How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

by Adams, Scott

  Hypnosis is an inexact process because every brain has a different mix of chemistry. For example, if I ask you to relax and imagine a forest in the summer, most of you would find that a pleasing image. But people who are afraid of bears or afraid of getting lost might get agitated by the thought of a forest. A hypnotist learns to detect slight changes in breathing, posture, movement, and skin tone to know if the images presented are working as planned. Adjustments are made accordingly. In the simplest terms, a hypnotist tries to do more of whatever works and less of what doesn’t.

  My experience with hypnosis completely changed the way I view people and how I interpret the choices they make. I no longer see reason as the driver of behavior. I see simple cause and effect, similar to the way machines operate. If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.

  Recently my wife and I went shopping for a new vehicle. We looked at a lot of models online and in person, and none were irresistible. Then we came upon a vehicle that was so “us” that I laughed when I saw it. I could almost feel my brain make up its mind before we had done one iota of reasoning, data gathering, or negotiating. I could tell that my wife had the same experience. This car was so obviously going to belong to us that seeing it was like peering into the future.

  Predictably, everything we learned about the car after that point seemed either good or good enough. We convinced ourselves that the price was reasonable. We convinced ourselves that the features were just what we wanted. And eventually we convinced ourselves that we had negotiated a good deal.

  The normal way people would look at our car-buying experience is that we saw a model that looked good enough to interest us then we did research and applied our reason and came to a rational decision. The reality is quite different. The amateur hypnotist in me knows that our visceral reaction to the car was the beginning and end of the “thinking” that went into the purchase. Our powers of reason did some due diligence to make sure it met our basic requirements, but we already knew it would. The purchase was an irrational decision that tried, and failed, to sell itself to me as the product of reason.

  It is tremendously useful to know when people are using reason and when they are rationalizing the irrational. You’re wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when reason is not influencing the decision. If you’ve ever had a frustrating political debate with your friend who refuses to see the logic in your argument, you know what I mean. But keep in mind that the friend sees you exactly the same way.

  When politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn’t matter. Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie. If you’re perplexed at how society can tolerate politicians who lie so blatantly, you’re thinking of people as rational beings. That worldview is frustrating and limiting. People who study hypnosis start to view humans as moist machines that are simply responding to inputs with programmed outputs. No reasoning is involved beyond eliminating the most absurd options. Your reasoning can prevent you from voting for a total imbecile, but it won’t stop you from supporting a half-wit with a great haircut.

  If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You’ll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.

  On an episode of The Bachelorette, a show on ABC, one of the contending single men played a practical joke on the young woman he hoped to marry. The joke involved taking her to his parents’ home and convincing her that he still lived there, which he didn’t. The joke was well executed, complete with a fake bedroom that was a disgusting mess. What the suitor failed to understand is that the bachelorette would still feel the scenario in the joke long after the truth was revealed. In the bachelorette’s mind—the irrational part that we all have—the memory of this fellow being a live-at-home loser was like a stain that couldn’t be removed. I think the bachelorette genuinely appreciated the joke and had a good laugh. But my wife and I turned to each other and said, “He’s toast.” He was eliminated soon after. We can’t know how much impact the joke had on the bachelorette’s decision, but my training with hypnosis tells me it was probably huge.

  Apple owes much of its success to Steve Jobs’s understanding that the way a product makes users feel trumps most other considerations, including price. If Steve Jobs had seen people as rational beings, he might have followed a path similar to Dell, selling highly capable machines at the lowest possible price. Dell succeeded too, of course, but if buyers were rational, there would have been only one computer manufacturer left after about a year; consumers would always buy the best computer for the money and drive out the bad players overnight. Luckily for Dell and several other Windows computer manufacturers, there are enough irrational people with poor information to keep several companies afloat so long as their products are confusingly similar. Jobs’s worldview led him to a business model with high margins, whereas Windows computers have become commodities.

  If you feel I’m overstating the case that people are irrational, allow me to put some boundaries on that idea. People certainly make the small decisions based on rational considerations. You probably invest your money in ways that are prudent, or so you think. But keep in mind that the financial meltdown of 2009 happened because even the best minds in finance were irrationally optimistic about financial instruments they couldn’t hope to understand.

  Rational behavior is especially useless in any situation that is too complex for a human to grasp. Cell-phone companies exploit that fact by offering pricing plans that are too complicated to compare with the competition. (I coined the word “confusopoly” to describe that strategy.) The intent is to prevent consumers from using whatever small reasoning power they possess to compare prices and features. Instead, consumers make largely uninformed decisions and convince themselves they did well. I speak from experience, having moved from one cell phone carrier to another recently, while planning a third move soon. I tell myself that each of the moves was based on price, coverage, and features. But reason didn’t help me the first two times I chose a cell phone carrier, and it probably won’t help the next time because the pricing plans are intentionally hard to compare.

  I don’t think you need to become a hypnotist to understand human psychology, although it helps. But I do think a working knowledge of psychology is essential to your success—both personally and professionally. Consider it a lifelong learning process. You’ll be glad you did. Over time it starts to feel like a superpower that allows you to understand things that confuse and confound those around you.

  Business Writing

  I never took a writing class in high school or in college. I learned the basics in English classes and that seemed good enough. I could write sentences that people understood. What else did I need?

  I did notice that some people in the business world wrote with an impressive level of clarity and persuasiveness. But I figured that was just because those people were extra smart. It never occurred to me that there was some technique involved and that we unwashed citizens could easily learn it.

  One day during my corporate career I signed up for a company-sponsored class in business writing. This was part of my larger strategy of learning as much as I could about whatever might someday be useful while my employer was willing to foot the bill. I didn’t have high hopes that the class would change my life. I was just looking for some tips and tricks for better writing.

  I was very wrong about how useful the class would be. If I recall, the
class was only two afternoons long. And it was life altering.

  As it turns out, business writing is all about getting to the point and leaving out all of the noise. You think you already do that in your writing, but you probably don’t.

  Consider the previous sentence. I intentionally embedded some noise. Did you catch it? The sentence that starts with “You think you already do that” includes the unnecessary word “already.” Remove it and you get exactly the same meaning: “You think you do that.” The “already” part is assumed and unnecessary. That sort of realization is the foundation of business writing.

  Business writing also teaches that brains are wired to better understand concepts that are presented in a certain order. For example, your brain processes “The boy hit the ball” more easily than “The ball was hit by the boy.” In editors’ jargon, the first sentence is direct writing and the second is passive. It’s a tiny difference, but over the course of an entire document, passive writing adds up and causes reader fatigue.

  Eventually I learned that the so-called persuasive writers were doing little more than using ordinary business-writing methods. Clean writing makes a writer seem smarter and it makes the writer’s arguments more persuasive.

  Business writing is also the foundation for humor writing. Unnecessary words and passive writing kill the timing of humor the same way they kill the persuasiveness of your point. If you want people to see you as smart, persuasive, and funny, consider taking a two-day class in business writing. There aren’t many skills you can learn in two days that will serve you this well.

  Accounting

  I found accounting nearly impossible to learn because of the bubbling moat of boredom that surrounds the entire field. But a basic understanding of accounting is necessary to be a fully effective adult in a modern society, even if you never do any actual accounting on your own.

  Accounting is part of the vocabulary of business, and if you don’t understand it on a concept level, the world will be a confusing place. In particular it’s helpful to be able to create your own cash-flow projection on a spreadsheet and feel some confidence that you understand the tax impacts and the so-called time value of money.* Accounting overlaps with the fields of economics and business, and in each of those fields you need an understanding of accounting practices.

  In my town there’s a tiny restaurant that has changed hands several times, always with a new concept and menu. The one thing that all of the concepts have in common is that they can’t work because there aren’t enough tables in the place to cover their expenses. (I have a good idea what their expenses are because I once owned two restaurants in the area.) My guess is that each new operator has plenty of culinary skill and no accounting skill. No one with accounting skill would get involved with a business model that can’t work on paper.

  You can pay others to do your accounting and cash-flow projections, but that only works if you can check their work in a meaningful way. The smarter play is to learn enough about accounting and spreadsheets that you understand the basics.

  Design

  In today’s world we’re all designers, whether we like it or not. You might be designing PowerPoint presentations or a Web site for your start-up or flyers for your kid’s school event. You’re also furnishing your home, buying clothes you hope look nice to others, and so on. Design used to be the exclusive domain of artists and other experts. Now we’re all expected to have a working understanding of design.

  If you’re like me, you were born with no design skills whatsoever. I was amazed to learn, well into my adult years, that design is actually rules based. One need not have an “eye” for design; knowing the rules is good enough for civilians.

  For example, landscape designers will tell you that it’s better to put three of the same kind of bush in your yard, not two and not four. Odd numbers just look better in that context. You don’t need an eye for design to count to three, and you get the same result as the expert, at least in that limited example.

  I also learned that art composition for anything from a magazine cover to an oil painting to a PowerPoint slide should conform to a few basic templates. The most common is the L-shaped layout. You imagine a giant letter L on the page and fill in the dense stuff along its shape, leaving less clutter in one of the four open quadrants. Artists call the uncluttered part negative space. In the case of an oil painting, you might have a tree going up one side, some landscape on the bottom, and the open sky in the top left. You can change it up by rotating the L and leaving a different quadrant less busy than the rest, but it’s still the L concept.

  When you take a photograph, you can use the same concept. Instead of centering the person in the pictures, adjust your field until the person is one side of the L and the ground is the bottom. The less-busy quadrant might be some landscape or the sunset.

  When you design a PowerPoint slide or a Web page, it’s the same idea. You leave one quadrant less busy than the rest. Skim through any well-designed magazine and you’ll see the L design in 80 percent of the art and photography. The other 20 percent will be some special cases that I won’t go into here. I’m only trying to convince you of the importance of design and the ease with which you can pick up the main idea. Learn just a few design tricks and people will think you’re smarter without knowing exactly why.

  Conversation

  Few people are skilled conversationalists. Most people are just talking, which is not the same thing. The difference is that skilled conversationalists have learned techniques that are surprisingly nonobvious to a lot of people. I was among the clueless about conversation skills for the first half of my life. When I was a teen, I thought conversation was a complete waste of time and something to be avoided. I was aware that there were several alleged reasons for conversation, but I didn’t see much value in them. I was a bore.

  There are probably a dozen or more reasons to have a conversation, depending on how you slice it. You might start a conversation to …

  Exchange information

  Plan

  Complain

  Entertain

  Feel connected

  Befriend

  Seduce

  Persuade

  Be polite

  Avoid awkward silence

  Brag

  A bad conversationalist will focus on the impoverished part of the list, doing a lot of bragging, complaining, and exchanging of information. It’s fair to say that such a person doesn’t understand what conversation is or how to do it. I fell into that category for the first few decades of my life.

  My first inkling that conversation was a learnable skill, and that the benefits of conversation were larger than I imagined, happened while I was taking the Dale Carnegie course I mentioned earlier. The focus of the class was on public speaking, but we also learned techniques for making conversation with strangers, such as one might in a party or business situation. The technique is laughably simple and 100 percent effective. All you do is introduce yourself and ask questions until you find a point of mutual interest.

  I’ll paraphrase the Dale Carnegie question stack as best I remember it. It goes something like this:

  What’s your name?

  Where do you live?

  Do you have a family?

  What do you do for a living?

  Do you have any hobbies/sports?

  Do you have any travel plans?

  If you’re like me, the questions seem a bit too awkward and personal for someone you just met. Prior to experiencing the Dale Carnegie course I would meet someone new and immediately go into joking mode because I didn’t know what else to talk about. I discovered that perhaps only 5 percent of the general population wants to get into joking mode with a stranger. And of that 5 percent, maybe only half of them will appreciate whatever you think is funny. Everyone else will want you to go away. While most people enjoy humor, the typical person doesn’t go directly there before getting to know someone.

  The secret to making the list of six questions work wit
hout seeming awkward is in understanding that the person you meet will feel every bit as awkward as you. That person wants to talk about something interesting and to sound knowledgeable. Your job is to make that easy. Nothing is easier than talking about one’s self. I would go so far as to say that 99 percent of the general public love talking about themselves. When you ask a stranger a personal question, you make that person happy. Your question relieves the stress of awkward silence and gets the conversation moving. Best of all, it signals that you have interest in the stranger, which most people interpret as friendliness and social confidence, even if you’re faking it. And faking social confidence leads to the real thing over time.

  Your job as a conversationalist is to keep asking questions and keep looking for something you have in common with the stranger, or something that interests you enough to wade into the topic. In my entire life I have never met a stranger who didn’t have some fascinating life experiences that spilled out if I asked the right questions. Everyone is interesting if you make the situation feel safe. Here’s a summary of good conversation technique.

  Ask questions.

  Don’t complain (much).

  Don’t talk about boring experiences (TV show, meal, dream, etc.).

  Don’t dominate the conversation. Let others talk.

  Don’t get stuck on a topic. Keep moving.

  Planning is useful but it isn’t conversation.

  Keep the sad stories short, especially medical stories.

  The point of conversation is to make the other person feel good. If you do that one simple thing correctly, the other benefits come along with the deal. For example, a person who likes you is more likely to be persuaded, to recommend you for good opportunities, to share information, and to want a relationship with you. And if you must complain, because it’s just too hard to keep it in, you’re better off complaining to someone who already likes you; that way you’ll get the empathy you want.