How to change someone's mind
March 18, 2020
I've read many explanations lately about why people are not convinced by debate. Fortunately, James Clear points the way toward persuading people: treating them as friends.
JamesClear.com: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds, 2018-Sep-10 by James Clear
Be Kind First, Be Right Later
The brilliant Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”
When we are in the moment, we can easily forget that the goal is to connect with the other side, collaborate with them, befriend them, and integrate them into our tribe. We are so caught up in winning that we forget about connecting. It's easy to spend your energy labeling people rather than working with them.
What kind of mistake do you want to make?
March 08, 2020
Mistakes are a chance to collect information. Plan them carefully.
New Statesman: It’s impossible to live in a state of error-free perfection: the trick is to make the right mistakes, 2019-Jan-29 by Ian Leslie
On an individual level, it can be liberating to accept that the whole trick of life is deciding how, not whether, to screw up. A student may do better in an exam once she feels that nobody is expecting her to answer every question correctly. Every day, somebody starts a new business, fully aware that it may go kaput, having weighed that possibility against another error: creating the regret that comes from never trying in the first place.
When theatre directors give pep talks to their ensembles before an opening night, they often point out that the odd mistake is inevitable. They do so because the worst mistake of all would be for the performers to be so cautious that they forget to put their heart and soul into what they’re about to do. Well, your audience awaits. If it’s not too late to ask, what mistakes do you plan on making in 2020?
Start from accepted values
February 18, 2020
We actually can't change someone's values by talking with them. We could possibly affect their values by doing things with them. But more immediately we can show them that the values they currently hold are consistent with more options than they realize.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Conservative arguments for radical ideas, 2020-Jan-03 by Chris Dillow
...we don’t persuade people by telling them that their worldview is wrong and by demanding that they change the ideas of a lifetime. We are more likely to succeed by showing them that their ideas are consistent with things they might not have considered.
Here are some examples of what I mean....
Worker ownership. This sounds like a radical idea. But it’s not – and not just because law and accountancy practices are routinely owned by their workers. One inspiration for it comes from Hayek’s important point, that central planning is impossible because economic knowledge is fragmentary and dispersed. Worker control, more than hierarchy, can mobilize such knowledge. Hayek’s key insight – “you don’t know what you are doing” – is a challenge to top-down managers.
Email productivity defined
February 13, 2020
These days our emails are so complex, and our email sending platforms put out a firehose of data. If we could only get one piece of data, what would it be?
For most of us, it's whether the email we're sending is delivering our target audience to the web site. If 3% of the emails we sent resulted in a link-click. Then we're performing as well as can be expected.
Email Optimization Shop: From the Boards: CTR or CTOR? 2020-Feb-1 by Jeanne Jennings
CTR gives you a good read on how interested your recipients are in your message. That’s pretty much all your recipients — everyone that you sent the email to minus those that bounced.
Let’s keep the math simple. If you send to 100,000 people, and 1,000 of them bounce, your CTR denominator is 99,000. If 4,000 unique people click on a link in your message, that’s a CTR of 4.0% (4,000/99.000). We know that 4.0% of the people we sent to clicked on our message. Let’s call this pretty good, since the latest Q2 2019 Epsilon Email Trends and Benchmarks Reports put average CTR at 2.9%.