How To Fix a Monotone Voice, with Ramit Sethi

Yes. I have a video here I'm going to show you in just a second. I brought in one of my dream job elite students, and we were doing a social skills teardown. I actually asked him that classic interview question, tell me a time where you went above and beyond the call of duty. He responded in a monotone, sort of dry, rambling story. You'll see it. It was just pretty boring. But I showed him how to improve that dramatically, how to kind of spice it up and make it much more impactful and emotional. You'll see the before and after in this video. Take a look. Chris, how's it going, man?

Good.

Good to see you.

Yes. I have this story that I just can't quite get right.

All right, perfect.

So it's kind of an answer to the question.

Answer.

A time that you went above and beyond.

Let's do it. Let's just do it right now.

Okay.

Give me a time. You went above and beyond what the call of duty called for.

Okay. So In July of 2009, our company was acquired by Sony. And, you know, the founders and some of the exec teams were all celebrating their new wealth. And then, you know, the rest of us, half of us were worried about losing our jobs, and the other half were trying to implement these new systems for all the people who were wearing ties that were now around our office. So I ended up creating modeling out a fake financial universe in which it was the expected financial reality that they needed. The interesting thing was that wasn't the only place we could do that in our business, actually brought it to our collecting payments and data from our providers. And also our Feeds team was able to use the same framework we were able to close 30 days earlier. And our corporate overlords were happy.

Okay, that's the story.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay. We can definitely improve that. Tell me, you said it doesn't quite work. What's the reaction you get?

Well, I haven't. I haven't. I can't say that I really tested on people. It just feels too long, like there's too much going on. The crazy thing is I'm definitely proud of it because I know it solved, like, a ridiculous number of problems in our business, and I just. But the problem initially was one thing, and then it just ended up solving all these other.

Okay, so this is a story you want to put in your story toolbox.

Yeah.

Right. And you want to make it good. You want it. You want to tune it up, and you want to make sure that no matter what question they ask you, you're going to get this story in there, right?

Yes.

Okay. Because it's a good one. All right, so anybody have a quick concise piece of feedback on what you thought of this story?

Emotions and getting excited about it.

He comes off very flat. Dude, Kaushal's lecturing you about emotions, dude. What are you going to do? You got a problem on your hands? No, that's very good feedback. It's actually an emotional story as well. Yeah. Okay, let me give you the. Let me give you my feedback and I'm gonna actually give you the story how I would tell it.

Okay?

So my feedback is that it's actually a great story. The bones of the story are great. If we put this in plain English and I asked you what did you do in plain English? It's like, actually very compelling. So you get a great skeleton of a story. You go into too much detail. The reason you it's long is the same reason you lose people. Because you start saying words like, our collecting payments team and our feeds team, and I'm just like, what the fuck? I don't care about. I don't even know what these words mean. Right. Here's how I would say it. By the way. I actually thought that the, like, you had some really funny comments in that for, like, a pretty dry guy. So you need to pump up your energy. I've told you this a hundred times. If you did that, it would come across as even funnier. But you said corporate overlords. That was really funny. And then the part at the beginning was really funny too, about, like, they are off all these new guys with suits, and we're just wondering, like, do we still have our jobs? That's, like, pretty funny, actually. You need to, like, smile a little bit. Even a wry smile. Force yourself to smile. Because then I'm gonna be like, shit, this is pretty funny right now. I'm like, is this guy, like, bitter or is he funny?

Well, no. So, yeah, I hang out with the same people I have for the last 15 years, so they all think I'm hilarious.

Okay, okay, got it. Okay. This is why a lot of married people are not funny, right? Because their partners, like, you're so funny, but you're actually. They're actually not funny. You're funny, but for an outsider, you need to just, like, give me permission to think it's funny.

Okay.

All right. So this is what I would do. I'd be like this. I'd be like, you know, my last company, we were actually acquired in 2009. And so all Of a sudden, you can imagine what happens. We have the executives who basically have just made a ton of money and they're off yachting around or whatever they do. And now we have a lot of people who come into the office. We've never seen them before, and they're just wandering around in suits and making these crazy demands. So the first thing they told us, by the way, my team, we're still wondering, like, are we still going to have our jobs? Are we not? They come in and they're like, we need to get this data now. And the thing was, usually it took us 90 days to close this data, but they wanted to close the report way earlier. So we're like, okay. And then they just left. These suits left and. And we had to figure out how to do it. So not having really any managers to help guide me, I had to figure this out. And so I went and I actually created a model and I just modeled out a fake universe where I showed what I expected the data to be. Well, the funny thing was that actually turned out to be 5% within the exact numbers that ended up being the case. So if I predicted 100, it actually turned out to be 95 and it was great. Well, people looked at that and my managers looked at it after I did it and they're like, wow, this is actually pretty useful. It was actually predictive. So they then took that and they took it to this team and that team and then a third team. The amazing thing is that this random project that I created, it took me about two weeks, but I spent a lot of time on it and I was very proud of it. It actually has cut down our sales cycle from 90 days to. To 30 days. So in the midst of all this craziness, with the managers out of the office and the senior managers gone boating, we actually were able to cut our sales lead down. And that was one of the areas where I was very proud of what I was able to do. What's the difference?

I mean, you said you were proud of it and you felt it.

I felt it. Good. What else?

Talked about the stuff you said I was overreaching on. You put that at the very end. Once they had sort of got the payoff, you said, oh, and then it also went in all these directions.

When you're able to cut off all the other stuff that you like. I did not mention collecting payments in the Feeds team. When you're able to eliminate the non essentials, you can spend a lot more time. So ironically, you actually factually had more Details. But mine were more important details. Right. Because I could spend more time elucidating that stuff. What else? Good point. Yeah.

One thing I thought, Ramit, that you did really well was lead the arc of the story with the tone of your voice. So you had everything that was at the beginning in the setup. Kind of like, okay, this is what it was like until one day. Da, da da, da, da, da, da. And that, I think, is something that you could bring more to the front with vocal variety.

Chris, can you give me a vocal variety right now? Let's do one about. You know, I went to this place in San Francisco, and it was totally not what I expected, and I was surprised. Just say that back to me and use emotions in your voice.

Exact. Could we pick a place maybe one that I like?

Yeah, go ahead. I'm getting real specific here.

All right, well, because otherwise I'm never going to be able to connect to them.

Go ahead.

Oh, man. Nobody's ever heard this before. This is the first time that anyone will hear me show any vocal variety. So I just. I went to this place. I cannot believe how difficult this is for me. I went.

Go ahead. Sorry.

I'm just trying to think of a real place to summon this real emotion.

Disney World Blizzard.

I like coffee, so, you know, Reed, I went to Blue Bottle this week.

Okay.

It was amazing.

Yeah. Really?

Yeah. The coffee is unreal.

Which one? Like the one in the Mission?

No, I went to the one in Mint Plaza. They have the crazy old time drip system. Yeah. Delicious.

What was so good about it? I thought it was, like, disgusting when I went.

That's because you don't have good taste in coffee.

Oh, you might be right. You might be right. What was good about it?

So the flavors are so rich. I mean, you have berries on one side and, you know, it's kind of earthy, but not in a bad way. In a clean way.

It's really delicious. Dude, that was awesome. So what did you. Did you feel that?

Yeah. It's about coffee.

Yeah.

There you go.

And was it awkward to do to force yourself to that level of energy?

A little.

A little.

I was pumping it up.

Okay. And interestingly, did anyone feel like that was awkward from their perspective? No. Did it feel way better? Yeah. Look at that. What you think is awkward is totally normal to other people. Got it.

Yeah.

Okay. So awesome job. The key insights I'll share from the storytelling is, again, when you're able to strip out the non essentials, then you're able to spend more time on the details and whether or not you include more facts, it feels like there's greater data, greater stories. It's more compelling. And using vocal tones for you will be a huge, huge win. So leaning in, using your hands, leaning back, and being like, you would not believe what they said, you could do that, and your stories will be that much more compelling for it. All right, all right, all right. Thank you for coming up. Yeah.