Tag Archive for: Steve Jobs

2 Books Radically Changed How I Present

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Speaking in public can make or break your career. Why? Because it won’t matter how good your idea, product or service is if you can’t get buy-in from your audience. If you don’t know how to hook an audience not only do you lose, so does everyone who might have benefitted from your great idea, unique product or new service. Don’t let that happen!

In addition, presenting to groups can do wonders for your career because people respect individuals who can confidently and succinctly present ideas in such a way that the audience says, “I get it!” With this in mind, I want to share two books that radically changed how I present.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Carmine Gallo wrote this book a decade ago and it’s just as relevant as we start 2020 as it was in 2010. As I read the book I took seven pages of typed notes! I reinforced what I was learning with “to do” notes to myself. Below are a few of my biggest take away ideas.

“Throughout this book, ask yourself, “What am I really selling?” Remember, your widget doesn’t inspire. Show me how your widget improves my life, and you’ve won me over.”
My Note: Professional success and personal happiness.

“HEADLINE What is the one big idea you want to leave with your audience? It should be short (140 characters or less), memorable, and written in the subject-verb-object sequence.”
My Note: Wouldn’t you agree; much of your professional success and personal happiness depends on getting others to say “Yes” to you?

“Create your headline, a one-sentence vision statement for your company, product, or service. The most effective headlines are concise (140 characters maximum), are specific, and offer a personal benefit.” My Note: Helping You Hear “Yes!” 

“Simple slides keep the focus where it belongs—on you, the speaker.” My Note: Exactly

Do you like what you’ve seen so far? If so, get yourself a copy of the book today.

Presentation Zen

Garr Reynolds published this book in 2012. As I read this book I kept going back to my power point slides to rework them. I moved away from the traditional word and bullet point filled slides with cheesy animation and pictures. I’m a little embarrassed to show you some before and after slides but I think by doing so you’ll clearly see the difference this book made for me. On the left are slides from a 2010 presentation and on the right is what I currently do with the same slide. Night and day difference!

     

                                                                                                                   Photo by Charles Forerunner on Unsplash

      

                                                                                                                                       Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash

What I came to realize is this: your slides support your talk. Because people think in pictures, incorporating high resolution pictures to drive home your points makes a huge, huge difference. In case you’re interested, three picture sources I’ve used over the years are Unsplash, Maxpixels, iStock. The first two are free but don’t discount iStock just because you have to pay. It’s worth it when you find the perfect picture for your presentation.

Is it scary to move away from text filled slides? A little because you can’t refer to your slides for your talking points. But, there’s also a freedom that comes with this change. First, if you miss a point nobody knows because it’s not like they can say, “Hey, he never addressed the second bullet point.”

Another freedom you’ll experience is not being tied to specific talking points. What that means is you can change your talk on the fly depending on things like audience feedback or time restrictions. For example, if a group is responding more to my personal stories I will start incorporating more by way of examples throughout the presentation. If my time was unexpectedly cut short I don’t need to say, “I’ll have to cut out some things out due to time.” Instead I might tell an audience, “Even though we have a little less time don’t worry, we’re going to cover everything you were looking forward to.” Then I adjust on the fly.

Conclusion

Let me emphasize that everything I’ve just shared is predicated on two very important things; 1) you know your material by heart and 2) you practice, practice, practice. These two things combined with your slide changes and advice from Steve Jobs will make you look like a pro next time you’re in front of an audience!

To Do This Week

Pick up copies of Presentation Zen and The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. For a tiny monetary investment, you’ll get HUGE returns once you start making the types of changes I did. Imagine going into your next big presentation and blowing people away because you’re so much better than everyone else. It might make the difference in landing that big sale, getting a new job or earning a promotion.

Brian Ahearn, CMCT®, is the Chief Influence Officer at Influence PEOPLE, LLC. An author, international trainer, coach and consultant, he’s one of only 20 people in the world personally trained by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D., the most cited living social psychologist on the planet on the science of ethical influence and persuasion.

Brian’s book, Influence PEOPLE: Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade that are Lasting and Ethical, was a top 10 selling Amazon book in several insurance categories and top 50 in sales & selling. His LinkedIn Learning courses on incorporating persuasion into sales and coaching have been viewed by more than 85,000 people around the world!

Speak Metaphorically to Influence Literally

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Speaking metaphorically can help you influence people, literally. This post was inspired by the Ted Talk Metaphorically Speaking from James Geary.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary a metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.”

He is my personal example of a metaphor. Several weeks ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress because of the impact Facebook, fake news, and user data may have played into the 2016 presidential election. As our elected officials tried to grill Zuckerberg it was apparent they had little to no knowledge of how Facebook and other social media outlets operate. In response to this fiasco I post the following on a few social media sites:

“Imagine horse owners in 1910 grilling Henry Ford about car accidents and you have a picture of what happened the other day.”

People understood exactly what I meant right away. What would the impact on the newly formed auto industry have been if congressmen who rode horses ignorantly questioned Henry Ford about the dangers of automobiles? We might still be using the horse and buggy to get to work or at least set technology back many years if not decades!

For the most part people think in pictures, not words. When I mention an elephant it’s highly unlikely you’ll think “E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T.” Instead you probably have an image in mind. For some people it’s a big African elephant with huge tusks. Others might envision the smaller Asian elephant used in some Indian Jones movies. And other people pictured a cute baby elephant like the one in the movie Dumbo. No matter how people think of an elephant, we all use pictures in our mind’s eye and would likely agree on what an elephant is, despite minor differences.

Metaphors can take a complex subject and immediately make it understandable for most people. I’d guess if you didn’t see any of the Zuckerberg – Congress interaction you got a pretty good idea of what happened based on my 22-word description.

When Steve Jobs wanted people to grasp what a computer could do for them he said the computer was like “a bicycle for the mind.” Bicycles are easy to use and make us much more efficient in getting from one place to another. Most people, upon hearing Jobs, probably thought, “Yea, I get it.”

Much of persuasion is about taking the complex, simplifying it then communicating with people in a way that gets them to say “Yes” and take action. Next time you need to share something complex, don’t talk in technical terms, think about the proper metaphor to share and you’ll increase your odds of success. In other words, speak metaphorically to influence literally.

Brian Ahearn, CMCT®, is the Chief Influence Officer at InfluencePEOPLEand Learning Director at State Auto Insurance. His Lynda.com course, Persuasive Selling, has been viewed nearly 130,000 times! Have you seen it yet? Watch it and you’ll learn how to ethically engage the psychology of persuasion throughout the sales process.

Persuading Einstein and Members of AARP

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I just finished Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Issacson. Excellent book! Issacson also wrote another very interesting biography I read a few years ago, Steve Jobs. His book on Einstein was so well written and portrayed Einstein in such a way that I was sad at the end to read about his death because I felt like I was just getting to know him.

We all have notions of Einstein from school, quotes we’ve read, movies we’ve seen and various other sources. Some of what we learned was true and much was fairy tale or at least exaggeration. What fascinated me about Einstein was how much of a rebel he was in his youth and how much he was willing to change as he got older when the facts warranted change.

As we get older, change gets harder. In some sense we’ve honed what works for us and those patterns or habits – which include speech and thought – are no exception. We think what we think and do what we do because we believe it’s the right way or the best way given the situation. Dale Carnegie understood this and that’s why one of his tips from How to Win Friends and Influence People encourages us to “show respect for the other person’s opinion and never say, ‘You’re wrong.’” Never forget, right or wrong, people have reasons for what they do.

Beyond being stereotyped as “set in their ways” is there any proof that older people are more difficult to persuade? Actually there is. A study mentioned in Robert Cialdini’s Influence Science and Practice noted, “in a follow-up study employing subjects from ages 18 to 80, we found that preference for consistency increased with the years and that, once beyond the age of 50, our subjects displayed the strongest inclination of all to remain consistent with their earlier commitments (Brown, Asher, & Cialdini, 2005).”

So, as we age it’s natural to cling tightly to closely held beliefs, attitudes, values, and ways of doing things. As most of you reading this know, it can be darn hard to change someone’s mind, especially as they grow older.

So, what’s this have to do with our friend Albert Einstein? On one hand he seemed to cling stubbornly to his view of the universe and dismissed some newer science including quantum mechanics. Without going into detail on either issue, suffice it to say that despite lots of data on quantum mechanics, there were a few important questions Einstein could not reconcile in his head. Had someone been able to help him do that he might have changed his mind and abandoned his search for a unified theory.

Being an analytic personality, Einstein would naturally cling to his beliefs because he so thoroughly thought them through. You’d need data to convince him AND you’d need to do so at the points that were of most concern to him. No scientist could convince him that we can never truly tell a particle’s exact position and momentum (a tenant of quantum mechanics). Scientists believe we can only guess at those two things, but Einstein could not reconcile that in his mind, so he held to his earlier beliefs about the universe.

On the flip side there was something very dear to Einstein’s heart that he eventually did change his mind about. He was an ardent pacifist in his younger days and believed if people would refuse military service there would never be a need for military action by nations.His view on this was shaped by the horror of World War I and the unparalleled destruction it brought on the world at that time. Through the early 1930s he held onto this view. However, with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany he began to re-examine that view. While he never embraced war, he came to believe people should enlist to defend freedom. He was also instrumental in getting President Roosevelt to start exploring nuclear technology and was against unilateral disarmament towards the end of his life because of the imbalance of power it would cause.

Why did he change? He was confronted with facts and the reality was the stakes were too high to be wrong. As you attempt to persuade people you’d do well to consider where they are in their life cycle. Teenagers and younger people have not developed the same groove older people have. It’s easier for them to experiment and quite often there is much less at stake for them in terms of loss should they make a mistake.

Brian Ahearn, CMCT®
Chief Influence Officer
influencePEOPLE 
Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.
 

The Influential Steve Jobs

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I
recently read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. It was an interesting book about one of the most influential people of the last 100 years. When I say Jobs was influential I don’t mean in the sense of necessarily using the science of influence. I say Jobs was influential because the products he developed are used by so many people around the world and have set the standard for many communication devices today. Indeed, the iPhone and iPad are the standards when it come to phones and tablet technology.

I found an interesting paradox as I was reading the book, because I enjoyed the book but found myself disliking Jobs the more I got into it. At times I caught myself thinking, “I love my iPhone but can’t stand him.” I almost felt guilty that I enjoy so much what he invented because of the path he took to get there and how he negatively impacted so many people along the way.
There were certain descriptions used of Jobs throughout the book that I found to be nonsensical, particularly his “reality distortion field.” The author and many people he quotes talk about Jobs’ vision – be it for a new product, deadline or something he simply believed – as if he had some magical power to distort reality. He was certainly a visionary and he had a strong will coupled with a bully-like approached that helped get things done. For those reading this who played sports, think of your meanest, toughest coach and multiply that person many times over and you begin to get the picture of the approach Jobs used with people. Nonetheless, if you enjoy Apple products or just biographies of people who shaped history then I encourage you to pick up Steve Jobs because it’s a fascinating look at the man who’s had so much impact on the world we live in.
The following paragraph caught my attention and is the basis for this post because it relates to the science of influence and sales:

“When it came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in product demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being ‘worth thousands and thousands of dollars,’ and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced what he hoped would seem like a low price.”

Whether or not Jobs understood he was using the science of influence, he was, by tapping into the compare and contrast phenomenon. This is used all the time in sales because the price of a product can neither be high or low unless it’s compared to something else. That something is quite often another price. For example, when I first started running I went to a department store and got a pair of running shoes for about $40. They were much better than anything else I’d ever worn so I was happy until I realized I needed a better shoe after logging lots of miles. Imagine my sticker shock when I saw good running shoes at a real running store sold for $65 – $115! Fortunately for me there were some good salespeople who could clearly explain what I was getting for my money.
Sometimes the comparison point isn’t another price; rather it’s describing everything someone will get. A good description makes them realize they’re getting quite a bit and can soften the blow price might deliver. We see this all the time on infomercials when we hear, “But wait, there’s more!” That’s where the infomercial host goes on to describe all the extra ginsu knives we get for the same low price we were considering buying a single knife for.
Another example comes from my area of expertise, insurance. In your auto insurance policy there’s a coverage called “liability” which protects you in the event that you cause bodily harm to another person or damage their property in an auto accident. The most common amount of coverage people carry to protect themselves is $100,000. The bad news is that really doesn’t go very far in today’s litigious society when some cars are worth nearly that much and even a short
hospital stay can easily exceed that amount.
Having more than 25 years in the insurance industry I’d never recommend selling someone less than $300,000 in liability coverage. Of course the natural objection from a customer would be paying three times more for all of the extra coverage. But the good news is it doesn’t cost three times more! A good salesperson would use a similar approach to Steve Jobs and might say, “If you’re like most people you’re expecting to pay three times more for three times more coverage. While that’s a reasonable assumption I have some great news, it will only cost $X more, not even close to three times as much.”
The value of this approach is that it lets a customer see there’s clearly a need for the extra coverage (they hear about lawsuits in the media almost daily), and their satisfaction level will go up when they realize they’re getting triple the coverage for a fraction of what they expected to pay.
No matter whether you’re a salesperson, involved in marketing, work with advertising or just trying to convince your spouse to spend some money on something you want, look for legitimate comparisons that will make your request look like the best, most reasonable choice. You may not have as much success as Jobs did with Apple but science tells us the odds of you hearing “Yes” will go up rather dramatically.
Brian, CMCT
influencepeople 
Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.