How to Articulate Your Thoughts More Clearly Than 99% of People

The single most valuable skill set you can have is getting other people to do things for you because fundamentally, if you know how to do that, then you can get somebody else to do every other portion of the business and they can build it on your behalf. And so in this video, I'll walk through an in-depth process of how I think about managing people to get the desired outcome on a consistent basis and how to have some of the hardest conversations you have to have and make it feel easy. So let me show you something that I haven't done in any other school days, but I'll walk you through it. So I just call this like my management diamond. So fundamentally, if you ask someone to do something, you want them to do it. If they're not doing it, then comes the problem solving, which is what, how, when. Oops. So if someone doesn't do what you want them to do, the first and obvious reason is they didn't know what you wanted them to do. And so you fix this one through communication. This is, by the way, a really good framework for having hard conversations when someone's not doing a good job. So you say, hey Carly, I wanted you to do this and you haven't done it. So I just want to figure out what the reason was so we can solve it or make it less likely to happen in the future. So I figured the first was that you didn't know that I wanted you to do that. Did you know that I wanted you to do that? If they say, no, I didn't know, then you're like, great, now you know, right? Now if they're like, I did know that you wanted me to do that, then you're like, oh, did you not know how to do it? Which you solve with training, which will dovetail into the whole teaching thing in a second. But okay, yes, I did know that you wanted me to do it and I know how to do it, but I didn't know you wanted it by now or by tomorrow. And so I didn't have a deadline here. So we assign deadlines when we tell people to do things. And that's just again, to hold them responsible. Now, if someone knows what you want them to do, they know how to do it, and there's a deadline associated and they still don't do it, then the question is, did they need some sort of incentive? Were they not motivated to do it? Or was something blocking them? I could have the best chef in the world who's the most motivated, knows that I wanna make an omelet, knows how to do it, knows I want it in the next 5 minutes. He's like, bro, I don't have eggs. Doesn't matter how much I do. Like sometimes people don't have, like we actually had this issue with my editing team was I was like, why don't you all fucking edit in the building? And they were like, the upload speed. They're like, my upload speed at home is faster than here. And so it actually just takes me more time. And so we paid Google Fiber to drill a hole into the fucking wall. And here we are now, they can, it's faster here now. Right? But it's fundamentally like, if there are blockers, then it's like, okay, well can I just solve whatever that blocker is? Can I remove that impediment? And so walking through this has helped me have a lot of hard conversations with people and not make them hard. It's like, there's 5 reasons that you didn't do it. You didn't know what it was, how to do it, when I wanted it, you weren't incentivized, or something's blocking you. Any of these sound familiar? And if there's more than one, then you gotta fix more than one. And oftentimes if you delegate, if you basically, you hand something off to somebody and it gets worse after you hand it off, it's 'cause you didn't delegate it, you abdicated it. You just said, here you go, good luck. And so that's a very easy litmus test. If you hand it off and it gets better or it's neutral, then you actually delegated it. And so what happens is most entrepreneurs just find a human being that has a pulse, say they have a meeting like this and just say a lot of things at them, expect the person to have 100% retention and to know exactly what to do when they want to do it, how they want it done with no blockages the person's not aware of. And then be done. Be like, oh yeah, I already, I told him once. It's like, yeah, once, not in a written format, in no structured form. Like, and then you're just yelling at them on a Zoom call. And then 2 weeks later, you're surprised that they're not doing as well as you after having done it for fucking years. You know what I mean? So we, we think through this. So this is how I think through, um, trying to figure out, um, employee issues. So this one's fairly straightforward, in my opinion. This one's fairly straightforward. The 2 hard ones are these guys. So from a training perspective, I'll give you, I'll give you an example I had to do recently with, um, a teammate or an employee here. I'll just give a— so let's say there's somebody on your team who's a dick, right? You're like, hey, Caroline, you're being a dick. The thing is, is that stop being a dick is actually a pretty terrible directive. And the reason is because they don't know what they're doing, because they're dicks. They're like, you just want me to not be me? And you're like, kind of. And so what we have to do is— so I call it bundling and unbundling terms. And this is fundamentally why I think my content does better than most people's, is that, like, you've heard me define terms. It's like, okay, patience is figuring out what to do in the meantime. So if I told someone be patient, it doesn't mean anything. If I say be charismatic, how do I be charismatic? It's like, okay, I need you to have more vocal ranges when you're talking. I need you to pause for emphasis. I need you to say people's name. I need you to look them in the eyes. I need you to nod when they're talking. Like, these are a series of activities that when someone does all of them, we bundle them together and say, this person's charismatic. And so rather than saying, be charismatic, say, I need you to do these 6 things or stop doing these 6 things that you are doing. And by doing that, then people will stop describing you as a dick. And so we had, so a teammate who was really high potential, like really smart, hardworking, did all that stuff, but something started happening and they started acting a little bit dickish. And we had 4 leaders in my company have like sit-down talks, which normally wouldn't do, but the person was really good at their job. It's like, I don't really wanna lose the productivity. And so I was the last stop where I was like, it's me or you're out. So we gotta figure something out here. And he'd already been given a lot of instruction, a lot of don't be a dick, be nicer, things like that. But that doesn't help anyone change their behavior. And so fundamentally giving someone a frame of what I want to have happen as a result of this conversation helps filter what you're actually talking to them about. And so like me insulting them or making them feel bad doesn't actually do anything for increasing the likelihood that they behave in a certain way. Most of the time it's just clarity. Just like when you hop on the call and you tell people to do this stuff immediately, they will not like you. And if they don't like you, they'll complain more, which makes it more likely you get fired. You don't wanna get fired. Great. So all you have to do is not do that at the beginning of the calls and people will stop describing you that way. He's like, this is so eye-opening. I didn't even know. And there was like 4 or 5 other items that I asked for specific examples so that I could say like, stop doing these things and people will stop calling you a dick.. And within a month, people were, people were like, dude, he's completely turned around. It's like, he just actually had specific instructions. And so most of us aren't willing to do the hard work of saying like, what is this person doing? Or what does this person need to do? Which is why I'm a big fan of checklist because it's like, this is what you have to do when you onboard someone. Like check your hair, make sure that there's not a bed in the background. Like I'm like, yeah, you're onboarding a customer and it's got like, you know, a pink bunny poster behind you. And it's like, that's probably not the first impression I'm really looking for. So it's like, these are the checklists of the onboarding call. It's like, why does Sarah suck and Caroline's great? You just say, well, Sarah, here's the checklist. You did 3. There's 11 items. Sarah consistently, or Caroline does 9 out of 11 and hers consistently get higher scores. Now, if Sarah follows the checklist and she does all 11 and her scores are way below the other girls, then it means the checklist is wrong. Which means that's on you, not on her. And so it means that you're incomplete in terms of what you're trying to train them on. And so sometimes it's useful to know that. So if both people do the checklist and they objectively meet the things, then there's other things that you don't know about. And so fundamentally, soft skills and hard skills are all just skills. It's just that soft skills, people just have a harder time teaching because it's bundled language. And I think that's why so many people struggle teaching them. So in training the team, to loop back to your question, I want to figure out what the problem is with the person so I can try and loop to these things. If it's a training issue, I try and break it down as much as I humanly can. If it's a motivation issue, it really comes down to reinforcing stimuli. So either people do things that, because they get stuff that they like, or they avoid things they hate. Getting fired is usually a pretty aversive stimulus. So a lot of people will do things to just not get fired. So it's fairly strong. But the best performers do things because they just like doing them. Like the best employees, the best teammates, they just work all the time because the actual conditions of work are more reinforcing than any boss can be. Right? Which is why a lot of people, like on my team, for example, with a lot of editors and whatnot, they just edit in their free time. They picked up editing because editing itself is a reinforcing thing. No one cold calls in their free time. Oh yeah, I just picked up cold calling on the side. Yeah, I just cold call like on my days off just because I just like it. Like no one says that. But the thing is that sales and editing have very fast feedback loops. And so you can immediately get off the call and get a reward. You immediately get— you see an edit and— or you catch a moment and there's just a lot of feedback loops that are really tight and good. Other roles have slower and longer feedback cycles. And so as a manager, you have to basically artificially input more feedback loops into longer project timelines or jobs that require more complex tasks. That motivate people through reinforcement. And so a lot of people, I think, in culture say, oh, someone did something crazy. And so what we do is we say, what happened that caused them to do it? But we actually invert how behavior works, which is people do things because of what happens after they do them, not because what happened before. And so that's like what happens after you do stuff is the latency of training. And that's how you train people. And so anyways, I, I, I geek out on human behavior stuff a lot, but, um, motivation fundamentally comes from deprivation, which is what are you most deprived of? So if somebody's very deprived of praise, which many people are, giving praise motivates them. If someone gets praise all the time, praise might not motivate them. Just depends on the person. And so this is figuring out what are the reinforcing stimuli from someone's past That's getting to know your employees better so you can do the things that motivate them. Money, by the way, has been conditioned as a universal reinforcer. We've learned at an early age that this thing equals whatever we want. So it's just a generalized reinforcer. But there are more specific reinforcers that you can give to individual people. So yeah, that's that. And then block, you just unblock the thing if you can afford it, whatever the problem is. So That's my little manifesto on management. Okay, cool. Oh great.

Where do you, um, where do you find like more information to better understand these concepts? Because we're in a very like human capital intensive industry. Management is the big piece that's missing for like every company, and that's why so many people fail. Where would I find like this in more in more depth and in more volume so that I could understand these concepts better.

So I've got a special CTA for you today. This excerpt was from a school day. So this is from the school winners who came out. They were the top 10 and they asked me about managing team. And so I answered that question. But if you don't have a business, then none of that matters. And so to start a business, you can go to school.com. We run the school games. It's for people who are just getting started in business. And that's what that's for. If you already have a business and you have a big team and you want to scale your team, we run workshops occasionally at acquisition.com at our headquarters here in Vegas. And so if you'd like to partake in one of our workshops, you can go there and click the scale button and hopefully we'll see you soon. So most of these concepts were derived from the ground up from just like rat studies with Dr. Cashy, who you— Sam knows, my, my good buddy. And so, um, I think most people just do a lot of things and just like see what happens. Like it's very haphazard. I think Almost no one knows how to train. Yeah. Period. I feel, oh, I feel like understanding human psychology, like that was always my found— Even ignore psychology. Really? I completely ignore it. I saw that. I would say that you talk a lot about it. Like you've probably never heard me say the word psychology. Not the word psychology, but what you're like, maybe I'm blanking it. Right. So, so to get, no, I don't wanna get too far into that cuz I will go there. But, so this is, this is like for everyone. Like if you want to basically have your bullshit-o-meter always turned on, it's separating out when people give reasons, because statements, or just blank statements of like, the other day someone was like, there's only 3 ways that you can make a customer worth more. And then they continued the sentence. I was like, that's just false. They just started the statement that way. And a lot of people make statements that are just false. They have no idea what they're saying. And so we walk through a framework when we're trying to basically detect bullshit, which is logic, evidence, utility, which is what does this mean, how do you know, and so what. So I'll give you an example. So I had someone the other day say, I'm stressed because I'm lonely. And I was like, okay. I was like, what does lonely mean to you? It's a bucketed term, right? It's a bundled term. And he was like, well, I was like, that on Friday night you have no one to text or that people don't respond back to you? Or like, what does that mean to you? Because there's a thing, there's an activity that occurred and then they described it. They chunk it up as loneliness. But when you get 2 steps below that up to like what occurred, what was the action that got stunted or something that you wanted that you didn't get, then you can get a lot more specific. We're like, okay. So then I say, all right, so that was the lonely occurrence. Now, have you been stressed before when that wasn't happening? Yes. Okay. So then how do you know that that thing has anything to do with your stress? They're completely decoupled. Right? It's like, all right, and who cares? You're stressed. Have you been stressed when things are going well? Yes. Have you been stressed when things are not going well? Yes. So in general, you're stressed when you're alive. Noted. What's your point? Right? And so we like breaking this down allows you to just be less confused about what other people say. And so the reason I'm going here is because most people are full of shit. Not purposefully, not maliciously, they just don't know any better. And so they just like parrot out other things. They talk about pop psychology, whatever. And I, for the most part, have just erased feelings, intentions, beliefs, all of these words from my vocabulary in terms of what influences behavior, because I just only focus on what can we observe? Because if I were to say, this guy's really motivated, I'd say, how do you know? What does motivation mean to you? I had a lady say, can you motivate me? I was like, define motivation. And she just like stood there and melted. And I was like, right. So you want me to answer a question that you can't define the word for? So what's the likelihood that you get what you want? Really low. And so, but the thing is, is we ask questions about stuff all the time we can't define, which means maybe we need to ask better questions or at least know what the fuck we're talking about. And so anyways, I bring this up because if you, going back to the motivation thing, if I say this person's really motivated, you'd say, how do you know? It's like, well, they do all the stuff. It's like, great, then forget about the concept or label of motivation and just say, This person does these things. Great. And so I don't care if you feel motivated or not. If you do these activities, people describe you that way. And if you do these activities— when I had the conversation with the dick in particular, right, I said, I want to be clear, I don't care if you're a dick. I don't care if you hate everyone. As long as you behave this way, it doesn't matter to me. And so a lot of people spend all this time trying to be like, there's these 7 stages of awareness. I'm like, how do you know? How do you know that? What's your evidence for that? And so what? Like, what are the activities someone has to do? Okay, they have to see your ad. Great. Then they have to interact with it in some way. They have to take an action. So if you go through the Leads book, I walk through the lead stages in the book, and it's only based on the observable. They took a step, then they give you their information. They give you means to contact them. Then after you have means to contact, like, you— these are the things that, like, no one can, like, fight me. Like, these are the things that have to occur. And so if you reason up from, what can I observe with my eyes, it makes life a lot easier. Even when you're talking to, like, a spouse, you're like, okay, I'm really upset. Like, okay, what does that mean right now? How do you know you're upset? And so what? What do you want me to do about it? And so then you can just be like, when you say this, what do you want me to do? When you say, like, if someone says like, you should know, it's like, oh, I'll play that game. I'm hungry either means you would like me to go get you food. You would like us to go get food together. It could mean that you want space. It could mean you're in a bad mood. I was like, but I won't take one cue for 6 behaviors. Pick. And then it makes things a lot easier. And so you can start training realistically, like anyone in your company to behave a certain way by just saying, when you say this, what do you wanna have happen? And also when you're having the conversation with staff or employees or whatever, like sometimes we in the moment, like someone disrespects you, you want to like immediately insult them or whatever, right? But you're like, okay, well, what do I want to have happen? Well, if I insult them, they're going to be more resistant to me in the future, but I need to have more influence over them, not less. So me counter punishing to prevent their thing in the future, it's probably going to be counterproductive. And so what can I say that increases the likelihood that what I want to have happen happens? And so it's like taking a second step forward, I mean, or back, to think what's the second order of magnitude effect on their behavior rather than what I feel like doing in the moment. And so when you're trying to look for, okay, how do I manage people better or how do I train people better, most training is just not chunked down far enough. And so the people who are successful in whatever your education thing is come in more qualified than other people. Like, have you ever had a student or a customer who you're like, this guy's gonna win no matter what? Right? It's not you, it's 'cause them. Because they have a history of skills, they have a larger skillset that they bring to the table. And so fundamentally, the people who are successful with your program are lacking the things you teach. The people who are not successful lack those things and other things. And so to have the most comprehensive training, you would have to start with, here's how you write words. Here's how you type. Here's how the internet works. Of course you're not going to do that because there's a base assumption, which is what qualifies someone to be a customer, of a certain level of skills. It also works the same way with an employee. There's a certain level of skills that are required to work for this role. And so if someone does have a deficiency, then the question is, what's the return on effort? I think I could teach someone who has Down syndrome to be a neurosurgeon. Well, I couldn't, but somebody could, right? It just might take 30 years. It's probably not worth it. 'Cause for the same resources, we get 2,000 other neurosurgeons who don't have Down syndrome, right? And so if you think about your customers that way, it's like, and simply thinking about things like take out character traits, take out beliefs, whatever. It's just, I need them to behave this way. That's it. Just break it down to the activities and it makes a lot easier. And so fundamentally it's like, I wish I were more charismatic. I wish I were more patient. I wish I were more confident. If you just de-bundle those things and just say, how do I break this down to the smallest level? And how do I just do those activities? It makes it a lot easier. And so usually when training does not work, it's because we made an assumption of a skillset that they didn't have. And so the more advanced someone is, the vaguer the instruction can be. So I can say, or Sam could say, hey man, do you think you just market school? And I say, sure. That's it. That's the directive. It's not like, okay, do you think you can make this many pieces of content? Do you think you could run this many pieces of ad? Or like whatever it is, Right? And if I'm like, hey, do you think you can make an amazing product? Can you make it? He's like, sure. Like, it's not like, do you think you'd have an activation sequence or onboarding, or we're gonna do these things in return? I like, I trust that he's gonna do it because he has the skillset. You trust that I can do it because I have the skillset. And so fundamentally, the more skilled the person is, the bigger the instruction can be. And so if you have low-level people, you don't have a lot of room for vagueness. So you have to be more specific with your instruction. As people get higher and higher up in your organization, you can be vaguer and vaguer with the instruction cuz they have more skills. And so experts fundamentally just have more ways to be rewarded within the same context. Like, if you're really good at editing video, then you have many things that reward you because you have more skills. If you're really bad at it, there's very few things that reward you. And so that's what mastery development is.