the 3-minute Ego Test)
• Being prepare for Act 2 ( blog post )
• Learning to disagree gracefully (blog post)
• Learning to identify and grow your strengths (Read: 7 Ways to Identify Your Strengths)
• Mastering the fundamentals of leverage (Course: The Art of Leverage – Request an invitation)
• Being Likeable (A chapter in Beyond Code – free download)

There are a lot more skills to add to the list. Unfortunately, not all of these highly-valuable skills are not taught in school. You learn them as you go because your work requires you to OR you can consciously choose to identify a set of them and pursue their mastery.

Watch the right progress metric

There are so many metrics (money being the most common one) to track and you can get carried away. But if you are learning right, you will notice one thing very clearly if you are learning the right things is:

It will cost you less to get the same or better results (and to contribute more) as compared to what it costed you last year.

This metric will account for the change in the marketplace. This metric becomes a better indicator as you age. And, the best part is – the opposite is true as well. If you are not learning the right things, you will notice that

It will cost you more to get the same or better results (and to contribute more) as compared to what it costed you last year.

Since it’s very personal, only YOU can track this metric in the right way.

Get the right mentors NOW

In a recent radio show,  Srini Saripalli asked me a closing question – “If you were to live your life all over again, what would you change?”. My answer was simple – “Nothing much as I am happy with my life so far. If I HAD to pick one, it would be that I met all my mentors a few years before I met them.”

I miss many of these wonderful people who shaped my life. In fact, I miss them in my past.

[ Related reading: Creating the ultimate lasting impression]

The right mentors at the right time can create magic for you. In your ongoing conversations with these mentors you WILL know how to decide what to learn next.

If you need reasons to work with mentors, here are ten of them.

Getting it done while you are not “working”

This is some combination of a mindset and a skill. If you are investing in the right skills and shaping your mindset right, sooner than later, you will start getting things done while you are not “working.” For the world, you ARE working but for you, it’s play. It stopped “being work” the moment you started losing track of time when you are engaged in that work.

Both parts are important:

Part 1: Getting things done (meaning you need to be producing meaningful results)

Part 2: While you are not working (you should enjoy the work so much that you lose track of time)

If Part 1 is missing, there is a slight chance that you are confusing work and entertainment.

What gets challenging is for you to identify what you need to learn so that you can be in “flow” in the future. Your gut will tell you what those skills are – you just need the confidence to trust that gut.

The Ideal Combination

There are set of skills that will provide the ultimate combination: helping you produce better results in the short-term AND providing you ”future capacity” to gain unfair competitive advantage.

For example – one lifelong skill that will fall into the above-mentioned category is “presentation skills.” Learn this and your current projects can be packaged and presented well. Since it takes years to master the skill, it will provide you “future capacity” to gain unfair competitive advantage. For someone else to gain competitive advantage in this area, they have to PAY the price over the years. There is NOBODY who can learn such skills overnight. The earlier you start, the greater your advantage.

A Better YOU…

Ultimately, it boils down to one final question – does learning this skill make you a better YOU – not just for your sake but for the sake of the world around you.  If your heart signs off on this litmus test, go for it!

Calmness without competence won’t help much because it might just send a message that they are not serious about their life or work or both

Competence without calmness might might signal hubris or over-confidence or in some cases plain uncertainty

One of the keys to gain unfair competitive advantage is to practice being calm and one of the keys to being calm is to not be on a quest for gaining unfair competitive advantage.

Faking calmness seems easy but it only works in the short-term.

Staying calm is easy in theory but it takes years of practice to get there (more on this later in this article)

Faking competence seems easy but it only works in the short-term.

Staying competent on any topic requires a lifelong investment in yourself in addition to having great mentors and a supportive network in that space. And, in addition, you need to be working on projects related to that topic so that you get the real-world skills. Reading a book on a topic rarely gives you the complete education to stay competent and current on the topic.

A combination of competence and calmness is also not automatic and it’s something you have to “work” to build.

The combination of competence and calmness happens internally first and is witnessed by others rather than the other way around. It’s an inside-out approach. This is not something that you will fake it till you make it.

How do you develop this combination?

There is no shortcut to develop this combination but here is an approach that few of us are taking. It is still a work-in-progress but early results are encouraging:

1. Select the Skills:

Pick one or two skills where you need to develop competence. Yes, you and I know that there is a good chance that you are competent in MANY skills but DEPTH requires choice (to pick a few skills) and sacrifice (to push other skills to the sidelines as “also ran”s)

2. Select the Market:

Find out who needs the benefit of these skills to move the needle on their projects. It seems hard at first because those people who needs the benefit of these skills may not be aware of you or your ability to help them. But this keeps getting easier as time progresses as you build social proof. Ideally, tribal knowledge in your circles should treat you as the default go-to-person for your knowledge of these skills.

3. Take Action that Matters:

Lend your skills (need not be for free but surely at a discounted rate at first) and move the needle. This step is important as the more you do it, the more you will be on the path to develop calmness. You lose your calmness generally when you don’t have a sense of control on the situation. It is impossible for you to get that sense of control in any NEW situation UNLESS you have faced MANY such situations in the past. This is when your “background of obviousness” is so rich that you become comfortable with the uncomfortable – not 100% but enough to keep you calm.

[ Related reading: How to Stay Calm ]

4. Build your Support Network in Parallel:

In parallel, go and find the mentors and other people you need to network within the space and start amplifying work that matters from these people. You don’t need to reach out to them or “friend” them. You WILL be discovered sooner than later if you amplification that you bring to the table is reasonably big.

My Example: Amplification Choreography

For me personally, one of the skills I decided to focus on can be summed up as Amplification Choreography. It is to take a concept, idea, product or service and choreograph its amplification creatively and within the constraints imposed by the situation. Constraints increase the difficulty on one end but on the other end, constraints are what brings out the best of our creativity. Via Foresight Plus, I get to meet and work with really smart people on their ideas. Whatever form or shape they bring their ideas, in general they are looking at one and only one thing – to amplify what they have. Amplification Choreography provides a reasonably satisfactory answer to them. It is a true win-win as the more we help people via amplification choreography, the better I and my team become in that skill. Needless to say, this is also an area where I build my own network as it directly positively impacts all the projects (both for-profit and non-profit) projects that I am involved with.

A quick non-profit example is here:  How to Design a Touching Thank You Card

Does the above make sense?

Probably not.

Now, how about making such a case for Google Glass?

Watch this video where Sergey Brin makes a case starting at 2:45
[ Note: I respect Sergey Brin for all the awesome work so these comments are only based on a particular storytelling incident ]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sergey explains that people keep looking at their smartphones while having conversations and it’s distracting and that’s one of the reasons behind the Google Glass project. You see, with Google Glass they don’t have to look down and get distracted.

Really?

Yes, you can get distracted without even looking somewhere else.

Making a case for the sake of making one won’t cut it, unfortunately.

Before I go any further, watch these two videos that will set the context for this article. While there is a chance that this may be staged, the point is to focus on the lesson on not on winning a debate that will lead to nothing.

Video #1: Pumpcast News, Part 1 – The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

This is a short video (5 minutes) where Jack Rafferty surprises a cool couple (husband is a bartender and wife is a fitness instructor)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video #2: Pumpcast News, Part 2 – Happy Couple on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

Jay Leno invites the happy couple from the Pumpcast News to play with the band

Click here to view the embedded video.

While the entire thing was pure fun and entertainment, there are a couple of lessons to be learned from this. The key ones for me are:

1. Are you ready to do something special?

Opportunities don’t come packaged and delivered on a set date. They come abruptly and out of the blue. You rarely can capitalize on them unless you are ready for them – meaning you should have invested enough in yourself such that a moment’s notice is all that’s required to bloom. As we both know, it’s never the lack of opportunities but the lack of preparedness to capitalize on opportunities that are passing by.

2. Being comfortable with who you are

Yes, it is difficult to be like someone else but it’s harder to be just YOU. It was very clear that the couple were super comfortable with who they were. What you need to be careful is not to confuse “being comfortable with who you are” with “complacence.” The world where we live requires you to be moving fast just to stay where you are.

3. Small wins are cool (sometimes they lead to bigger wins)

Notice how this all started – Jack Rafferty offers the husband free tank of gas if he sings. That “small win” was more than enough for the husband (and later his wife) to sing his heart out. Of course, the big win was to get on the Jay Leno show but that was not the reason for both the husband and wife to participate in the “game”

Have a great week ahead.

I was advising a young student who is getting into his first real job and wanted to keep everything plain and simple. The outcome was the following six simple growth equations.

1+1 = ?

This is where you are working without a purpose. You don’t know what you want in life so you are confused whether you are growing or sliding sideways. The anxiety to “get things right” robs a lot of your growth.

1+1 = -1

This is where you make dumb career decisions such as focusing on personal gain at the expense of relationships. You take advantage of people forgetting that you don’t lose a person but a relationship network. This is a no-win strategy.

1+1 = 0

This is where you work to ensure that you keep your job for the next year and nothing else. Since you are doing “just enough” you escape from the axe but since you are not “growing” sooner than later, disaster strikes.

1+1 = 1

This is where you are adding one year of experience with another year of experience. In other words, you don’t bring the power of your first experience to the second year to enrich the second year experience and so on. This problem is way more prevalent than what

1 + 1 = 2

As simple as it sounds just getting here will put you in the “above average” category as you are building up your experience every year. In a short-span of ten years, you will be miles ahead of your peers if you keep up the attitude and approach towards learning.

1+ 1 = 11

This is where the magic of leverage comes. In this case, not only are you learning but you are also “giving” so that others around you are improving on the equation. You ensure that nobody around you is below the 1+1=2 equation. So, sooner than later, you would have built a small army of people who have vested interest in helping you succeed big time. Knowingly or unknowingly you are filling in the reservoir filled with the power of reciprocation.

Bonus Equation: 1+1 = !

This is where you take your experience from work AND mesh it with uncommon investment in yourself to create something remarkable. Remember that all said and done you have limited control on what your experience will be in the first few years of your career but you have unlimited control on how much you can invest in yourself. Taking advantage of that is where all that magic is.

Please take a moment to share this with anyone in your network who is starting their career.

Can one more Thank You make a big difference?

The answer is Yes – just ask any person who received that Thank You from you.

Why is it “one more” Thank You?

The focus of this article is on that “one more.” The concept is so simple but one that has changed my life in a very profound way. Let’s get to the heart of it right away.

[ Note: Printing this page might make this easy to do this exercise but it not required ]

Think about your most recent “win” – be it in your personal or professional field. A win could be anything that has moved the needle in a significant fashion in your life – something that has made a real difference to you and/or your loved ones.

Now, list all the people who have played a part in that win. Remember to list even the ones that have played a minor part too (this is VERY important)

What was the win? ( one or two lines about your win)

——————————————————————————————————

——————————————————————————————————-

Apart from you who helped you get this win? (write the name and what contribution they made)

1. ___________________________________________________

2. ___________________________________________________

3. ___________________________________________________

4. ___________________________________________________

5. ___________________________________________________

6. ___________________________________________________

7. ___________________________________________________

8. ___________________________________________________

9. ___________________________________________________

10. ___________________________________________________

Add more lines as necessary.

Take as much time as required but the goal is to list EVERYONE that helped you in any small way to get you this win.

When you think you are done with the list, take another 2 minutes to think of anyone else that you should add. You have to get EVERYONE that played a part – however big or small that part was.

Now, comes the part

Go through the list and check off all the people that you have explicitly thanked (even a simple thank you email is fine) so far. If you have checked off EVERYONE in the list, hat’s off to you. In most cases, I have seen that more than 50% of the people in the list are not checked off – meaning people have not taken the time to thank those that got them a win that mattered to them.

Your mission if you choose to accept it is to send one more thank you note for someone that’s not checked off in the list. You need to do it TODAY. Then, if you want bonus points, keep sending one more thank you note before the end of the week until you check off EVERYONE in the list.

I won’t say why this will work but please try and find it out for yourself. Whoever has done this exercise have actually come back and thanked me for this. if you care to share, please add your comment explaining your own experience.

All the best!

To read next: The Price of Not Thanking Enough.

For those that are more interested:

Why does this work?

In general, people over-estimate what they brought to the table for a win AND underestimate what others and luck brought to the table.

An exercise like the above for every significant win will bring out a lot that you might have taken for granted. Do this exercise regularly and soon you will stop taking anything for granted. Plus, you will start appreciating all the blessings around you.

Update: My friend Dilip Saraf‘s addition as a comment at LinkedIn is worth noting:

Great post, Rajesh, as always! What I find is that merely a Thank you is often not enough. What most people miss in their message is being specific, personal, and timely. For example, to you I’d write: “Thanks, Raj, for this reminder! I went through your list and just realized a number of people I had ignored in expressing my gratitude to them when what they did selflessly made a BIG difference in MY life! Now I feel complete. You are a good friend to have!”

Thanks, Dilip for the insightful addition.

Mini Saga #128 – Readiness

It was Dave’s first camping trip with his three friends. Tired after hiking all day, they wanted to sleep early in their tent. Seeing three pairs of earplugs in Dave’s hand, Sam asked him, “Why do you want three pairs of ear plugs?” Dave smiled, “They are not for me.”

Readiness involves caring for yourself AND caring for others involved.

Note:

1. A mini saga is a story told in exactly 50 words. Not 49 or 51 but exactly 50.

2. You can download a photographic manifesto of Mini Sagas at ChangeThis. Here is the link – Mini Sagas: Bite-sized Wisdom for Life and Business (PDF, 2.9MB).

3. For a complete list of Mini Sagas, please see the entire list here or at Squidoo

More importantly, have you seen some smart people do stupid things AND are completely oblivious to that fact?

If you are curious to know why this happens, please read the outcome of my mini-research project on this topic.

[ Note: Replace "You" with any smart person in question ]

Over the last few weeks, I asked a bunch of people about stupid things that they have done and what was the cause of that. I got dozens of interesting answers. Here is the partial list:

•  Didn’t seem stupid when I did it.
• Error in judgment, should not have happened
• I do stupid things all the time. The smart things I do more than compensate for these stupid things
• Well, time will tell if it was really stupid. The world will see
• I am a risk taker unlike others
• Mistakes happen to everyone. I am a human after all
• I am not alone in this, Am I?
• I move fast in comparison to most others and when you are that way, you slip and fall sometimes
• I don’t know what happened
• It is silly, I know. I just move on…
• Ah… those were the days
• Well, you live and learn

You are I are not evergreen heroes who will never do stupid things. If you recently did something stupid, it will not be the first time you did something like that nor it will be the last time. Unless, you did something so stupid that you reached a point of no return, this is not a real problem. You normally recover quickly and stay safe until your next act of stupidity.

The problem is when you are oblivious to your stupidity – if you don’t realize that you are doing something stupid, it is not easy to recover because you won’t make an attempt to do anything else. The telltale sign of that situation is that you shun accountability AND move the blame to someone (e.g. Your Boss, your spouse) or something (e.g. Changes in law, luck) very quickly.

Why does this happen?

Here is what happens in many cases. It starts long before this stupid act.

1. It starts with defying normal boundaries in the wrong direction

You test the boundaries by breaching them a little beyond normal limits. A trivial example: if everyone comes to office at 9am and it’s OK to be late by up to an hour, you will come to the office at 10.30am. You get away with it because you are smart and you make up for that lack of discipline with your super duper skills.

2. You give repeated deviations a positive twist

You continue to break the normal boundaries and rather than catching yourself as a repeat offender, you give them a positive twist with justifications that others can’t easily refute (e.g: out of the box thinking, creative people always are different etc.)

3. You start believing your own story

Giving a positive twist was a way of getting away with your “deviant” actions. The real problems start when you start truly believing that you are not at fault. Others around you are polite to say anything else and if nobody is making a ruckus about your “deviant” actions, then they are not that “abnormal” – so they are OK.

4. You increase the deviations and repeat steps 1 to 3

The problem with repeated deviations is that they become “normal” routine in your mind. The world notices the deviations but won’t speak much and in your early stages of fast-growth career, these things won’t matter much.

5. You forget to notice that your accomplishments are not commensurate with your smartness

This is an important point because if your accomplishments are commensurate with your smartness (in a manner that others can vouch for) then you can continue to get away with your “deviant” actions because valuable accomplishments in most cases will trump noticeable aberrations. For a deeper discussion about this topic, please read: The Inflection Point around 40.

6. You create a mess with your macro deviation:

Then, it happens – the stupid act. It had to happen one day or the other but that happens to be today. Because of the way you kept deviating incrementally from your “normal boundaries” you didn’t realize that your deviations are quite BIG in comparison to the “normal boundaries” as defined by the world. Over a period of time, collective and progressive micro deviations have resulted in a macro deviation that is easily noticeable.

You are oblivious to this because you don’t think about deviations that much. Your actions are well within your “normal boundaries” as you kept stretching those boundaries over a long period of time with minor breaches. This time someone out there will also point this out to you as it is clear by now that your accomplishments don’t match with your smartness for them to keep giving you a long leash. The party had to end one day.

What can you do?

This is a case where prevention is better than cure.

Have someone else on your side (mentor, confidant) ALWAYS. That someone MUST be competent AND candid with you. That someone must be one who can call you out on your micro-deviations along the way. It is also important that you trust that someone without judging them or justifying your actions. If you are in the fantasy land for too long, you will pay a price sooner than later.

I carry a short stack of notecards in my bag just to make notes for myself. Many of these are things that I would have said in a conversation or reflected upon post a conversation.

As I was browsing through my stack from the last few weeks, I found nine points to ponder. Here they are (in no particular order)

1. Attach yourself to the effort; detach yourself from the outcome

Outcomes are always uncertain because EVERYTHING has to go right to reach a certain outcome (Note for any digital electronics geeks: Think AND gates) so really anything can happen. A key component that has to go right is YOUR effort. If there is ONE thing that you have maximum control of – it is your effort. So, attach yourself to the effort and detach yourself from the outcome.

2. Empathize with the actions of others as much as possible; Always OWN your reactions to the actions of others.

A surefire recipe for disaster is to base your happiness on other people’s actions. People act the way they do for a variety of reasons and it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to understand their logic completely. You can empathize with them as much as possible but for sure should OWN your reactions because your life is made up of a series of such reactions.

Note: This does not mean that you should be super-stoic and take whatever is thrown at you. Your reaction to utter nonsense can be to disengage gracefully.

3. Learn from your successes and your failures. Most importantly, learn from the failures and successes of others.

Life is too short for you to learn from your own successes and failures. You may pay dearly if you choose that path. In some cases, sheer stupidity may take you to a point of no return. However, there is no dearth of lessons you can learn from the successes and failures of others if you are OPEN to it. It is a far cheaper option compared to the former.

4. Be educated. Be entertained. But NEVER confuse one for the other

There is a time for entertainment and there is a time for education. The problem comes when you confuse one for the other. Imagine you are watching a few TED videos because it is cool to say that you watched a few cool TED videos. It is pure entertainment until you create something meaningful out of the action of watching these videos. You will be fooling yourself (and feeling good about it) if you confuse entertainment for education.

5. Be an opportunist. Capitalize on EVERY single opportunity to GIVE.

Being an opportunist is wrong unless you are constantly looking for “opportunities to GIVE.” There may be a moral reason (it’s the right thing to do) reason for giving but honestly, there is a practical reason to do so too. Giving is what invokes probably the most powerful force on earth – the power of reciprocation.

If anything invest in yourself to increase your capacity to drop the costs of giving meaningful gifts – this alone will supercharge your power and influence.

6. If you think it’s hard to fill in someone’s shoes, try just being yourself

Granted, it’s hard to fill in someone’s shoes especially if they are big

What’s harder is just to be yourself – to capitalize on your unique strengths to make a meaningful impact.

Why?

There are no ready templates to be YOU. You need to be creative, invent what works for you and keep innovating to create impact with your unique strengths. You need to do this while fighting the temptation to just follow.

7. Making money is good. Making meaning is better. Making meaning while making meaning is the best!

On one end there is money for the sake of money. On the other end, there is meaning. Whatever be your view about money, I think you will agree that with money it gets easier to create an impact that’s far reaching. So, rather than shying away from making money, go towards making both – meaning + money.

Note: There are always exceptions of people with no money making a massive impact. For every one such person, there will be ten who can make that kind of impact with money

8. You can never change what happened but you can ALWAYS change how you look at what happened.

It is clear to us all that past cannot be changed but nobody can stop you and me from reframing our past to make us more powerful. Just like in #2, you have the power to choose your reaction or the frame with which you see your past. You can make it such that it’s dis-empowering or you can make it empowering – your choice!

9. Not having an opportunity to sing is a small problem compared to not having a song to sing.

It’s actually easy to complain that your circumstances have not provided you an opportunity to sing.

Think about it

Who gets to sing?

In general, the “one or two of the best of the available options.”

Your task is really cut out – your goal is to be one of the “best available among available options.” This means only one thing – relentless investment in yourself AND having that sing to sing that others want to listen.

Have a great week ahead!

Like many other mini-research projects, I embarked on a journey to find out the answer. Here is what I found – some reasons may be obvious but may be not all of them. You be the judge

Here are the reasons (in no particular order)

[ Note: "You" is used in the article for simplicity and not to imply that you face these issues ]

1. You may NOT be communicating well enough: People buy-in to the story they are told. If the story is not communicated well, there is nothing to buy-in. Granted, the vision is clear in your head but you have not taken the time to craft a story to make it clear to the audience. Without a good story, all bets are off.

2. Buy-in requires future mindshare commitment: Buying-in to a concept is not a spot activity but a promise for future investment of time, energy and mindshare. Some smart people don’t realize that they are not just asking for “Yes” now but a “Yes” now AND a future commitment for a long period of time. Not everyone is ready to make that commitment. Solution? Make the ask smaller and more digestible and one can always expand the scope later.

3. They didn’t address the “belief filter” right: One step before the buy-in happens, the audience needs to believe the story. Every person passes new ideas through their own “belief filters”. One person’s belief filter may include a simple smell-test of future potential and they should be fine to move to the next stage. On the other extreme, their “belief filter” may include an elaborate investigation of proof points on your claims. There is a spectrum out there on how people view the world. What needs to be presented on one end of the spectrum is different from what needs to be presented on the other end of the spectrum. Many people tell the SAME story to everyone and are baffled that only a few people “get it.”

4. Your story involves no participation from the listener: Your story is good for you but how is it good for the listener. If you want your listener to buy-in, then you better tell a story that involves them or else it’s a lost cause. It is too much work for the listener to figure that part out on their own.

5. Your proposition is flawed and they are too polite to point it out: You present an idea and they nod their head in agreement. At least that’s what you think but in their mind the proposition is flawed AND they just don’t want to bother or have the energy to argue and fix it. It is low-cost for them to just indicate agreement but move on to other things rather than debate about it. If you mistake their politeness to be a form of support, you are mistaken. Confronting reality may give you short-term pain but it’s better than long-term misery.

6. They don’t see a positive possibility for their future as a result of buying-in: As we covered before, buying-in to an idea is a serious investment of resources now and in the future. It makes sense to invest those resources if they see a positive possibility for their future post buying-in. They need to see this in comparison to the already available alternate opportunities as the opportunity you presented will COMPETE with alternate available options. It is your job to establish the value and communicate it.

7. They have to buy-in to YOU first! This is probably the biggest and most overlooked reason. People work with people and your listeners are no different. If you have not given enough reasons to buy-in to YOU first, there is no point in presenting an opportunity as that won’t even be considered

In summary, your smartness helps but does not give you a passport to get buy-in to your ideas. You need to both – work on yourself PLUS work on your ideas to make them compelling.

What next?

Please read: How to Sell Your Ideas