MBA1443 Must Read: Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100BA show Business Insights. You can't afford to miss every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and Today's episode is a must Read episode on our Must Read Episodes. I share with you a book that I've read that has influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its insights, its takeaways and why you should read it too. Today's must read is Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. He's the master at going deep at one topic in his books. He is a New York Times bestselling author of Tipping Outliers, Blink and so many more. This book is all about our relationships with people we don't know, people that we meet for the first time, our assumptions, our theories about them, the conclusions we make in our mind, how we communicate with them. And this book is really relevant to entrepreneurs because we talk to strangers all the time. They're called our customers, our partners, people that we meet at conferences or business meetings or even when you're meeting somebody while you're traveling for business and they Ask you, hey, what do you do? The subtitle of this book is Brilliant. It's what we should know about the people we don't know. That's what we get into the insights, the takeaways from that book and in today's must read episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. In this book, as Malcolm Gladwell does so very well, he challenges what we think we know. We think we know people, we think we understand them, we shake their hand, we look them in the eye and we kind of form an opinion about them. And that opinion kind of stays with us pretty much forever. We make a conclusion so quickly about the people in front of us in a matter of seconds. Is this good? Is this thinking faulty? What else should we be doing? This book really outlines the fact that strangers are complex. And he breaks it all down in this book. The first thing he touches on in this book is what's called the truth default factor. As human beings, by default, we think people are always telling the truth, or at the very least, we think most of the time people don't lie to us. But he shares several studies in this book that shows people lie more often than we think. In fact, on average, 50% of the time, people are lying about big and small things. But even worse, in these studies, they find out that we're really bad at detecting liars. Almost half the time we get it wrong. Which makes you think, hey, maybe my judgment of character is not as good as I think it was. So why do we do this? Well, it just has to do with the fact this is what we've been conditioned in society. In order for society to work, we have to just take things for face value and believe people by their word. Otherwise you're going to live in an environment of distrust and nothing gets done. If you don't trust anybody to do anything or don't trust what they say, it becomes a very selfish society and you don't work together. In fact, it reminds me of the country of Moldova. A study shows that Moldova is one of the most unhappy places in the world. It's a country that was part of the former Soviet Union. And the big reason why people are unhappy is because corruption, bribery, lying is so prevalent in society and well known, no one trusts anybody. In fact, people won't go to the doctor in Moldova unless The doctor is 35 years or older because they're worried that the young doctors bribed their teachers to pass medical school. Now, for most of us, we don't live In Moldova, we live in societies where most of us do what we say and we kind of fulfill our end of the bargain. And that's why we just blanketly easily say, hey, everybody's kind of doing the right thing and saying the truth. And, and I'm going to take everything for face value. And we are taught this in schools from a young age so we can have a functional society. But the truth of the matter is, is that many people are not as honest as we think they are. Now, the book kind of starts with this chapter and it's really a slap in the face. It kind of reminds you, hey, maybe I need to be on my guard a little bit. Now, Malcolm Gladwell is not saying that everybody is a lie and a cheat and you're surrounded by a bunch of people that are going to deceive you. Many of these lies are innocent and they're just ways to kind of make them feel better about themselves. But he is saying they are strangers. Don't treat strangers like people you've known for decades. The other thing about strangers is transparency. When you meet a new client, when you meet a new customer, if it's the first time you've spoken to them, there's going to be a low level transparency. There's going to be a low level of really understanding who they really are as a person, their likes or dislikes, how they're really feeling. Most people don't wear their emotions on their sleeves. Most people are not open and transparent from the moment you meet them. And this is really important to know as business owners because if you're looking for answers, honest answers, transparent feedback, it's best to get them from customers you've known for some time, you've spoken to them a few times. So if you want to get the real juice about your products or services, if they're really enjoying them, if they can be improved in any way, it's better that you build upon those relationships that early on so that you can have those conversations later. And they can be transparent because they're not strangers anymore. But that first time you talk to them, that cold call, it's not natural for strangers to be transparent. They want to hold the cards close to their chest, right? They don't know you yet and they don't know what the ramifications of their honesty will be. So if you want honest answers, you're going to have to work for them. You're going to have to actually take some time and just get to know them a little bit, have other chats, see if you can help them in any way and not really ask for feedback in the beginning, after a few conversations and some time has passed, people will be a lot more comfortable being transparent. Another concept that's fascinating, this book is called Coupling. Often we make assumptions, we draw conclusions about strangers that are just not accurate. For example, if you never heard of Tony Robbins, the personal development coach, you didn't know anything about him. He was a stranger. A lot of people make assumptions like, this guy was just born with the gift of gab. He probably came from a good family, came from good schools. We make all these assumptions. We might even take one fact and couple it with his success. Say, for example, his mentor with Jim Rohn. Like, of course, Jim Rohn was his mentor, the godfather of personal development. If I had Jim Rohn as my mentor, I'd be just as successful. And that's why he's successful. Tony Robbins is successful because Jim Rohn was his mentor. We make this coupling effect, and we just think that's the truth, but it's not, because we don't see the full picture. We don't see the full environment that he came from. For those who do know Tony Robbins, for a period of time, he was homeless, he lived out of his car, he was a janitor, totally broke, came from very little means, and actually struggled to scrape together enough money to go to that first Jim Rohn conference to see him live. Yes, Jim Rohn was part of his life and was his mentor. But there were so many other factors that you didn't consider because you didn't know him. He was a stranger. If you did know them, you'd be like, well, I think he's successful because he's resilient, because he's resourceful, because he wanted it bad. And that allowed him to have the opportunity to be mentored by Jim Rohn. Coupling is very dangerous when you're making assumptions about strangers. A lot of us were. We just get lazy. We just want to rationalize what we see in front of us, and therefore, we just make these conclusions. There's so many insights in this book, but what I love about Malcolm Gladwell's style is that he explains his point of view. He explains what he's really dissecting through stories. And these stories are often intertwined with research. And therefore, you're reading research, you're reading great stories, and you're not even noticing it. You're just reading a nice kind of written book, giving you examples through storytelling. And by the time you get to the end of the chapter or even the end of the book. You're like, I not only learned something new, I learned it in context, I learned it in reality and see how it actually gets applied in the real world.

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Wrap up today's lesson, Malcolm Gladwell talks about a lot of different topics in his many books. This is one of the best books you could read from his library of books. As an entrepreneur talking to strangers, I would say the Tipping Point is another one, and I often don't make this distinction about books, but it's really relevant to Malcolm Gladwell's type of writing. I actually recommend this book in written form and not in audio form. Not because it's narrated poorly or anything like that, but because the type of writing or the type of information you're going to be absorbing in Malcolm Gladwell's kind of books, it requires you sometimes to put the book down or to put your Kindle down. If you're reading it on a Kindle and just absorb what you just read, to think about it, to ponder, to see how it applies to your life. It's not so easy to do that with an audiobook. Yes, you can pause, but often they're on to the next thing already, so pick it up on paperback or Kindle. I highly recommend Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA Show. Make sure you hit subscribe right now. By hitting subscribe you have access to our over 1400 lessons and it's the only way you have access by hitting subscribe. So whatever you are using to listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher Radio, or by hitting subscribe you have access to all our episodes. Also, it makes sure that when the next episode we Air is available. It's available on your device. And if you want to give us any feedback, leave us an iTunes rating and review. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I've said this so many times, but I'm reminded of this by doing this book review. Books are one of the best investments you can make in your personal development, in your professional development. For 5, 10, $15. Are you kidding me? You gain so many insights, so many ideas and a renewed perspective. What value. That's incredible. This is why I think all entrepreneurs should have a book budget and it should be pretty much unlimited. But don't buy them and don't read them. Buy them and make sure you read them. Then buy the next one. Don't hold back when it comes to books. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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