Repeat Yourself, a Lot
tomtunguz.com
tomtunguz.com
It’s honestly amazing to me how much mileage I’ve gotten out of simply saying, “I heard you say X about Y. Does that sound right to you?” a couple of times during discussions just to make sure that everyone is clear that we’re all discussing the same thing.
It seems like “common sense” to clarify your understanding of someone else’s communication but I haven’t run into very many people who actually take the time to do it.
This is not only useful for improving communication but for making other parties satisfied they are being heard.
I do this too and it gives people an opportunity to clarify their views, which everyone appreciates, and often leads to them explaining broader motivations which helps develop trust.
I recommend reading “ Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” by Chris Voss if you are interested in conversation tactics.
Your parent comment seems to be talking more about summarising someone else's point in your own words, which is a deeper reflection on what someone means, and an even stronger signal that you're actively listening. (That summary is what gets you a "that's right" in the terminology of Voss. Mirroring is used to get your counterparty to expand on what they're saying, not just go "that's right.")
E.g. you are on a business meeting and your counterpart just took his glass of wine and sipped. Mirror it and sip your wine a few seconds later. Or do it with your hot date.
Mirroring works. Most of the time.
As apparently does using someone's name. Most (not all) people like hearing their name. Try to find out if they like or dislike hearing their name and either use their name a lot or very very seldomly.
I.e. for most people even in a 1 to 1 conversation say "Thank you Brent" and not just "Thank you".
If you’re pitching me your new product you get one “that’s a great question” and one ridiculous insertion of my name before you get a hard no.
Coincidentally these crappy tactics usually go with crappy products so it’s an easy win.
I think that can work in text.
(Or repeat the things you want to hear more about. And s/he will tend to understand and talk more about that.)
On a side note I found the book to be interesting, and I used few of his techniques to negotiate price of my now current house.
Sounds like a candid camera experiment waiting to happen
Anti mirroring the interviewers / recruiters during an interview
Which can be the last things, or not.
It's not enough to be a parrot -- one also need to understand the other person's perspective: what among the stuff s/he said, does she care the most about
(At least how I remember it)
Summarizing what they said (show you understand it) but like you're just now discovering the truth behind it - together with them.
The only sales technique that's really stuck with me.
well, that might be conversational mirroring, idk, but mirroring is a body language phenomenon, where one person crosses their arms, then the other does, one crosses legs, and the other one does, etc.
it's something people do naturally, unconsciously, and it indicates agreement.
then, it is suggested by salesman types, one should engage in a conscious (cynical) version of it where you mirror somebody on purpose, to make them think that you are in sync with them.
Or are you talking about my comment? In that case I'm quite confused.
E: ok this is amusing. I found this article: https://blog.blackswanltd.com/the-edge/how-to-get-buy-in-sta....
- Ask a "no-orietated" question
- Go silent (Effective pause so they can answer)
- Follow-up with a calibrated "what" or "how" question
- Repeat as necessary
This feels very similar to my default communication style, so it's funny to see it documented like this.
“Ah okay, so ingress hits our service named BigMouth, which… acts as a load balancer and proxy essentially?”
I wrote a little review + gist here: https://nts.strzibny.name/learning-negotiation-never-split-t...
For example, "We reviewed <garbled> and found the events hadn't been logged." -> "You reviewed what and found the events hadn't been logged?"
It’s hard to clear the air after arguing about different things for 20 minutes.
When an angry customer called me to complain about shipment, product or what not, due to aforementioned difficulties associated with intl calls, I had to first make sure I understand what they were saying. I try my best to put together what the situation was and repeat back to them in my own words for them to confirm. I kid you not, angry customers always get much less angry once they realized that I understand their situation.
The emotional change resulted from being merely understood was so amazing and the interaction was always precious to me like I made a new friend.
So you start by identifying a problem or goal (or a few), and write it down, and walk everyone through why that's important. Then you talk to everyone about what they're working on - does that work ladder up to that problem or goal? How? Then on a regular basis, you talk about how the team is progressing against those problems/goals. Send out emails celebrating wins and specifically explain why they are important to those goals. Then if you hit a goal, you have a party, and you genuinely thank everyone involved in hitting that goal, and recognize them (even if it's everyone).
And by the same token, if people want to get distracted, you bring it back to those core goals - "hey, it sounds great that we've got this cool opportunity to expand into eastern europe if we internationalize the product, but how does that get us closer to our goal of getting 50% of our current enterprise customers fully rolled out with all critical feature requests addressed?"
You have to be able to tell a story, build a narrative, take criticism and debate, organically bring people's work back to the story, and so on. It's not EASY, but it's incredibly powerful when done well (and I am not saying I am great at this, I've seen people who do it beautifully, but I do it better than many people I have worked for).
Having read that book, I've realised people need to hear something many times before their system 1 will even consider thinking of it as true. So these days, I have much more patience and I deliberately employ repetition strategies -- sometimes with powerful logical arguments, but sometimes without, too. It's about as effective either way, in my experience.
Saying "we need to also consider a solution that doesn't use Oracle" in different contexts and with different reasons attached over a few weeks time somehow mysteriously gets people to think that maybe we should at least consider a solution that doesn't use Oracle.
I know this is not the same thing as the linked article but I just love this fundamental guidance to public speaking.
It might just be a personal thing but it’s never felt useful and just serves to lower the signal to noise ratio. I always skip the intro and summary sections. I find the same with blog posts that religiously follow this structure.
Just tell me the actual information!
It could be a very subjective thing. I have a short attention span and will generally crank up the speed of these video courses too. I just want to quickly and efficiently extract the raw value without the fluff.
I don’t find it helps comprehension and retention. (For me, the only thing that does is immediately putting into practice what you learn).
1. The content is extensive, or
2. The information is being presented in real time without the opportunity for review.
Courses often use this structure because the primary audience are the students in the classroom, which fits criterion 2.
Written content roughly the length of a book chapter often follows this structure because they fit criterion 1. There's enough content that the intro and summary contribute non-trivial insights.
Short blog posts on trivial ideas use this format because of either SEO or cargo culting, I assume.
Online learning content seems to unnecessarily and blindly follow this structure even when a lot of the time neither 1 or 2 apply. Perhaps because face-to-face courses would traditionally do the same.
The ability to rewind, slow down, rewatch etc. for online content removes a lot of the need for extensive intros and summaries. But there are certain scenarios where it's still a valid structure.
“This is not a source of value!”
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/
He basically makes the argument that companies live or die by their focus on a long term strategy, and the role of the CEO is to basically be the human embodiment of that strategy. The CEO repeats themself over and over and over again so that everyone at the company intuitively knows what they want and what direction to move it.
And, like your reference, also maintains that they ratify decisions that are in line with the company values.
Corollary is that much of what you have been told, and have come to believe implicitly, is false. It is your inborn responsibility as a human to discover which are falsehoods, and root out behaviors based on them. The project has barely begun.
People some time don't pay attention. Or they do, but they forget. They have habits in their actions and way of thinking.
So I agree. You have to repeat yourself.
Current job, no so much, it's really dependent on the culture of the workplace.
> When selling a company, a product, or an idea to customers, employees, investors, candidates, repeating a consistent message several times embosses the message upon the individual’s memory. It establishes clarity: Redpoint is a leading venture capital firm.
> In a 2015 study, researchers discovered that familiarity can overpower rationality and that repetitively hearing that a certain fact is wrong can affect the hearer's beliefs.[4] Researchers attributed the illusory truth effect's impact on participants who knew the correct answer to begin with, but were persuaded to believe otherwise through the repetition of a falsehood, to "processing fluency".
> The illusory truth effect plays a significant role in such fields as election campaigns, advertising, news media, and political propaganda.
From the article:
> When selling a company, a product, or an idea to customers, employees, investors, candidates, repeating a consistent message several times embosses the message upon the individual’s memory. It establishes clarity: Redpoint is a leading venture capital firm.
It's not that hard, seriously. This is a staple of propaganda repackaged into low quality blogspam.
Let's take `Redpoint is a leading venture capital firm.`. What does that even mean? Leading what? In what? It's a pointless meaningless phrase. But if you hear it often enough it becomes 'truth' in whatever the context you're in at that point.
Basically one of the major ways in which we manufacture, package and sell bullshit.
I agree with your overall premise. Then again it seems like that this is one way people can become successful. There is value in knowing.
PS: What if the method is applied to something, which has some real substance? And not on something pointless like the phrase you cited.
The word 'propaganda' has a negative connotation. But there is 'good' propaganda, or propaganda which is done for a good or valuable cause. A recent example would be pro-vaccine propaganda.
but, please don't keep repeating yourself in meetings it's annoying
To make it less annoying, signal that you have the message by voicing the same memes. Once it's obvious that enough people get it, those people can start repeating something else instead.
also, some people just keeping repeating stuff in slightly different ways
I suspect sometimes this is not planned but they're thinking out loud
It makes a lot of sense. Almost everyone here will know about spaced repetition and SuperMemo, but even improperly spaced repetition (rapid repetition during a speech or lesson) is almost certainly better than no repetition.
Are there any studies that badly spaced repetition can be neutral or negatively affect recall?
I’m very curious. How did you come across this book? It seems very niche.
I don't remember, unfortunately. I get most of my book recommendations from authors of other books I like, and sometimes from HN. So probably one of those two!
This book in particular lies close to the naturalistic decision making (NDM) research, which I associate primarily with Gary Klein, which in my mental knowledge graph has an antagonistic connection to Kahneman and Tversky, so it might have been along that path. Or one of the millions of side paths that also connect those two. Or something else entirely.
Original comment based on misreading below.
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Depending on where the emphasis of your question lies, there are two questions in your comment.
1. Why do people publish research about such a niche subject? It seems that a lot of organisations have a self-interest in finding out how experts come to be such, and if there's a way to optimise that path.
2. How come this niche stuff is collected into a book rather than some other format? You wouldn't believe what kind of niche books there are out there!
For those who wondered: Accelerated Expertise: Training for High Proficiency in a Complex World
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17399473-accelerated-exp...
These types of blogs (and fortune cookie thinkers in general) routinely do 'you have to have laser focus', followed by 'don't put all of your eggs in one basket' without any hint of irony or self awareness.
I find my internal conflict with DRY and what's actually necessary for leadership (yes, repeat, repeat often, then repeat again) continually show up, but absolute, the best teachers and leaders tend to say the same thing over and over again.