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Communication skills allowed me to get paid $15K for a 30 min talk.
These opportunities landed in my inbox multiple times over the last 5 years. I don’t consider myself a public speaker. And I actually sh*t myself before giving a live talk.
The reason I get opportunities to speak is that I’ve accidentally figured out a strategy to communicate in a way that allows anyone to have extraordinary levels of influence in their field or niche. It’s allowed my content to be viewed more than 1 billion times and for me to rack up millions of social media followers and subscribers.
Here’s the full strategy.
The simple form of communication everyone overlooks
Writing seems obvious.
Everyone can do it. Everyone already does it daily. Yet people don’t treat writing with the respect it deserves.
Writing sharpens your thinking. Writing is thinking. Writing forces you to put ideas into words. Writing is timeless. Writing forces you to get to the point.
The biggest thing writing does is help you share your ideas. Strangers aren’t attracted to us for our good looks, perfect sentences, or promises of fame and fortune. At its most basic level, people follow people online to stumble across interesting ideas.
When I figured this out my writing went to the next level.
I began looking for novel ideas most people hadn’t heard. It turned me into a researcher, and later, a curator of ideas. I realized someone else’s idea plus my insight was actually a new idea.
This made writing so much easier. I no longer had to be a genius. All I had to do was take an idea and become a good thinker. The more I wrote online the clearer my thinking became.
Most people’s thinking is so scattered because they’re busy, stressed, dealing with financial challenges, and can’t focus without looking at their phones. Writing daily prevents these epidemics.
You must write every day to become a great communicator.
Use the tool within you that everyone is afraid to use
This morning I was watching my two daughters play with each other for the first time.
They were so happy. My 10 week old baby laughed out loud for the first time too. I shouldn’t admit this but I had tears in my eyes.
Time stood still. Nothing else mattered. All the BS in the world vanished.
It reminded me of the secret to communication that builds real influence. It took me a lifetime to discover this and I never see it get taught.
Using raw emotion is the most powerful tool in history to communicate an idea.
When someone’s heart takes over while you’re communicating an idea, they listen differently. They see you in a different light. And you connect with them through your humanity. Communication through raw emotion can never be beaten.
Yet few people do it.
Why?
Corporations teach us to strip away our quirks, personality and emotion so we can be perceived as “professional.” But being professional is dry, boring, common, robotic, and forgettable. It doesn’t inspire. And it’s not persuasive.
Being professional dehumanizes us.
I’ll never forget a small financial services company I met. The CEO’s name was Mark.
He was a gentleman. I had many conversations with him. We talked transaction fees and SaaS platforms. It didn’t really go anywhere but we did some business together.
One day over coffee I ask him why he doesn’t drive a fancy car, live in the suburbs, or wear nice clothes. It seemed odd to me because his firm made tens of millions of dollars and had almost zero employees.
“I’ll let you in on a secret, Tim.”
He went on to tell me how business was just a vehicle. He used the money from his business to fund orphanages in his hometown back in Egypt. He told me stories of some of the people he helped.
I felt a wave of emotion come over me.
It was just so damn inspiring. His kindness was like nothing I’d ever seen before. From that day on I was never the same. I did everything I could to demolish roadblocks for him so he could keep funding orphanages.
The most odd part about this story is he told no one.
No one in his company or his network knew what he was doing. He only told me because he says I coerced it out of him and he thought he should tell his banker the truth LOL.
Using raw emotion is powerful.
Why few people use this tool
Using raw emotion in communication is rarely done.
I analyzed 250 LinkedIn posts last month from top business influencers—only 4 mentioned how they actually felt about something. The rest were tactical tips and industry news. That's the gap.
We’re taught to hide our emotions out of fear we might overshare or show weakness in a situation that requires us to look strong.
In a world of AI, where we’re drowning in information, and AI can already write better than humans, emotion is all we have left.
If you don’t use any form of raw emotion you’ll likely be ignored. That means you’ll get hardly any opportunities, and the ones you do get, you’ll need to fight like a dog in a dog fight to the death.
How to use emotion
In every form of communication, tell people how you feel.
That's the best way to ensure emotion is present in your communication. Then when you feel the urge to hide your emotions just stop yourself.
Tell yourself: “What would a person of extraordinary influence do? They’d inject emotion. I must too.”
Another technique: take the bad things that have happened to you and use them to explain why you think and believe what you do. Make the bad things have value. Use them as motivation to move forward, not as excuses to stay stuck.