But You Did Not Persuade Me

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the hell of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dream of sexy laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. But You Did Not Persuade Me by Jeff Atwood.

One of

my favorite movie scenes in recent memory is from The Last King of Scotland, a dramatized biography of the megalomaniac dictator Idi Amin as seen through the eyes of a fictional Scottish personal physician. Here's a clip.

Do you want something for the headache, sir?

No. Something to help you sleep, perhaps?

Later. I want you to tell me what to do.

You want me to tell you what to do?

Yes. You are my adviser. You are the only one I can trust in here.

You should have told me not to

throw the agents out in the 1st place. I dared that you did not persuade me, Nicholas. You did not persuade me.

What I love about this tour de force of a scene beyond the incredible acting, is that it illustrates just how powerful of a force persuasion really is. In the hands of a madman or a demagogue, dangerously powerful. Hopefully, you don't deal with too many insane dictators on a daily basis. But the reason this scene works so well is the unavoidable truth it exposes. To have any hope of influencing others, you must be able to persuade them.

Steve Yeager is as accomplished a software engineer as I can think of. I was amazed to hear him tell us repeatedly and at length on a podcast that the only thing every software engineer should know is not how to write amazing code, but how to market themselves in their project. What is marketing except persuasion? Mark Hedlund, who founded Wasabi and is now the VP of engineering at Etsy, thinks of himself not as a CEO or a boss, but as a lobbyist in chief. I believe that could be rewritten as persuader in chief with no loss of meaning or nuance.

This is Mark Hedlund speaking. I was recently asked how I run our software development team. I said, well, basically, I blog about something I think we should do, and if the blog post convinces the developers, they do it. If not, I lobby for it, and if that fails too, the idea falls on the floor. They need my approval to launch something, but that's it.

That's as much running things as I do, And most of the ideas come from the other people at this point, not from me and my blog posts. I've argued against some of our most successful ideas, so it's a good thing I don't try to exert more control. I'm exaggerating somewhat. Of course, I haven't blogged about all of our ideas yet, but I do think of myself as a lobbyist in chief. And I have lots of good examples of cases where I failed to talk people into an idea, and it didn't happen as a result.

One person I said this to asked, so who holds the product vision then? And I replied, well, I guess I do. But, really, that's not right. We all do. The product is a result of the ideas that together we've agreed to pursue.

I recruit people based on their interest in and enthusiasm about the ideas behind Wasabi and then set them loose. And we all talk and listen constantly. That's how it works, and believe it or not, it does work. So how do we persuade? Personally, I think when we lead by example, even if that means getting down on your knees and cleaning a toilet to show someone else how it's done.

But maybe you're not a leader. Maybe you're just a lowly pawn. Even as a pawn, it's still possible to persuade your team and those around you. Science and data are among the best ways to be objectively persuasive, but remember that data alone isn't the reductionist end of every single topic. Incorporate data by all means, but you need to tell a bigger, grander, more inspiring story than that to be truly persuasive.

I reread Letter from a Birmingham Jail every year because I believe it is the single best persuasive essay I've ever read. It is remarkably persuasive without resorting to anger or incivility. Read it now, but do more than just read it. Study it. How does it work?

Why does it work? Does it cite any data? What techniques make this essay so incredibly compelling? Nobody ever changed anything by remaining quiet, idly standing by, or remaining part of the faceless, voiceless masses. If you ever want to effect change in your work or in your life, you must learn to persuade others.

Let's listen to that scene from The Last King of Scotland again.

You want me to tell you what to do?

Yes. You are my adviser. You are the only one I can trust in here.

You should have told me not to

throw the agents out in the first place. I did, that you did not persuade me, Nicholas. You did not persuade me.

I love how the dictator acts like it was obviously the adviser's job to persuade him, not just to provide the information that he needed, but to persuade him to do the thing that he was supposed to do. I think this is a trap that a lot of smart people fall into. I think smart people get hung up on this because they are very logical and they assume that everyone else is going to be very logical also. Or at the very least, everyone should be very logical. And so smart people think all I have to do is present the facts clearly and correctly, and then logic will take over in the other person's mind, and they will see that I am correct.

I'm right. But if you just pull up Twitter or, for that matter, the home page of any news site, you can see we don't live in a perfectly logical, rational world. And so just presenting the facts clearly is not enough. Unfortunately, it's not enough to just be right. You can't just be correct, and as frustrating as that is, it's the truth.

If you wanna win, you're gonna have to be more than right. You're going to have to be persuasive. I know there are a bunch of you right now thinking nonsense. This is blasphemy. I don't have to be persuasive.

I have facts and figures on my side. Being right is enough. The truth is enough, and we all wanna think that. I'm with you. I want to think that.

I want to believe that just being right is enough. But unfortunately, there are just too many cases where the objectively best person for the job was passed over because someone else was more persuasive. Someone else was more convincing that they would be good at the job even though objectively, they were worse. We can all think of products that aren't objectively the best, but everyone's been persuaded that they they are the best. And my first response to that is, woah.

I'm not persuadable as I record on my Apple laptop drinking my diet Coke and wearing a Nike shirt. But not me. I'm not persuadable. So if you wanna still believe that all appeals and decisions and arguments should be completely logical and without persuasion. That's fine.

But if you truly believe that you have the best something or you have the truth on your side, don't you want to try to be persuasive? I think of it as a form of almost intellectual laziness to just present the facts with no persuasion at all. Because it's just so much easier to be bullheaded and say, no. This is the best way. We have to do it this way than to take the time and explain and persuade why is this the best way.

Here, let me let me try to persuade you that my way is the best way because I believe it objectively is the best way, but that's not enough of an argument. I think the best quote on this subject is by a guy named, and pardon my French, Antoine de Saint Exupery. It goes like this. If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood, and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. Don't just tell me, persuade me.

The Musicmakers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode, how to blog about code and give 0 I need to get off work at 6 and build charming birdhouses or customize my bicycle or something. You can subscribe in iTunes by searching for the Music Makers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm. And as always, you can reach me at Aaron@musicmakers.fm.