The Power of Stories

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When it comes to persuading people to take a certain action, some people like to persuade using the spoken word and others like to use the written word. Now, both can work and there's a time and place for each. In today's episode, we're going to talk about 5 key principles that apply when you're using the written word to persuade people. We'll also talk about key mistakes to avoid in your writing and how you can grab the attention of editors who are in a position to publish your work in their media. Hi everyone, I'm Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Trish Hall. Trish is a longtime journalist who spent 6 years at the Wall Street Journal and more than 20 years at the New York Times, including nearly 5 years as the op-ed page editor. She's also the author of a great book called Writing to Persuade. And with that, please enjoy my conversation with Trish Hall. So you wrote a book here recently called Writing to Persuade, and we want to dig into that here. And so in the book, you talked about 15 principles of persuasive writing. So we don't need to go through all 15 here, but I'd like to know, how did you come up with these 15 principles to begin with?

Well, I wrote the book after I left op-ed. When I was in op-ed, a lot of what I did was intuitive and just sort of what an intelligent editor would do. I was looking for pieces that I found interesting, that were timely, that fit into the news cycle in some way, that surprised me, that I hadn't read in the competition. But when I left to write this book, I did a lot of research into the psychology of persuasion, and it did primarily confirm my experience in op-ed. It sort of gave academic grounding to things that I could sense, but I didn't know why they were true. So, you know, it's really important in persuading people that you listen to them and that you don't treat them like garbage and that you're not hostile. I sort of knew that as a human being, but, and as an editor, but I didn't know about the psychological research underpinning it. So, so that list was a combination of, my experience and research.

All right.

Well, let's dig into some of these 15 principles. So, there's several that I want to explore. So, one of them is what you call, "We believe what we believe." So, tell me more about that.

You know, I see it in my own life a lot, but then I also, like I said, the academic research really supports this. You tend to have— there are exceptions, obviously. There's exceptions to every rule, but you you tend to have opinions that are very similar to those held by your friends, and you tend to believe them because you believe them. Most likely, you did not do deep research on every opinion that you hold, but there's kind of a set of opinions that people in different social circles and different educational levels tend to hold. And it can be hard to break out of that. I think in the book, I gave the example of moving to New York I was 30 years old. I had never lived in such a big city. And a friend of mine, my first friend there, you know, who had grown up there sort of teaching me everything, teaching me the subway. And one of the things that was— she explained rent control, which was a very bizarre thing to me. I'd never sort of heard of it. I didn't know how it worked. And then I had a friend who was an economist, and everyone in New York who was sort of your basic liberal was very in favor of rent control. And he thought it was terrible and that it really benefited people who came first, but it didn't necessarily benefit the people who needed it, the people who had less money. So it was my sort of first experience of being very conscious that I believed something just because everyone I knew believed it. And I believed it just because I believed it, not because I had really studied it. And it's hard to get through to people, to get a crack in there and make them think about something that they believe without thinking about it too much.

Yeah, so I think a couple things in there. One is there's that old saying that you become the 5 people that you spend the most time around, you know. So that's kind of one thing. If you're hanging around people that have a certain belief, chances are you're going to believe that because you want to fit in. And then a second is this idea of confirmation bias. So people that have a certain political persuasion, for example, might read The Times or The Post. If they have a different one, maybe they're going to watch Fox News. So It's like we want to just confirm what we already believe. And so that makes it more difficult to be someone who can persuade them to a different point of view. It's important just to understand that we believe what we believe, and it's— we got a tough nut to crack here if we're trying to persuade someone.

And the confirmation bias thing is really interesting because people, they like literally won't read things that— if they happen to come across something that challenges their point of view, they just don't take it in. I mean, they've done brain scans where they just don't take it in. They're more likely to absorb information that confirms what they already know.

Yeah, and I think a lot of the folks that are listening to this are in the financial advisor community, and I think many of them do this maybe intuitively, is that they try and read the opposite opinions when it comes to like what's going on in the markets or what's going to happen with such and such thing. That they try and get the extremes. And then part of their skill and expertise and value is trying to look between the two extremes and see what makes the most sense, what's most likely, and then move forward with that. So I think many of them consciously try and get away from this confirmation bias. And if they just happen to be bullish, they're only going to read bullish reports. They try and see both sides of the equation there. So good. All right. So a second one that you have here of your 15 principles of persuasive writing is play on feelings. So talk a little bit about feelings versus facts versus being logical. How does that come into play here?

The whole question with facts, it kind of relates to confirmation bias too. Like they found that people, and I would see this in the stories that were popular enough, and people think that they can persuade other people with facts. If they shoot you facts, you will of course change your mind. But that's not really how people change their mind. They don't usually have their minds changed by people they don't agree with. You're more likely to change your mind if someone you're close to who has similar points of view points out something to you, and then you might go along with that person. But it's very, it's very tough to get through just with information. I think the kind of ideal op-ed, in my experience, would have some kind of storytelling, because that's what we all relate to, is telling stories. And telling stories usually means their feelings. I mean, I really noticed that during the pandemic. I'm really interested in science, just kind of one of my areas, science and health. So this is made for me. There's a lot to read. And of course, I read a lot of the charts and the statistics, but I also read the stories of, you know, somebody had COVID and what happened. Stories are really a way to reach people, and they reach people because they usually arouse feeling, and that sticks with people. You're more likely to remember a story about a person than you are to remember numbers, although your audience might be different. There are certain people who, I mean, I happen to really like charts and numbers. That's one reason I was a business reporter, but a lot of people, it doesn't mean anything to them. So if somebody is trying to persuade a client to invest money and leave it for the long-term and teach them about, you know, compounding and the value of time, showing them a chart might not work, but telling them a story of a little kid who had money put away for her when she was 2, and now that she's 30, she can buy a house. I think that's more powerful for most people.

Yeah, I think so. I think for many of the clients of advisors, understanding something through a story is going to be more effective. Now, there are some clients, and I'm going to stereotype here, like maybe engineers, for example, they might want to see the numbers, they want to see how things line up, and they want to dig into some of the details and see supporting information, for example. But by and large, I think you're right. I think most people want to go into the stories. So, as you were Editing folks, can you think back to a writer that you were editing for the op-ed page that maybe was particularly good at storytelling and what made them so good at telling stories to be part of their persuasive process?

There was a big Sunday cover once by someone who had worked on Wall Street and made a lot of money, and he wrote a piece about having been addicted to money. And why he had to sort of overcome that. And his first version, he was really wonderful, his name's Sam Polk, and he made the story better and better as we went along and talked about it by adding more of the story of his childhood and why he was that way. I mean, because op-eds generally aren't that long and they're not like really long newsroom stories, the stories that are being told in them are often short. But they make something real. I think another important part, one of my favorite writers was Arthur Brooks, who was the head of the AEI. So he's a, you know, conservative Christian capitalist organization writing for a liberal readership. And he was very popular with our readers. And he was because he always seemed to figure out a way to see things on their terms, to find where the common ground was, and then get in his point of view, which was very often different from theirs. And sometimes he would do that through telling stories, but they would be an op-ed, an 800-word op-ed. Those might have been, you know, 2-paragraph stories, but they were something that made it human.

Yeah. Now, you touched on this idea of the common ground. I know one of the things that you wrote about in your book is this idea of shared values. And I think you've indicated that's an important part of the persuasion process as well, is to try and find some similarity with the person you're trying to persuade.

Yeah, I think it's what's so difficult in this country right now because our media systems are so different and people get all their storytelling, all their news, all their information from systems that don't connect at all to the other one. And so finding out what you share with people, it's a challenge because people are so polarized right now. But like my friend who was the economist who thought rent control was a bad thing, I mean, And this is also why I felt very close to Arthur Brooks and often persuaded by him, because even though I was a liberal and he was a conservative, we both had the shared value of wanting to see more people live better. So the question was, how did you get there? How did you get to that point? I think it's more difficult now because I think it's possible that a lot of people don't share that many values. There are values that are really in opposition, and at that point it's really a challenge. But if you think that you have some similarity in your end goal, then it's easier to say, then it's just a matter of how you get there.

Right. Okay. So a third of your principles of persuasive writing was surprise your reader. So how do you do that?

Well, that's partly because I was an editor reading hundreds and hundreds of pieces every week. And most writers read too much. They have too much to do. I mean, everybody has too much to do, right? But they're reading all the time. If you can surprise your editor, you're going to surprise your reader. And if you can't in the first, second, or third sentence make them go, huh, I didn't know that, that's interesting, I want to know more about that, then they won't keep reading. And I think that really applies to all of us in the work world now. People have too many meetings where nothing goes on. They send too many emails where they're not really saying anything. I work for clients, I write and edit a lot of op-eds for people, and they often just aren't really saying anything that everybody doesn't already know. So it's, it's important, even if you're just writing an email, to understand what's going to be new and interesting to that person, what's going to make them open the email, because everybody's like, you know, drowning in words. And so whether your reader is the reader of an email or a long magazine piece, you have to have some understanding of what that reader wants to know and probably doesn't already know.

So what are some different ways that you can immediately surprise the reader, whether it's a fact that most people didn't know or some contrarian statement, or what are some various ways that like, oh gosh, within the first 2 or 3 sentences, this person has got me hooked here already?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the classic ways to do that is to, um, say most people seem to believe X, but what's really going on is Y. It's contrarian, but it's based in facts, right? And you give those facts right away. Another way is to take somebody's position on something and say, well, that may sound good, but there's, you know, unintended consequences, and have you ever thought about this? So often it's a matter of finding something that it's surprising because everybody's sort of going along thinking a certain thing. And I think one part of that is being blunt. Every part of life has its jargon, and if you get lost in your jargon right away, you'll lose people. That was a big problem with people submitting op-eds.

A fourth one of your principles was to be specific. So tell me more about that.

Well, that ties into the jargon thing. People use this kind of flat language. There's corporate language, like marketing language, advertising, every place has its language, and it's very rarely specific, and you can't picture things as a result. So don't tell me that this budget cut is going to lead to lots of hungry children. Tell me that it's going to cut out lunch every day for 2 million children who won't get lunch somewhere else. Like, that's not super specific, it's a little more specific, but to be as specific as you can so that people can visualize it and understand it Instead of using jargon and instead of using a lot of generalities. That's often all of us when we were editing, we could cut out the first 5 or 6 paragraphs of a piece because it was kind of a general wind-up.

Now I know when I was writing books and I'd get it marked up from the editor, sometimes I'd see "show, don't tell." Does that apply in persuasive writing or where does that concept— first of all, why don't you just say what show, don't tell is, but I got that a lot from my editor in my book.

I'm like, ah, you know, he would say, talk about using persuasion in everyday life. Like, I'm like, what does that mean? He's like, how would you persuade your husband to load the dishwasher differently? So it's always like, instead of saying, you know, don't criticize, give a little story about a time that you did criticize and it backfired. And he would push me to give the exact words that a person might use. So I think showing means making it concrete and telling a story. It goes back to that rather than just sort of generalizing.

Yeah, so people can put themselves into that situation and, and see themselves actually doing that.

And this is part of the structure of an op-ed. An op-ed at the end always calls for some kind of action or gives some kind of opinion. I think the same thing applies to blog posts or emails. The takeaway sentence— what are you going to do with this information? What does it mean? I think it's very important.

Yeah, and a way that I like to phrase that too is make it easy for the reader to understand what you want them to do next, right? Don't make them have to work for, okay, well, what am I supposed to do with this information? You know, I kind of like what they wrote, but now what do I do with it? It's like, make it clear, make it easy for them to take that next step to do something with you.

Yeah, that's really good advice. I think that's right. It's surprisingly often not clear.

Well, this last one here on the 15 principles, this 5th one that I want to talk about, is something that I am very guilty of not doing, and that is prune ruthlessly. So tell me more about that.

I mean, we all have to edit ourselves. If we're lucky, we have good editors. But when I was editing my own book, I realized there were just certain adverbs I used all the time, and they were, they were like verbal tics, and they were mostly unnecessary. So I just would search for the word and go through the whole book and take them out. We often use 5 or 6 words when we could use 1. We often use words that we're just used to using in conversation. Oh yeah, oh great, oh really. I'm the worst. I own that. I just feel like I use the same words over and over again. And when you're writing, if you can challenge yourself to think of a stronger, more vivid word, it's worth it. And often in the process of pruning and getting rid of vague words and substituting specific words for them, it becomes shorter, it becomes tighter, it becomes easier for people to read it. Like, look at your own life. Everyone has too much to read. So if you make it as short as you can but still powerful and still containing the ideas you want to get across, you'll just do much better because people have so many choices of where to go.

Now, this might vary from writer to writer, but for you personally, and maybe for other writers that you may know, when someone's writing, do they tend to self-edit along the way, meaning they write a sentence or they write a paragraph and then they're editing it before they go to the next sentence or the next paragraph, or do you just try and get everything down on paper, know that it's a mess, and then go back once you've kind of done the brain dump, then you go back and edit? So it's, do you edit as you go along or do you just brain dump and then go back and edit?

I think different people are different. I like to get sort of my first sentence for some reason, or first paragraph, but I like to put everything there. So let's say I'm writing a 1,000-word story. I might have 8,000 words there with notes and ideas and just stuff. And then I kind of carve my way through that like a sculptor. That works for me. Other people don't do that at all. Other people make outlines and they, they need to have a perfect first draft before they do a second draft. I think that's personal and you just figure out what works for you by doing it. So like, what do you do?

Yeah, in my case, I tend to self-edit along the way. So I'm writing and I'm editing as I'm writing. And so by the time I finish the first draft, it's probably 90% of the way there. But what I'm actually— I'm trying to do the opposite. I'm trying to just get everything out first and then go back and edit because I think I'm going to get a better product if I can just get everything down first and then really take the time to do the prune ruthlessly. Because I find that the more time I spend editing, the shorter my stuff becomes because I realize, oh, you took way too long to make that point. You can cut these words out. You can cut that paragraph out.

I think it's hard to edit yourself. And when people— if people have time, they should write something and then go away from it for a while. Because I often, like, finish writing something and I don't look at it for a couple of hours or maybe even the next morning. And I'm like, this is terrible. So you really have a much better perspective. You come to it as the reader if you get some distance from it. But I don't think one system or another of writing is better, but I think that it's hard to tighten up your own writing and see sort of logical flaws in the structure without getting some distance on it.

Oh, I totally agree. And usually if I write something that's going to be published on a Monday, I might start it on a Saturday and then I write a draft and then I look at it on Sunday, make some changes, and then I look at it Monday morning before it goes final again, maybe make another tweak. So I definitely like to have at least 24 hours distance between it. So we've gone through 5 of these 15. I've got a few other questions that I'd like to go through here as it relates to persuasion and then also writing in general. So one is, you're a writer, you're an editor, you've been a reporter. So what are some of the biggest writing mistakes that maybe that you've made and maybe that you've seen in some of the writers that you've worked with?

Well, I mean, if we're talking about the op-ed form, The biggest mistake I think people make is that they're not brave. They're afraid to say something really— especially when they're in the corporate world, they're afraid to say something that people might not agree with or that will somehow get them in trouble. There's something— I think people are afraid to really, really be honest. And I think the most honest writing is often the most powerful. I mean, there are a lot of books I like about, you know, fiction and nonfiction, it's a very, that's like a different thing. But in short pieces, I think that people have this idea that they should write something or should say something, it's their field, and then they just don't, they don't go far enough, they're not surprising enough. I think in journalism, if you're looking just at like news stories, so much of it is about the reporting. I mean, what makes Maggie Haberman an amazing New York Times you know, White House reporter is that she is constantly talking to people, and she's talking to a big range of people, and she's gathering the information. And that is the most important part. I think writing is less important in that kind of daily journalism than reporting, because, you know, you can take a kind of not amazing collection of facts— I've done it many times myself— and write a perfectly pleasant story that people can read. But really, the hard part of journalism is getting all the details. Like, the great feature writers, the great magazine writers, they interview lots of people and read lots of books, and they have such a complete understanding of their subject and what they're writing about. So, yes, it's hard to write. It's hard to pull all that material together and make it interesting to people. But when I see pieces that don't work, it's often because I don't think people dug deep enough, went far enough. And asked enough questions.

Yeah, I think that's such an important point, this idea of not being brave enough. And I see a lot of that in the financial industry in terms of the writing. So much of it is just pure educational, which is great. I mean, we need that, obviously. But then also, I think a lot of consumers want to know, well, what do you think? What do you really feel about this? And so this idea of being brave, of having an opinion, of standing up and believing in something, I think is important because people want to know, well, what do you believe? Where do you kind of draw the line on things, for example? Because they want to work with people who do have a belief system and they understand what those beliefs are and what those values are. And so, I know I encourage advisors when I work with them and talk to them in writing, for example, is have an opinion about this. And you may turn away some people, which is okay because, you know, they were never going to become clients anyway. But for those who agree with what you're talking about, they're going to be even more connected and engaged with you.

I think that's right.

Great. All right. So let's talk about another area here. So how to please an editor. So again, you were the op-ed editor for a few years at the Times. And what are some things that people could do that actually got you excited about wanting to publish them?

At one point, I edited Sunday Business and we would have some, you know, we had some regular columnists and one of the columnists, everybody said, well, yeah, this person is not very good. I'm like, why do you keep using this person? And they'd say, well, they always file on time and the copy's like, you know, it arrives, it arrives on time. Basically, they were reliable. And I thought, you know, that's kind of a terrible reason to keep using someone who's not very interesting, but I totally understood it because people have obligations and space to fill or columns to fill or whatever, and they want the people who are going to be the least amount of trouble. So on the one hand, you want interesting people who say surprising things, and they say it well, and they say it tightly, and they say it quickly. But you also want people who don't give you a lot of grief. And it is hard in the newspaper business because, you know, you're calling someone at 8 o'clock at night and they're having dinner or whatever. You're saying, I need you to look at this playback, and I need you to change this, and I need you to do this, and the copy editor had this question, and it's a big imposition on people. But the people who are graceful about that and just kind of accept it and do their best to make things work with an understanding of all those deadlines, they're very popular with editors.

Yeah, so anything that you as the writer can do to make the editor's job easy, obviously, is gonna, is gonna be helpful. Yeah, and I, I remember working with a client of mine who I helped them get an article submitted to a popular online financial news site, and the editor came back and said, this is 2.5 times longer than what I can publish. And so, you know, we had to go back and cut it way down and then submit it again and make a tweak here and there. So yeah, so anything you do to make it easy and do what they ask you to do, I think would be very, very helpful.

The other thing editors will do, they won't get back to you, they won't get back to you, and you think, oh, they don't want that. And then all of a sudden they get back to you and they say It's 2.5 times too long and you need to get it back to me at the right length in an hour. You know, it's frustrating for people, but if you want to be published, you just kind of have to do it, right?

Yeah. And like you say, not every time it's going to work. I know I was trying to get an article published and I was going back and forth with the editor and they were saying, you know, make this suggestion, you need to tighten this up, and this, that, and the other thing. Went through several go-arounds and then finally at the end, the editor came back to me and said, I just can't make this work.

I know, it's terrible. I mean, things like that happen, or a whole piece goes through all these people and then some other editor, somebody's boss's boss, says, I don't like that piece. And it's like, I always found it difficult, right?

And I think just a couple of points here for the advisors that might be listening to this is it's one thing to write something that you're trying to get published elsewhere and that has an editor that is going to require that you do certain things to it. That's really what we're talking about here, how do you please the editor in that case. But otherwise, if you're writing something for your own publication, your own blog site, or through your own mechanism where no one else has to approve it, that's a little different story. But a lot of the things that we're talking about here apply to make that particular piece of content that much better as well.

I think in that case, and a lot of people are in that situation, It's a lot of pressure to be writing and editing yourself, and then you have to proofread yourself. And I know if I go to a site and there's typos, I think, but I mean, I make typos, everybody makes typos. And so if somebody's doing their own work that way, if they have a kind friend who will read it for them first and look for typos, it's really worthwhile because it's a lot of burden on one person to do all those things, and you can't always see it.

Yeah, the reader will see it, but it's like we're so close to reading, we've read this 20 times and we didn't see that we you've got the same word twice in a row or something like that.

It's impossible not to do that. That's why, you know, rich newspapers have layers and layers of editing and poor newspapers don't.

Right. Okay. So another thing I want to talk about here is this idea that great writers are also voracious readers. And I know that's something that a lot of folks have indicated that, hey, if you want to be a great writer, spend more time reading. So I'd love to hear from you, Is that true for you? And what are the kinds of things that you read that you think have helped make you a better writer over time?

I mean, I feel like such a hypocrite now because I feel like all I read is Twitter and journalism.

That's reading.

It's just such a fascinating time and there's so much to read. I go onto Twitter and I get lost in this. I follow a lot of virus scientists and I read their academic papers and I just get lost in there. And but before this all happened, you know, everybody reads differently. I've always really liked reading fiction the most. I obviously read some nonfiction, but I feel like I learned about writing from, you know, just reading a lot from an early age, and you kind of absorb it. Yes, you're there to read the story, but you're absorbing different kinds of cadence and sentence structure and ways of writing. I was, I was thinking, I was looking at my bookshelf and thinking about, you know, in case you asked me this, who are some of the writers I like? And, and they're all different. They're weirdly mostly women, but, you know, like Kate Atkinson has like a lot of sort of mystery in her books, and, and Jane Gardham's books that I like the best are set in Hong Kong. Uh, Lena Andersson is Swedish or Norwegian, I'm not sure, which very dark, very short, tight sentences. They're all very different from one another. Some of them have very long sentences, some of them have short sentences, but they right away win me over with their characters. And to some extent, I think that's even true with nonfiction. Like, there's some nonfiction I really like that's really kind of like pure idea writing. Like, one writer I'm going to talk to him this week for a story, Peter Singer. He's a famous, you know, philosopher, and he— his writing is mostly sort of about ideas. But a lot of great business writers are really telling stories about What happened? And science writers. I mean, there's, there's a lot of really good nonfiction that follows one big, one big case.

Yeah. And I know I tend to read mostly nonfiction and my wife has been telling me for years, you need to read more fiction books. If you want to be a better writer, start reading more fiction and you'll learn how to tell better stories. And so I'm working on that. But in terms of kind of how-to books for writing, I know one of the, one of the books that I've enjoyed reading is Stein on Writing, Saul Stein. Yeah. Any other books, more how-to, that you would recommend?

I liked Annie Lamott's book. I think it's called Bird by Bird. The title comes from this great story where she was a kid and she was having trouble writing something. And I always find this advice helpful if I'm having trouble getting something done. And maybe it was a— I don't know what the thing she was doing, but sort of her father was just go bird by bird. Maybe she was doing a whole survey of the birds of her state or something. But You just go one step at a time, and I think that's very good advice. You just— you can get very overwhelmed if you think, I have to write this huge thing, but if you realize everything, no matter how big or how short, is bird by bird, it makes it less intimidating. I like— it's been around for a long time, but there's a book by William Zinsser called On Writing Well that I really like. Stephen King, who's a great writer, also has a really good book on writing. I don't read a ton of books on writing, but those three stuck with me.

All right, well, let's wrap up here with a segment that I call "You Said It." So I'm gonna read a couple of quotes here that I pulled from some of your work here and just get your thoughts on it, your context on it. So this first quote is, you said, "There is opinion that riles up and stirs up, and there is opinion that hopes to persuade." If you're aiming for the former, go for it. Just don't kid yourself that you're bringing anyone around to your side. So what do you mean by that?

I mean, I think that's what a lot of opinion writers, especially in this time, are doing. They have their audiences, and they're like cheerleaders, and they're kind of talking to their crowd. I mean, they're talking to their people.

It's that confirmation bias.

Yeah, and that's fine. I mean, And their people are probably learning something from it. I mean, I happen to really like Paul Krugman and I learn things from his column. But if I didn't like him, I probably wouldn't read him. I mean, you can see just from looking at comments on pieces that a lot of the people who comment on pieces are— they're already sort of in that circle. They're already there and they, they learn something from it and they like discussing some minutia from it. But you're not persuading someone who has a fundamentally different point of view. I don't think that's a bad thing. I just think that's what it is.

Yeah. And I think the important point I take away from that is think about what you're writing. Are you writing to just deepen your relationship with the people who already agree with you and already like you?

That's a really good point. You're deepening the relationship. Okay.

Yeah. Versus I'm writing to try and persuade someone that may not agree with me right now, but I want them to agree. Agree with me for whatever reason, or I'm writing to persuade a potential new client, here's why you should work with me. So you don't want to just rile that person up because it's going to put a wall up. You know what your audience is, what you're trying to do, and that will determine sort of the type of the persuasion that you employ. Would that be fair to say?

And I think what you just said is really important because I see this with clients a lot, and I'm sure you do too. Know what they're— you're trying to do. People have to know what the goal is. And that's critical in sort of figuring out what they want to write and where they want it to go.

Yeah. And then the second quote I would like to get your comment on is you said, quote, "Intriguing studies suggest that when faced with aggression, people don't change their minds. They hold even more fiercely to what they believe," end quote.

I know, isn't that strange? I mean, I found that really interesting because so many people when they're talking about politics, they start getting louder and louder and louder, and it's very intense, and it doesn't really get them anything. I mean, you can use that kind of passion and anger to rile up your own people, but you probably won't get anywhere with people who aren't on your side to begin with.

Yeah, great. Well, Trish, I think we'll go ahead and wrap it up there. So is there anything else that you want to add here that we haven't talked about yet?

No, I really, I love talking to you. I really appreciate the time. I do think that financial people, just one thing, have one of the hardest jobs in getting across to people because so many people don't really understand numbers. And so, it's a whole other level of challenge. So, people who do that successfully, I really admire. It's tough.

It is. So, if people want to get in touch with you or learn more or read your books, what's the best way for folks to learn more about you?

My email is on my website, and people are free to get in touch.

And the website is?

Oh, it's just trishhallbooks.com.

Excellent. All right, well, Trish, appreciate it. Thanks for being on our show today.

Great.

It's great talking.

One of the ideas that really hit home with me in my conversation with Trish was when she said the biggest mistake she saw people make in their writing in the op-ed section was that they were not brave. She said they were afraid to say something that people might not agree with or that will somehow get them in trouble. They were afraid to really be honest. And then she said the most honest writing is often the most powerful. Now I get it. It's hard to write something that some people might not agree with. But if you want to be a persuasive writer, if you want to make an impact, and get noticed, you've got to be brave. All right, that's all for today. Make sure that you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platform. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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