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Deletion is a gift

June 13, 2025 by mickmel 2 Comments

Reading Time: < 1 minute

If you’re going to be providing information to someone else, whether it’s a speech, a meeting, or a presentation, one of the best gifts you can give is one of deletion.

In the book “Smart Brevity“, the authors say:

“Delete, delete, delete. What words, sentences or paragraphs can you eliminate before sending? Every word or sentence you can shave saves the other person time. Less is more—and a gift.”

It’s easy to write a long piece, but cutting it down requires effort — and that effort will be appreciated by the recipient. Remove fat and bloat, cut down your slides by 90%, weigh your words carefully, and take the time to write something shorter.

Everyone will appreciate it.

Filed Under: Content, Empathy

The customer isn’t a moron – she is your wife

April 22, 2025 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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It can be easy to get frustrated with your customers, but it’s almost always a bad move. As Seth Godin said years ago:

“if you hate your customers, you’re going to hate your business.“

You don’t have to like all of them all of the time, and we even fire some from time to time. However, on the whole, we love our clients and I hope that you love yours.

In David Ogilvy’s classic book “Confessions of an Advertising Man“, he reminds us of this with a simple statement:

“The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.”

To him, it’s a way to remind us that people aren’t “consumers”, they’re humans. They have names, they have lives, they’re probably fairly smart, and they have a lot going on. As many things do, it brings me back to the idea of sonder, which is the idea of “that moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours“.

Customers can be frustrating at times, but they’re humans. They have lives, and good days, and bad days, and everything in between. Heck, the consumer might even just be your wife.

Filed Under: Business, Empathy

Branding is building a story

March 14, 2025 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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When people think about branding, they often think about logos and colors. Those are important aspects to a brand, but they’re really just reminders. Your true brand is telling a story.

This isn’t the story of your founder. It’s awesome that your grandfather started the company during the great depression and that it’s been in your family for 90 years, but that’s not the story that people care about. People want to know the story of why your company matters to them.

It’s the story of how your product will make them feel better, or work more efficiently, or raise more money, or keep their employees safer. It’s the story of how your product will make them healthier, or how it will help their children perform better in school.

Even moreso, it’s the story behind those stories. What does working more efficiently really gain for a company? Why does it matter if their children perform better in school?

You need to have this story polished, and it should be front and center. People have problems, and your business solves a problem of theirs. Share the problem, share your solution, and share how their life will change as a result of working with you.

Then, once they’ve become a big fan of yours and how you’ve helped change their life, they might find it really neat that to learn about how your grandfather was able to get things started all those years ago.

Filed Under: Business, Empathy

Change your mind or prove that you’re right?

March 8, 2025 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I write quite often about the value in changing your mind, largely because it’s something that I work hard to do. I don’t want to change my mind simply for the sake of mixing things up, but rather to avoid holding an incorrect position simply because it was something that I used to believe.

In her book “The Charisma Myth“, author Olivia Fox Cabane shares this thought on changing your mind:

Why do split-second impressions last for so long? One reason is that, according to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, when “faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

Behavioral research has since proven him right. Once we’ve made a judgment about someone, we spend the rest of our acquaintanceship seeking to prove ourselves correct. Everything we see and hear gets filtered through this initial impression.

As Galbraith says, this is something that we all tend to do to some degree or another. If you don’t intentionally seek to change your mind, your default will be to defend your position even when that’s a bad move to make.

Sadly, I see some folks moving in the other direction. Seven years ago I shared about my friend “Joe” and how he often did a great job of sharing both sides of political situations. I didn’t generally agree with him, but he was influential in my eyes because of his ability to share the good and bad from every angle. In the years since then, he’s shifted from that to simply “getting busy on the proof” and making wild claims that seem out of character. In an effort to prove that his side is right, he’s instead forcing people away.

It’s easy for all of us to slip into that mode, but everyone is better off if you’re willing and able to change your mind when the information calls for it.

Filed Under: Empathy, Learning

Appreciate their interests

March 6, 2025 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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Charles Duhigg’s book “Supercommunicators” has many great insights in it, and a big thread through the book is about how to more deeply engage with those that you’re talking with.

A great way to do that is to simply ask more questions about the person you’re with. From the book:

Ask open-ended questions and listen closely. Get people talking about how they see the world and what they value most. Even if you don’t learn, right away, what others are seeking—they might not know themselves—you’ll at least inspire them to listen back. “If you want the other side to appreciate your interests,” Fisher wrote, “begin by demonstrating that you appreciate theirs.”

As I shared a few weeks ago, this can come from the idea of using your gift of curiosity to learn more about others.

That said, it’s easy for people to feel like they did this when they actually do the opposite. In Adam Grant’s “Give and Take“, he shares how people who talk a lot can feel like they understand others:

Logically, learning about the people around you should depend on listening. The less you talk, the more you should discover about the group. But Pennebaker found the opposite: the more you talk, the more you think you’ve learned about the group. By talking like a taker and dominating the conversation, you believe you’ve actually come to know the people around you, even though they barely spoke. In Opening Up, James Pennebaker muses, “Most of us find that communicating our thoughts is a supremely enjoyable learning experience.”

Avoiding that trap is the first key, and then simply “appreciating their interests” is likely to lead to a much better conversation and connection.

Filed Under: Empathy

Empathy doesn’t require agreement

February 27, 2025 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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I talk about empathy quite a lot (here are 160+ other posts on it), as I feel it’s one of the most important skills we can develop. Understanding the feelings and experiences of others is one of the best ways to connect and learn.

One of my favorite books from the past few years is Mónica Guzmán’s “I Never Thought of it That Way“, which explores ways to better understand those around us, particularly those that we disagree with. Her main premise of the book is:

“That’s because, to be totally frank with you (and if it isn’t already obvious), one of my deepest personal convictions in life is that understanding the people who confound us is always, always worth it.”

When recently digging back into Chris Voss’ “Never Split the Difference“, he had a similar take. His goal comes from the angle of negotiation, and he puts a nice twist on it, saying:

“The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas”

Guzmán thinks similarly in her book. She encourages you to work hard to understand the other person, but that doesn’t mean you need to agree with them. You should work to understand and see things from the other person’s point of view and it’ll really open up your eyes, but that doesn’t mean you need to agree with them at all.

Filed Under: Empathy

Is curiosity selfish?

February 19, 2025 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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I was recently listening to an episode of the “You Are Not So Smart” podcast where they were chatting with Mónica Guzmán (author of the excellent book “I Never Thought of it That Way“), and Mónica got into some interesting thoughts regarding curiosity.

She shared a story of when someone considered her curiosity to be selfish. As she explains, they didn’t mean it in derogatory way, simply stating that “you’re learning because you want to make yourself better“.

While they didn’t mean it in a bad way, she still felt it wasn’t accurate. In her case, she sees curiosity as a gift and a way to make deeper connections with others. From the show:

“And now I know why it bothers me, actually. Now I have realized why it bothers me, because curiosity is a gift. The gift of your interest in somebody else. It’s unexpected. We’re all running around. We’re very busy. You know, I’ll even meet friends and … I’m so touched when they actually care enough to ask like more than two or three questions about my day.”

I’ve never really thought of curiosity that way, and I think that’s an angle of it that I sometimes lack. It’s one thing to be curious about science or politics or whatever, but another to be intentionally curious about those around you. As she says, people tend to be “so touched when they actually care enough to ask like more than two or three questions about my day”.

I suppose curiosity can be selfish, but if you focus it outward it can be an amazing superpower.

Filed Under: Empathy

Weighing your words against the labor of ink

February 13, 2025 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I recently listened to the “Shell Game” podcast series, hosted by Evan Ratliff. He describes the show like this:

What would happen if you created a digital copy of yourself, powered by AI, and set it loose in the world? Evan Ratliff, longtime tech journalist, decided to find out. He combined a clone of his voice, an AI chatbot, and a phone line—many phone lines, actually—into what are called “voice agents.” Then for the six months, he sent them out… as himself.

It was a fascinating show, and I highly recommend that you give it a listen.

In the final episode of the show, Evan references a 100-year-old article in the New York Times (view on NYT, or view Google Doc) about a shopkeeper who resisted getting a telephone for as long as he could, but he finally relented. It’s not a long article, at right around 1,500 words, so it’s worth giving it a read.

The focus of the article is about keeping humanity in business and “who are in revolt against the mechanisms of the city“. In the article they share a bit about why the slower pace can be advantageous, saying:

“If you use machines, you write a hundred letters where one will do, but not if each word is weighed against the labor of spreading out a drop of ink.”

It feels like something I say a lot on here (such as these thoughts from Blaise Pascal and Woodrow Wilson), though I’ll admit that the concept of a daily blog largely runs counter to that idea. If I were hand-writing all of these posts, they’d certainly come out a bit differently. Even so, I work hard to keep my thoughts concise and I weigh them carefully against the time needed to read them.

I may not always succeed, but keeping in mind the “labor of spreading out a drop of ink” is a valuable idea for all of us.

Filed Under: Content, Empathy, Productivity

Leadership is serving those in your charge, not being in charge

February 8, 2025 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A few years ago Marie Forleo interviewed Simon Sinek on her podcast and they discussed “The Environment Good Leaders Create“. It was a short (12 min) fascinating discussion, and you can listen to it here.

Here are a few things that I pulled from it:

“Most leaders think leadership is about being in charge. No, it’s not. It’s about taking care of those in your charge. Most leaders think everybody works for them. No, you work for the people in your organization. It is your responsibility to take care of them, make them feel safe, and they will naturally want to cooperate and work hard and give you their blood and sweat and tears to advance your vision.”

Related, he also added:

“Leadership is the practice of putting the lives of others sometimes ahead of our interests.”

The last piece from the podcast that I’ll share reminded me a lot of the concept of Sonder; the moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours.

“So practicing leadership is like driving to work in the morning and someone wants to cut in your lane. Do you go forward or do you pull back? That’s leadership. Like, we don’t know. Maybe they’re running late for a big interview and they’ve been unemployed for six months. Maybe their boss is an ogre and they left late because their kids had trouble getting out to school today.”

Taking time to understand what might really be going on behind the scenes of someone else can make a huge difference in your outlook on the world. Using the car example in that last quote, I intentionally let people get away with all kinds of stuff when I’m driving, as it keeps me safer and keeps my stress levels down. All told, it makes my trips in the car last like 10 seconds longer because someone cut in front of me. I really don’t understand why people let things build up to the point of “road rage”.

Take care of those around you, understand that everyone has a full and complicated life, and things will go better on every front.

Filed Under: Empathy, Leadership

Compassionate Emptiness

February 6, 2025 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

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Compassion often requires work on the side of the person giving it, but sometimes the best work is to do nothing at all. Similar to the idea of avoiding the trap of “we have to do something“, compassion can sometimes be best served by becoming an empty vessel.

The book “Orbiting the Giant Hairball” shared a deep insight into this that really struck me. From the book, they said:

Compassionate emptiness. The two words seized me and would not let go. Compassionate emptiness. To me that meant a state of nonjudgmental receiving. I thought:

“I will try to be in that state when people come to me to recount their burdens.”

From that day on, whenever somebody would come by to pour out their company woes, I would listen. In silence.

I would imagine myself to be an empty vessel only to receive. As fully as possible. Without judgment.

This is something I tend to not do well with, as I like to see myself as a problem solver. How can you solve a problem if you’re listening in silence? Many times, that silence might indeed be the very best way to help solve the problem.

Filed Under: Empathy

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