CM 235: Jonah Berger on How to Get Your Way
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All of us use language all the time. We write that email to try to convince a boss or a colleague or a client. We make that presentation to try to get an idea across. We want to convince people. We want to hold attention. We want to have deeper, better relationships. We all have things we're trying to achieve in all aspects of our lives. And by understanding the power of magic words, we can increase our impact in whatever area we're trying to be more impactful. Welcome to Curious Minds at Work. I'm your host, Gail Allen.

Almost everything we do, personally and professionally, is affected by the words we use. They help us build relationships, persuade others, and communicate feelings. But what if I told you that six types of words were better at doing those things than all the others?

These findings are at the heart of Jonah Berger's latest book, Magic Words, What to Say to Get Your Way. Jonah is a bestselling author who studied millions of words used in all kinds of settings. And he's found that certain words hold the key to getting your way. Whether you want to be more effective in achieving your goals or just become more aware of how you're coming across, this book is for you.

One quick ask, if you like the podcast, please take a moment to leave a rating on iTunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback sends a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now, here's my interview with Jonah Berger. Jonah Berger, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you back on. Thanks so much for having me back. The words we use matter more than we think. How big of a deal is this?

As I was writing this book and thinking about this space, and I've been kind of puddling around, I'll say, language for the past sort of 10 or 15 years or so, and I realized something quite shocking, which is that basically everything we do

it involves words. So, you know, whether we're writing emails, whether we're putting together presentations, whether we're making phone calls, whether we're talking to clients or colleagues or, you know, making a big speech, all of those things involve words. Words are how salespeople convince clients. They're how leaders lead. There's how doctors talk to patients, teachers talk to kids, parents parent. I mean, even our own private thoughts rely on language. And so

Basically everything we do involves language.

But there's an important but here, and that is that while we spend a lot of time thinking about what we want to say. So if I'm a leader and I'm making a big presentation, I'm thinking a lot about what are the main ideas I want to get across? Or if I'm a salesperson trying to convince a client, what are the main kind of points I want to hit to convince them to sort of seal the deal? We think a lot about what we want to say, but we think a lot less about how to say it.

the specific words that we use when saying those things. And that's a big mistake because subtle shifts in language can have a huge impact.

You know, using one word in a sentence, for example, can increase our influence by over 50%. You know, shifting the language we use when solving problems can make us more creative. Even when connecting with loved ones or, you know, better, you know, connecting with colleagues at work, the language used has a huge impact. And so the book is all about kind of what are these magic words? How do they work? And how, by understanding them, can we increase our own impact across all areas of our lives?

How do we know that word choice is so important versus other things like maybe the person who's saying it and how much status they have? Yeah. You know, I've thought a lot about that type of question. And honestly, I think about it a lot because I am not the greatest communicator in the world.

I am not in my own personal life, and I should... Personal life, I mean non-book writing life. So whether as a consultant, whether as a speaker, whether as a spouse or a dad or a soccer coach or all those different roles we all have, I don't always think about my language. I don't actually think I'm the best communicator out there. And I think all...

all of us have this kind of intuition that, look, you know, certain people are just really great with words, right? Like we can all think about someone in our own lives. They're just a great storyteller, a great speaker. And, you know, whenever they open their mouths, people listen. And we also know great writers, right? When we get something from them, we go,

wow, you know, that was so thoughtful or eloquent or so well put. I wish I could be a great speaker. I wish I could be a great writer. And I think the good news, having sort of spent some time working in this space and sifting through the research in this space, is that being a great writer, being a great speaker is not something you're born with. It's not like some people are just better at it by chance or luck, and it's sort of a fixed trait.

We can become better speakers. We can become better writers if we practice and we understand what works, right? Just like a sport, you know, the more you understand about hitting in baseball, the more you get on base. The more you understand about basketball, kind of mechanics of shooting, the more you make baskets. Same thing here. The more we understand how words work,

when they work, why they work, how to use them, the better speakers and writers and communicators we can all become. Tell us a little bit about, since you've spent a lot of time doing this, what are the methods and the tools that you've used to study this? Yeah, what's been so neat is two big changes in this space. So first of all, we've been using language. Our usage of language has not changed. Go back 50 years, we were still using language all the time.

But now much more of that language is captured in one way or another, recorded, transcribed, and for analysis can be analyzed, right? You and I are talking right now, but at the end of this conversation, you could spit out probably a transcription of what we talked about, an automated one, or someone could listen to the recording and write it down. In offices, we send out dozens, if not hundreds of emails every day with language in them.

We make presentations and save them as PowerPoint decks rather than write them on those old transparencies people might have used, you know, 20, 20 some odd years ago. As consumers, you know, we read online reviews and we share our opinions on social media. When we call customer service, those calls are recorded and potentially transcribed. And so there's much more language data out there than ever was before. And in my own research, for example, you know, we've analyzed movie scripts and song lyrics, thousands of songs.

tens of thousands of movies because that data is out there. But the second big trend that I think is quite neat is the tools to analyze these things.

So there's a whole field of research called natural language processing or automated textual analysis where people use tools like machine learning or simpler tools as well to count the number of words of different types, to measure the similarity of language, to parse these data sets of language that are out there.

And that's really what's been so exciting to me. You know, I learned about this space probably a decade ago working on a different project. I was doing some work on what makes online content viral. And we had all these articles, some of which had made the most email lists, some of which hadn't. And we wanted to say, well, what's different about them? Right. What's different about the language when article that goes viral and one that doesn't?

But there were too many to read. And we couldn't sit there and read thousands of articles. And so we were trying to figure out, is there a way to measure features of the content? And there was. We used a natural language processing software called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. And today, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other tools out there. But it's a great way to parse language, providing insight both to us as individuals, as leaders, as employees, as members of organizations, but

but also as organizations ourselves. We can parse the language our customers or clients create for a lot of insights as well.

So Jonah, one of the things that we do when we try to communicate with other people is we want to get them to take action. You explain it can be as simple as using a noun instead of a verb. What do you mean? Yeah. So one thing also in writing this book is I try to stay away from words like nouns and verbs because, you know, some of us are really smart and we did well in English class and we know what a noun is and a verb is. And other of us go a

And I'm more in that second camp, right? Like I can tell you now what a verb is because I spend a lot of time writing about it and thinking about it. But as regular people, we don't think in terms of nouns and verbs. We think in terms of language. So let me make that a little more concrete. And I would say a way to think about it is turning actions into identities. And what do I mean there? Well, often when we're asking for something, we need something, we often use some sort of verb to do that.

We say, can you help me? Help is a verb. We ask for help. Or if we work at, let's say, a nonprofit and we're trying to get people to do something like vote, we might say, hey, please go vote. Use the word vote, a verb, to encourage that particular action. But it turns out a subtle shift in language. By turning those actions into identities, we can actually make people more likely to do the actions. So there was a great study that was done

At Stanford University now, you know, many decades ago where they went to a local elementary school and they asked students for help cleaning up. So there was a big mess in the room. There were blocks everywhere and crayons everywhere. And, you know, they asked these little kids to clean up. You know, cleaning up is not a kid's favorite thing to do. And so they said, hey, you know, can you help me clean up?

So for some of the students, they said, can you help me clean up? For a second set of students, they made almost the identical request. It's if they added two letters. They said, can you be a helper and help me clean up? Can you be a helper and clean up? Now, help and helper are very similar. One is only two words longer than the other. But that led to a 30% increase

in the number of students that helped. And you could say, well, yeah, maybe that's something about kids and classrooms, but I'm in a workplace with adults. Is this really going to work? Well, a recent study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

tested whether they could use a similar idea to get people to vote. Again, voting is something we all know we should do, but we don't all make the time to do it. They sent out mailers to thousands of people encouraging them to vote. But for some people, they said, hey, please go vote. Will you please vote? And for other people, they said, will you be a voter? And here the difference is even smaller, right? Voter is just one extra letter from vote, adding an R on the end.

And yet that extra letter led to a 15% increase in the percentage of people who voted. And so what's the difference here? Well, the simple difference is these shifts turned actions, voting, helping, into identities. Being a voter, being a helper,

Because people want to hold desired identities. We all want to be smart and thoughtful and caring and knowledgeable and all those things that we care about. And if we turn actions as a way to claim those desired identities, right? Voting is not just an action. Sure, voting is important. But if voting is an opportunity to show myself and others that I'm a voter, well, now I'm more likely to do it. Or sure, helping is important. But if helping is a way to show myself and others that I'm a helper, I

I'm much more likely to do it. Right. And so by turning actions into identities, we can get people to be more likely to take those actions. The same thing works on the negative side. You know, losing is bad. Being a loser is

is worse. Cheating is bad on a test, but being a cheater, well, that's an even more negative thing. And so research finds that when trying to get students to not cheat on a test, telling them not to be a cheater made them less likely to do it because now cheating wouldn't just be a bad thing. It would be showing yourself and others that you're a cheater, which is this negative identity. And it's important because identities are more

consistent over time. They're more of a sort of fixed state. If I told you about two people, I have one friend who runs and I have another friend who's a runner, which of them do you think runs more often?

I kind of think it's that runner. It's the runner, right? The runner seems like a more, well, they're a runner. That must be part of who they are. Someone loves dogs. That's nice. They're a dog lover. It must be who they are. They drink coffee. Yeah, they drink coffee once in a while. They're a coffee drinker. It's part of who they are. And so identities seem much more stable online.

over time. And that has some interesting implications. One, as we talked about, by turning actions into identities, we can persuade others and get them to be more likely to do what we'd like them to do. But second, we can talk about ourselves and others in a way that shape how we and others are perceived, right? So if I'm writing a resume and I say I'm hardworking, people might say, oh, that's

That's great. But if I say I'm a hard worker, well, suddenly that seems like a more stable trait, right? If we're calling a colleague creative, other people will think they're, yeah, they're kind of creative. If we call them a creator, now they seem like they do it more often. If we want to get someone to do something, ask them to lead, that's a good thing. Being a leader, that's a more desirable trait. I'm more likely to do the work together.

there. And so by shifting actions into identities, by using these more fixed ways of describing people, it can make those actions or identities seem more desirable and make people more likely to go along. If you'd like the chance to get a free copy of this week's book, sign up for our newsletter, The 123, by heading to my website, gailallen.net.

Each new subscriber will automatically be entered into a drawing to win our most recent guest's book. Before we release the next episode, we'll send the winner their free copy and give them a shout out on the podcast. This week's winner is Niko from Greece. Congratulations, Niko. We'll be sending you a copy of Jill Schlesinger's book, The Great Money Reset. What's the one, two, three newsletter? It's one topic, two insights, and three actions you can take. Now back to my interview with Jonah Berger.

You talk about how words can also indicate who's in control and specifically words like can't and don't. How does this work?

Yeah, well, I'll get to Canandone in a second. Maybe I'll talk for a second about you first, because I think that's an even simpler way to think about this space. And you, again, is such a tiny word, right? Like it's three letters long, but you is really powerful. I did some work a few years ago for a large technology company.

And they asked me to look at all their customer service pages. So basically, you know, you have a problem with a computer, your phone's not working, you go to the website and try to figure out what to do.

And they have these pages. And when people read these pages, once in a while, you're asked, you know, was this information helpful? Some people say it was helpful. Some people say it wasn't. And we looked at whether the way the content was written. So same again, same what? Helping you fix your phone, helping you get your computer to do the right thing. Same what, but talked about differently. The language used shaped how helpful people found it.

And we found that the word you there had an interesting impact on how helpful pages were perceived. The word you, being used more often, more used was used, made people feel like that page was less helpful. And when we looked at why, we found something quite interesting, which is that you can make people feel like they're being blamed or that they have to do the work.

right when you go to a website and says you know if your phone isn't working you need to reboot the phone and then you need to do this other thing it can make you feel like well wait a second i've got to do all this work why do i need to do all the work it's your phone that isn't working right it seems more more difficult to do and also right why is it my fault i mean i didn't break the phone the phone broke it's your phone that broke

And so you can both suggest blame, but it can also be a little bit accusatory. And I see this happen a lot in interpersonal contexts as well. You know, in our home lives, you know, someone might ask us, did you walk the dog or did you cook dinner? In our work lives, someone might say, you know, did you finish that report we talked about? And while the person might just want to know, hey, is the report done? If they said, did you finish the report?

You can feel like as the listener being like, well, why is it my job to finish the report? Why are you putting the blame on me? A lot of people need to do this. How is it my fault? It can feel accusatory even if it's not. Similarly, in a customer service context, same thing. The more they say you, the more it's like, well, hold on. I called you because it's your problem, not my problem.

And so we need to be careful to avoid these accusatory yous, right? Yous can suggest who's in charge, which can be a good thing, but also who's responsible or who to blame. And that can be more challenging. And so we need to be careful how even we use a simple word like a you.

I thought that was really compelling and I was thinking a lot about the things that don't push my buttons when I read instructions from a company. Like for example, let's say I've got some kind of fitness tool that I want to sync and sometimes it just doesn't sync for me, especially since it's been acquired by another company.

And I was thinking about that language and saying to myself, wow, it's already annoying enough. And if they did add the you, it would become very clear very quickly that I have to do this work. I'm already doing the work and I resent it, but that would make it feel worse. That really resonated. So I was glad you pointed that out. And I love the way you described it, which is, you know, you by itself isn't necessarily bad.

Right. You know, if you're getting along with someone or things are going well, you can seem just fine. In fact, in some cases, when you're writing an email subject line, you're sending out to a large group of people or on social media posts, you can be good because it grabs attention. It shows that something is personalized. But if there's even a tinge of like anger, annoyance, discomfort, distrust going into it, any sort of a negative emotion, I think you can seem and could be interpreted in a negative negative way.

Absolutely. Were you surprised when you found those results? Did that surprise you or did you have a sense that that would be the case? I've, I've often found in working in this space, um, that you have a little bit of an idea of what might be going on going in, but you're never sure. Um, uh,

And so the results almost always surprise me. You is such a simple word. You asked about-- sorry, you asked about can't and don't earlier. And again, super simple, right? Often we say, I can't do this.

about, you know, our goals. So maybe we're trying to exercise more. And so we say, no, you know, I can't, I can't go do this. I need to go exercise or I can't eat that chocolate cake. I'm on a diet. And we do that, but we can't make it seem like we want to do the thing, but some external thing is preventing us. I want to eat that chocolate cake, but I can't. I'd rather go with you to this fun thing, but I'm stuck here exercising. And so it kind of

undermines our own efforts with a word like don't write a word. If I said, you know, I don't eat chocolate cake or no, I don't. I don't do things like that. It makes us feel much more in control. Like we have agency. We're in the driver's seat. I'm choosing not to do this thing, not because I'm being constrained externally, but because I made the decision.

And so even a simple word like don't rather than can't can help take control and give us that agency and make us more efficacious in sticking with our goals. Completely agree. That was another one that was like an aha, like, wow, why does that feel so much better? But it does. We also convey confidence through word choice. And I think confidence, of course, is something that most of us want to convey, especially in work settings. Can you talk about one or two ways we might increase how confidently we come across confidence?

Sure. Yeah. And if you don't mind here, I don't want to get into politics, but I want to bring up Donald Trump for a second, because whether you love him or hate him, everyone's entitled to their opinion. You can't deny that he has done an amazing job of selling his ideas.

Even if you don't like those ideas, he's been extremely successful in getting a set of people, not just a couple, but a large set of people to believe and support what he says. And so one question you might ask yourself is, well, what's he doing that's working so much? And if you look at his speeches, what he says is,

It's interesting, right? So when he announced his presidential campaign, for example, he said something like, you know, I would build a great wall. Nobody builds walls better than me. Believe me, I build them very inexpensively. Our country's in serious trouble. We don't have victories anymore. We used to, but we don't have them. You know, when's the last time we saw, you know, we beat China in a trade deal. I beat China all the time, all the time.

And, and when people heard that speech, you know, some set of people said, what are you talking about? Right? It's overly simplistic. It's empty. It's pure bluster. It doesn't even make sense. Yet a year later, this person that, you know, people said didn't make sense is elected the president of the United States. And so what is he doing through his language that is so impactful? And if you look closer, you'll notice he does something that a lot of quote unquote charismatic people do.

If you look at gurus, if you look at startup founders, if you look at politicians, we all also in our own lives can think about someone where when they open their mouths, everybody listens. And these individuals often do one particular thing they have in common, which is they speak with a great deal of certainty.

They speak like the answer is obvious and there's true and there's no uncertainty. Nobody builds walls better than me. I'll build them very inexpensively. In a meeting, someone can say, this is definitely the right course of action. It's clear that we should do this. The answer is obvious. Everyone agrees. Words like that signal a great deal of certainty. And when something seems so certain, it's hard not to follow them.

right? Because they seem so sure about what they're saying, it must be true. And I like this topic of certainty because I think we can contrast it with the way most of us communicate most of the time, right? So take myself as an example. I'm an academic. Academics are known for being bad at this. But when I do my consulting work,

A client will often ask, "Hey, what do you think about this strategy or direction?" or something along those lines. And I'll often say something like, "Oh yeah, this might work," or, "I think this could be a good idea," or, "It seems like this is the best course of action." Without even realizing it, I'm doing something called hedging.

And we do this all the time. Might, probably, could, possibly, I think this could happen. This should happen. It seems to me like, in my opinion, all of these are examples of hedges. And we hedge all the time. But the problem with hedging is often without even realizing it, we are undermining our impact.

Because when I say something like, I think this might work, right? I'm simultaneously saying, yeah, this might work, right? Or this might be a good idea. But I'm also saying, I'm not sure.

And because of that, people are less likely to listen. A bunch of research we conducted shows that the more we hedge, the less likely audiences are to listen to us. They're less likely to take our advice, do what we've suggested because we seem less certain. Hedges make us seem less certain, which makes people less likely to listen to us. And so I think the first takeaway here is if we're trying to convey confidence, if we're trying to persuade others, we want to ditch the hedges, right? Avoid hedging just because we can't.

We can. And that doesn't mean we should never hedge. And I'll get to that in a second. But, you know, don't hedge just because we naturally do it. Hedge because we mean to. Some cases there are uncertainty, want to communicate uncertainty. But in cases where we want to seem like we're sure of something or we want to persuade others.

ditching the hedges is helpful. Second though, there are some hedges that are more detrimental than others. So if I said, for example, I said, this seems like a good strategy versus this seems to me like this is a good strategy, or this might work versus

versus I think this might work. And again, pretty similar. But in those cases, I'm saying something is generally uncertain. It seems like this might work or it seems to me like this might work. I'm attaching it to myself. Same with might work or I think this might work, attaching it to myself. And we find that when we hedge but attach it to ourselves, I think this seems to me like, in my opinion, people are more likely to listen to us because we seem more confident.

Yes, there's uncertainty, but we're willing to own that uncertainty and say something seems to me like this will work. And so because we seem more confident, people are more likely to listen. So if we need to hedge, there are ways to do it more effectively. Don't just hedge because we can, make sure we mean to. And when we do hedge...

Use the ones that are more persuasive rather than less so. Makes a lot of sense. But it's something, once again, that I think we don't spend enough time thinking about the crafting of that. Oh, yeah. And, you know, I'm bad at this myself. Actually, as I was signing on to do this interview, there was something, I think, on Zencast that was saying, you know, get rid of the ums and uhs.

And I'd never seen this before. I wish I had seen this earlier. It would be in the book. But that's something I talk about in the confidence chapter as well. Um's and uh's are something we do all the time. When people ask me questions, I often say, um, and we're doing that basically because we're buying ourselves time to think.

Right. We're filling in that space. It's not dead air by buying ourselves time to think by saying something. But it's a verbal tick. Some people say like a lot. Same thing. They're still thinking. So they need some something to give them time. So they say the word like.

It's not too bad when we're speaking, but if you ever transcribe that and look at it, it looks pretty bad. And that helps us see what the listener's experience is as well. And it encourages us to get rid of those things because things like that, these non-fluencies they're called or disfluencies, make us seem less confident, less certain, and make audiences less likely to listen.

And I'm a person who loves questions. What are the right kinds of questions for the right situations? How do we pair those almost like a fine wine? How do you pair it well?

I love questions. And as I've kind of spent more time in this space and I talk about questions a little bit in The Catalyst and I've learned more in my last book, The Catalyst, and I've learned more about questions. It's just amazing the work that questions do. We often think of questions as ways to collect information and they do that and they're good at that.

but they also shape how we're perceived. They also shape, they act like a spotlight to sort of shape other people's attention and guide other people's attention. They can do a lot of really interesting work. And so I talk about a number of different types of questions and maybe I'll mention a couple here. The first is just asking for advice. And I think that many of us have this intuition, I shouldn't ask for advice, right? When I'm stuck on a tough problem, we're dealing with some difficulty,

You know, I'd like to ask for advice, but I shouldn't. Why? Because it'll bother someone. It'll interrupt them. You know, maybe they don't even know how to help me. And even if they do, right, aren't they going to think less of me as a result? They're going to, you know, my boss or my colleague will go, well, why didn't you know how to do that yourself? Like, they'll think I'm incompetent or not knowledgeable, and it'll be detrimental.

So some researchers from Harvard and Wharton got together to look at asking for advice. And they had a bunch of people have interactions over time. And some of those people asked for advice and some people didn't. And they looked how other people perceived them. And what they found was quite surprising. You might think that asking for advice makes you seem worse, seem less knowledgeable, seem less competent. But that's not actually what happened. In fact, the exact opposite occurred.

When people asked for advice, other people thought they were more knowledgeable, not less. You might say, well, why does asking for advice make you seem more knowledgeable? And the reason basically is that everybody's self-centered, right? Most people, myself included, we all think we give decent advice, right? Maybe it's not amazing advice, but decent advice.

And so when someone comes and asks us for our advice, we go, wow, that person must be really smart because they were smart enough to ask me for advice rather than somebody else. And given I give good advice and they know that, they must be pretty smart as well. And so, you know, first of all, just ask for advice, right? We often don't. That's a mistake. It'll make us seem better, not worse. And the second is the power of follow-up questions.

And often in social interactions, we ask questions to be polite. At the beginning of an interaction, someone might say, how are you? And we say something like, fine, how are you? Back. And not only is that a sort of an introductory question at the beginning of a conversation, but it's also a reciprocal question. Someone said something to us, we say basically the same thing back. And those type of questions aren't bad, but they don't really tell people a lot about us. They just tell people that we're polite, which they probably knew already.

But follow-up questions are much more impactful. When researchers looked at a variety of conversations, from conversations at the office to dating conversations to a number of other types of conversations, they found the more people ask follow-up questions, the more other people like them. And what's a follow-up question? Well, if someone said something like, oh, you know, I really got a lot out of that meeting.

Rather than saying, yeah, I got a lot out of it too. Saying something like, oh, what's one thing you really liked about it? Or, yeah, you know, I found it interesting too. What did you take away?

Someone said they had a tough day. Yes, we want to say, oh, I'm sorry to hear that, but we also want to say, oh, tell me more. What was so difficult? When our son or daughter comes home from school, they say, oh, I had a good day at school. Interesting. What'd you learn? These follow-up questions not only show that we paid attention, but that we care enough to follow up. And it makes others think we're more responsive and makes them like us more as a result.

Should we ever deflect? When is deflection a powerful tool? The idea of deflecting is interesting to me. And the basic insight here is sometimes people ask us questions that are in some ways inappropriate and not deeply inappropriate, but maybe we're in an interview and someone goes, oh, I like you a lot. I think you'd be a good fit for the company, but we're trying to figure out salary. How much did you make in your last job?

That's not a deeply inappropriate question, right? But it's a question that in some sense, it's not up to you to reveal. They're putting you in a tough situation that you feel like you have to kind of dig yourself out of. And so some very nice research shows that we can use questions almost like a shield to kind of deflect things away from us and move forward. So if someone says, what did you make at your last job? Some of us might have a tendency to say something like,

I don't feel comfortable answering that question. And that's fair, right? And that is honest. But very off-putting. Yeah. Think about how the other person, like, there's kind of dead silence afterwards, right? It's a difficult situation. I remember one of my colleagues being asked in a job interview, they were like, you know, if we gave you this job, but you turned it down, why would that be?

And that's not really a fair, it's an interesting question, but it's not really a fair question to ask someone. And if they say something like, well, I don't feel comfortable answering that, again, it sort of makes you, the person, the interviewee, look a little bit like a schmuck, like you're difficult. But instead, if you ask a question, if you say something like, they say, what salary did you get in your last job? And you say, oh, yeah, what's the usual salary range for this type of position?

Or if someone says, you know, well, if we offered you this job and you didn't take it, why would that be? And you said something like, oh, well, what are some of the common reasons that people, you know, like this organization or, you know, end up, even though they like it, turning it down?

It doesn't stop the conversation. It's not like kind of the music ends and the carousel stops. Instead, it shows that you're interested, right? It doesn't suggest like you're difficult to deal with. You heard the question, you care about the question, and you are continuing the conversation, right?

But you're doing it in a really clever way, right? You're doing it in a way that allows you not to answer the question and turns the spotlight back on them. Because again, questions are a little bit like spotlights. They direct attention to a particular type of thing. What salary did you get at your last job? And when you volley back,

Oh, yeah, right. Well, what's a usual salary range for this company? Now you've put them in the hot seat. You've put the spotlight on what's a usual range of salary for this firm. And now it's up to them, right? If they say something like, well, that wasn't the question I asked you.

Now they're the difficult person, not you. And they're unlikely to do that. They're more likely to say something like, oh, yeah, well, this is the usual range or, you know, move the conversation in a different direction because they don't want to answer the question. But now you're not difficult. And so it's a little bit of like questions is sort of jujitsu, right? It's carefully kind of ducking and avoiding and countervalling in a way that moves it forward, but makes you seem like a nice person.

Yeah, it almost seems like what lies at the heart of improv, right? Like you want to take that ball and pass it back and forth. You don't want to put the brakes on. That's a really, really helpful way to do that. That's a nice way to frame it. Yeah. I know I've done a little bit. I'm terrible at improv. I've done a little bit of it. But I love the ideas of sort of, you know, giving your partner something to work with, not stopping the conversation, you know, in some sense, not trying to be

overly creative, but move things forward. And I think a lot of those insights can be applied to all aspects of our lives. And so I love your idea of sort of passing the ball on. It's sort of keeping it moving and encouraging it to go on to something else. Jonah, two questions I like to wrap up the podcast with. The first is, what are you most curious about today?

You know, I am really interested in the way we learn things and the way language can help us learn those things. I think language is a powerful tool. And sometimes understanding what that one extra piece is that will help someone learn something new. If something's too far from what they already know and understand, they kind of can't fit it in. But if it's too close, they don't learn enough. And so I'm really interested in how we can use language to sort of help people learn things enough and in the right direction.

Is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to speak to? There's so much we didn't cover in your book. Anything you want to make sure we take away?

Yeah, you know, I think the only thing I would say, and thank you for all the wonderful questions and for your kind words about the book. I think what I find fascinating about this space is kind of the same place we started, which is that all of us use language all the time. We write that email to try to convince a boss or a colleague or a client. We make that presentation to try to get an idea across. We want to convince people. We want to hold attention. We want to have deeper, better relationships.

We all have things we're trying to achieve in all aspects of our lives. And by understanding the power of magic words, we can increase our impact in whatever area we're trying to be more impactful. Well, and I want to say that you've given me such a deep appreciation for a particular colleague that I have who is a person who...

agonizes in the best possible sense over words for presentations, for emails. And when I was reading this book, I remember immediately getting in touch with him and saying, this is what you're all about. And I have such a deeper appreciation now because he gets results. And I understand now why he gets results. So thank you for that as well. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it.

Curious Minds at Work is made possible through a partnership with the Innovator Circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer and editor Rob Mangabelli for leading the amazing behind-the-scenes team that makes it all happen. Each episode, we give a shout-out to something that's feeding our curiosity. This week, it's the award-winning novel, This Is How You Lose the Time War.

by Amal El-Motar and Max Gladstone. It's a masterful story that captures how an adversarial relationship can change over time as two characters alter their perspectives on war and blind obedience. The writing is poetic and masterful. Thank you, Amal and Max. What a beautiful book.