From Shreyas #communication People don’t listen very well People love when you listen to them People love feeling right People love getting entertained People pay more attention when surprised People crave control & empowerment People love getting praised People want to be accepted & liked (even by folks whom they don’t like) People avoid unpleasant conversations (and they admire those who can conduct unpleasant conversations gracefully) As you consider these 9 axioms and how you might apply them, consider these ideas: As stated above, when you start from these axioms, you can derive arbitrarily sophisticated approaches for your own communication. This means you can also tailor your communication, adapting to the specifics of the situation you’re facing. But… this requires you to think for yourself. Notice that none of these axioms just tell you “do this, do that, and you’re good” or “this is the proven way I convinced my manager to do XYZ and you should do it too”. That is a feature, not a bug. The reasoning is simple: while it is comforting to get handed a very specific tactic such as <just say this> or <just do this>, you know from your own experience that such tactics don’t actually work in most situations. (if they did work, you wouldn’t be reading this post because all your communication problems would already be solved by the hundreds of tactics you’ve been already given thus far in your life and by thousands more that are just a simple Google search away) It is important to remember the Antithesis Principle: while these axioms are broadly effective, it makes sense to turn yourself into the kind of person who recognizes any downsides of getting overly persuaded when you’re the recipient of some message or communication. Whenever we talk about influence, persuasion, communication, here’s a common response: wait, but someone can use these ideas to manipulate rather than influence - what if someone uses your ideas for their own self-centered objectives - you must also tell people to not use your ideas for evil. I get the intent behind these concerns. But I will also tell you that me lecturing anyone on integrity won’t actually change their integrity. No amount of external lecturing or telling stories or inspiring has ever turned any low integrity human being into a high integrity human being. The evidence of this fact is all around us in society and in history, the only question is how clearly you can see this evidence. So I’ll save you the moral lecture and simply tell you that integrity matters: not just for collective good, but also because it keeps your own life simpler and more tranquil. Lastly, AI is now very good at coaching on influence, persuasion, communication, etc. So good that it can be better at coaching you than the vast majority of senior managers and communication coaches. The key is to be thoughtful about how you prompt it, give it context, and iterate on the details. The next time you’re working with AI on a communication problem, try giving it the 9 axioms as context and specifying which axioms to weigh more (depending on who and what you’re dealing with — and this requires that you first truly understand the axioms). You might just get surprisingly better results from AI.