How to write things that busy people will actually read (w/ Todd Rogers) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Anne Morriss:
Hello Frances.

[00:00:02] Frances Frei:
Hello, gorgeous.

[00:00:03] Anne Morriss:
You and I have very different email styles.

[00:00:09] Frances Frei:
Night, day.

[00:00:12] Anne Morriss:
I probably overthink, and I might suggest that—

[00:00:18] Frances Frei:
I underthink and undercomplicate?

[00:00:19] Anne Morriss:
I don't wanna finish this sentence.

[00:00:22] Frances Frei:
I'm an under thinker. I, I'll take it.

[00:00:24] Anne Morriss:
So Frances, you and I, uh, I think yet again, represent two ends of this spectrum. I am remembering, uh, in the last few months an email that you sent to one of our partners, uh, in the marketing space, and we were fired as clients within 24 hours.

[00:00:48] Frances Frei:
I think it was faster than that. Yeah.

[00:00:50] Anne Morriss:
I don't think your intention was to be fired. Yeah.

[00:00:53] Frances Frei:
To get fired? It was not. It was not. If I recall, we hired someone to help drive book sales.

[00:01:02] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.

[00:01:02] Frances Frei:
And they, then had all kinds of things they wanted to do that were gonna drive all kinds of other performance measures.

[00:01:10] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.

[00:01:10] Frances Frei:
And I just kept trying to refocus it onto book sales. So the communication I thought I was sending is, “All of those other things, you can measure that, but we don't care.” And I was just trying to get them back to how will this drive book sales? How will this drive book sales? How will this drive book sales? And then they fired me.

[00:01:30] Anne Morriss:
Well, I think the substance of your point was exactly right. Um—
[00:01:36] Frances Frei:
But the style was exactly wrong.

[00:01:36] Anne Morriss:
But I think the style for this audience, uh—

[00:01:41] Frances Frei:
And, and a totally controllable experiment, it was all me. So there existed in email you could have sent that would not have resulted in that.

[00:01:48] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. And I think this story illustrates how consequential it can be to get the style of written communication right, and that's what we're gonna be getting into today.

[00:01:58] Frances Frei:
I’m super excited.

[00:02:03] Anne Morriss:
I’m Anne Morris. I'm a company builder and leadership coach.

[00:02:07] Frances Frei:
And I'm Frances Frei. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School, and I'm Anne’s wife.

[00:02:11] Anne Morriss:
And this is Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. On this show, we believe that meaningful change happens fast, anything is fixable, and good solutions are usually just a single brave conversation away.

[00:02:25] Frances Frei:
Who do we have today?

[00:02:26] Anne Morriss:
Well, Frances, today we have our first Master Fixer of season three on a topic that is so important and a topic that is tragically overlooked, very close to my heart, which is the written word.

[00:02:39] Frances Frei:
The written word, you have a lot of reverence for the written word.

[00:02:44] Anne Morriss:
I do, and I'm really excited to learn from our guest. We have Todd Rogers joining us today to talk about this subject. He's a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a behavioral scientist whose work has focused on how to use great communication to achieve a meaningful goal.

[00:03:02] Frances Frei:
I know Todd, he was a student back in the day. Uh, and—

[00:03:05] Anne Morriss:
Wow, I didn't realize that.

[00:03:06] Frances Frei:
Yeah. And he has a really refreshing take on this that I think is gonna get everybody to think differently about written communication.

[00:03:16] Anne Morriss:
Absolutely. Ah, he co-authored a book titled Writing Effectively for Busy Readers. I think that's just a taste of how good he is. It's a fantastic title. Uh, just came out recently, written with Jessica Lasky-Fink. I highly recommend it, and after this conversation, I think everyone will be able to see why.

[00:03:37] Frances Frei:
Oh, let's dive in.

[00:03:08] Anne Morriss:
Let’s do it.

Todd Rogers, welcome to Fixable.

[00:03:48] Todd Rogers:
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

[00:03:51] Anne Morriss:
Um, you're, you're a behavioral scientist working on a big problem, which is to help people write in ways that other busy, distracted people will respond to and take some kind of action, even if it's just to text us back and confirm lunch.

You're also trying to help people use writing to spur big actions, things like getting our fellow citizens to vote. You've described your audience as anyone who writes anything, which is a lot of people, Todd. So is this a fair summary of, of your mission? How, how do you think about it?

[00:04:36] Todd Rogers:
I'm glad you used the word mission, like I… This entire program of work, for the last five years and for the foreseeable few years or maybe longer, is I want everyone who writes anything to add a round of edit where they ask themselves, “How do I make it easier for the reader?” Because it's more effective for us as writers achieving our goals, and it's kinder to our readers and more inclusive. Whether it's a webpage, a proposal, a report, an assessment, an email, a text. The easier I make it for the reader, the more effective I'll be, and the kinder it is for our readers.

[00:05:07] Anne Morriss:
Alright, so speaking of text, I wanna get this outta the way, like right up at the top because my children ridicule me, like, relentlessly for using punctuation in my texts, and I will assert that capitalization, periods, dare I say it, even commas can be useful to clarity in this form. So can you just, can you settle this debate for us? Like, am, am I right?

[00:05:34] Frances Frei:
Or, or are you a boomer?

[00:05:36] Todd Rogers:
The, the…

[00:05:36] Frances Frei:
I think if I was just gonna be on the side of my sons…
[00:05:40] Todd Rogers:
Um, I’m gonna take your side because I've never met your children and I've met you. So yes, you are right.

[laughter]

[00:05:48] Anne Morriss:
This conversation is starting off so well. Todd, you're already one of my favorite guests. So, how did this become the focus of your life's work?

[00:05:59] Todd Rogers:
Uh, ooh, I was a political pollster and then I, I actually went to grad school after being a, a democratic pollster where I was interested in just learning the science of behavior change.

And then after grad school, I withdrew from grad, from my PhD program, actually, early to start a research institute in Washington called the Analyst Institute, where we ran Obama's experiments team and like were the hub of data science and behavioral science for the left. Uh, and the whole program, with hundreds of field experiments and other data science approaches, is that how do we communicate to busy voters effectively?

And I always thought of that as persuasion. But stepping back, it's really like, stage one is how do you make it, how do you get through their attention? How do you get them to, to encounter whatever it is we're saying or, or sending? And that's stage zero, before you can do anything persuasive. And so, I actually realized that we wanna move up the chain and how do we manage the reality that they're skimming, busy, and care less about what we're saying than we do?

[00:06:57] Anne Morriss:
Well, well, let's get a little tactical and we're gonna get into your, your principles, but, um, what do most of us tend to get wrong about written communication?

[00:07:09] Todd Rogers:
Well, I'm, I'm hesitant when I say the most common, but I'll name a couple. One, we think that writing well is the same as writing effectively, which is we are taught how to write well and, and sometimes taught how to write beautifully.

Uh, but that's not the same thing as writing effectively, practically. And so that, what that means is like we're taught how to write these essays with introductions and bodies and conclusions, and people aren't getting past the second sentence.

[00:07:38] Anne Morriss:
And what is the metric you're using for effectiveness?

[00:07:41] Todd Rogers:
Whatever the writer's goal is. If the goal is getting people to donate, if the goal is getting people to sign up, if the goal is getting people to respond—

[00:07:47] Anne Morriss:
Subsequent action.

[00:07:48] Todd Rogers:
Yeah. Or the goal is comprehension. Uh, it, we, whatever they are, we do these randomized experiments of treatment groups and control groups and we, like, you can take A/B tests, and we see that there's some systematic tendencies.

So you said, what are some of the biggest problems? The biggest problem is we conflate effective writing with good writing. The other one is I think that we, we struggle, and this is more not a writing problem, this has always been a problem. So it's not unique to what we're discovering, but I think people confuse, um, completeness with effectiveness. Right? Like comprehensiveness with effectiveness, and we’ll, we’ll get into that. But like I, I think that one of the signatures of clear thinking is being able to recognize what the most important thing is and what's extra.

[00:08:37] Anne Morriss:
And so just for the absence of doubt, you're defining effective as the reader takes the action you want them to take.

[00:08:46] Todd Rogers:
Uh, and the action could be comprehension. And I'm very agnostic. Every writer with every piece of writing has a different goal. Often those goals are not clear to themselves, and writing helps to clarify our thinking and our, and our goals. But, uh, whatever your goal is, I measure effectiveness by helping the writer achieve it. It turns out it's also kinder to your reader and more respectful to your reader.

[00:09:07] Anne Morriss:
Yeah, I mean, we, we think a lot about the cost of inaction in the work that we do. And that seems like a big part of this story. Like we, we could be using our writing to spur action, progress, comprehension, and in most cases, we are failing to do so.

[00:09:27] Todd Rogers:
I, I think so. I, so the, the re—most radical take that Jessica and I have is imagine if it's always our fault if a busy person didn't read what we sent them.

[00:09:40] Frances Frei:
Love it!

[00:09:42] Todd Rogers:
If we, if we shift the responsibility, it's not the reader's responsibility to read what we sent. It's our fault to write in a way that accommodates the way they actually read, which is busy skimming between thirty-second tasks. Like I think that we often have this default that like, “Well, I sent it, I said it. You were supposed to do it, you were supposed to understand it.” But if we really own it, that would radically change the way we think about our writing, the effectiveness of our writing. It's inspired in part by Don Norman, who founded User-Centered Design, where he, where he is like if someone interacts with an object and doesn't understand how it works, it's always the designer's fault. And I think that we should, if we think about writing that way, like then all of a sudden it's like, “Oh my God.”

[00:10:21] Frances Frei:
I wanna think about so many things that way.

[00:10:23] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. I mean, it's a challenge that Frances and I will often pose to leaders is what, how would your behavior change if you took radical responsibility for the performance of the people around you?

[00:10:34] Frances Frei:
So, so Todd, one of the examples that I often use is that we are at Harvard, the promotion rate is abysmally low. We're very proud of it. We think it's part of being elite, but look over at Caltech, equally elite, if not more so, promotion rate is 10 times what ours is. Something like that. So this, uh, they take radical responsibility for the development of junior faculty. This is, uh, near and dear to our hearts of what if we take radical responsibility for the success of others, how would we behave?

[00:11:14] Todd Rogers:
I, yeah, I love that. I, I had never thought about it that way. I think that that's spot on.

[00:11:18] Anne Morriss:
Alright, so in your book, you have six principles for achieving effective writing. What are they and how are you defining them?

[00:11:25] Todd Rogers:
The first principle is less is more, which means using fewer words, fewer ideas, and fewer requests. The second is make reading easy, which means short sentences, short and common words to just make it more accessible to more people and less effortful to read. The third is design for easy navigation, because people are jumping around and when they're busy, when they're skimming, so you wanna make it easy for them to pull out the information they're looking for and navigate so that they don't just give up on you. The fourth is use enough formatting, but no more. Bold, underline, highlight. People interpret it as the writer saying to the reader, this is the most important content, so you can draw them to that, but it also licenses them to not read anything else. So it has to be used carefully.

The fifth is tell readers why they should care, because we often focus on our goal. Our goal in writing this, and to the extent that we can reframe the content towards what they care about, we may as well tell the reader why they should care. And the sixth is make responding easy, reduce friction, simplify. If it's important to us, we wanna make it easy for them.

[00:12:30] Anne Morriss:
What’s the most important one on this list?

[00:12:33] Todd Rogers:
There are six principles. I have two children. I love both of my children equally. Uh, I think they're all important, but I will choose two that I think are fun and most underappreciated. Uh, the first is less is more. And, and many people know this quote from Blaise Pascal, but makes me sound pretentious to say that. And I will say like a normal person to Mark Twain who never said it, uh, that “I'm sorry this letter is so long. I would've written you a shorter one if I'd had more time.”

And what I love about that quote is it does two things. It says, one, “I've wronged you by this thing being so long,” and second, it takes time to write less. It takes more time to write less. Um, and so, what, the first, this principle we're talking is less is more. There are three components. One is fewer words, those who've read Strunk and White, the elements of style, omit needless words is the easy one. Which is, it's better to say “to” instead of saying “in order to”, but the more subtle one is omit only kind of useful ideas. The more ideas you add, the less likely someone is to read and respond.

And it's just a trade off. The, the optimal number is not zero. And so there's just this sort of, this is why we're not dogmatic about what exactly sh—what the rule, what the application of the rule should be. Other than that you just need to know that there's a trade off. The more you add, the less likely someone is to engage, and if they engage, the less likely they are to read and understand. And then the third is fewer requests, which is we've done these experiments where you ask people to do three things versus one. They're less likely to do any one of them if you ask for more things.

[00:14:14] Anne Morriss:
By the way, we have quoted Pascal pretentiously and we have also misattributed the quote to Twain in print in a book that has been printed.

[00:14:24] Frances Frei:
That doesn't come out with a next edition yet. So we're just shamed.

[00:14:30] Anne Morriss:
We are restless to correct the record on this, so I'm glad we're getting a chance. Um, but that's a super, a super powerful one.

[00:14:37] Todd Rogers:
There, the, one of the fun things on all the experiments on that topic is we'll write. Wait, I'll write 7,000 elected school board members. We're asking them to fill out a survey. In one condition, it’s a lot of deferential text about “Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Y-you’re doing important, really challenging work. Thank you. Please fill out my survey.” In the other it's, “Thank you for your important work. Will you please fill out my survey?” People predict the longer one is at least as effective, probably more effective, but the shorter one is twice as effective. And this is, we've run lots of these experiments.

We ran one with a, uh, one of the US Federal Political Committees, you know, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, where they send a six paragraph fundraising email and I say, arbitrarily, please delete every other paragraph. So it doesn't make sense anymore. It's incoherent.

[00:15:27] Frances Frei:
Hahaha.

[00:17:27] Todd Rogers:
And then we find that it, even though it's it, we've arbitrarily deleted every other paragraph, it still raises substantially more money.

[00:15:35] Frances Frei:
[laughter] Oh my gosh. First of all—

[00:15:37] Anne Morriss:
That is so good. That is—

[00:15:39] Frances Frei:
It’s so powerful. It, it is. And Todd, what I love about it also, it's, you are mission driven, right? You are, like, on a mission, um, to do this. You're also by any means necessary to do it. So the creativity in this experimental design is so refreshing. It's so refreshing.

[00:16:00] Todd Rogers:
Uh, thank you Frances.

[00:16:01] Frances Frei:
Todd, I'm, I'm writing a case on the OpenAI situation that's going on, and I have just committed for it to be short. Um, it's on page, we're on page 13. I, I am trying so hard to run, write a brief case.

[00:16:16] Todd Rogers:
[laughter]

[00:16:16] Anne Morriss:
Listeners, our expert witness is laughing at that number.

[00:16:21] Frances Frei:
And I'm trying so hard to make it short.

[00:16:24] Todd Rogers:
There are two thoughts I have as you're describing that. The first, I work with a, what has been very surprising is the organizations that have been interested, they’re, in, in helping their organizations become more effective from private equity funds to US, the US Navy and Army to, like, everyone is interested in, in writing more effectively.

And I worked with one government agency that issues these reports, and they have a, a summary section, which by congressional mandate has grown from a summary to a seven page summary section. Because there's all these mandatory things. So now they're having, I will call it an executive summary that they're working on, on top of the summary, on top of the report because it's just, it's all become so bloated and so I, that, that’s one.

Two. You want the details of your OpenAI case. Like that, that's why it's so, that's why it's so hard. And you want the, the students who are really gonna engage, you want 'em to have access to it and, and there're gonna be little threads they're gonna wanna pull, and you don't want to deny them the details of those threads.

And, so, structure is the second principle. Steering us to what Anne was asking, like what's the other favorite principle? One is design for navigation, which is make it easy for people to, to jump around. But there are three kinds of, like reading people do. One is the, the close reading that we were taught to do, so word by word by word. The other is skimming, where we stay linear and we just go fast. And the other, which I, I think we need to, to write for is scanning, which is just darting around trying to find what we wanna find. And we've done these experiments where you add headings, like, you know, sometimes we do it, we do it by taste.

When you add headings in the experiments we run, more than double the likelihood someone uses anything past the first few paragraphs because like, they're, they, you make it, you're like saying, “I wanna make it easy for you to find the different topics in here.” So you could keep your 13 pages, and it may even get longer if you add structure to it, which is, is what it is, but it'll make it easier for them to navigate and find the elements they're looking for.

[00:18:31] Anne Morriss:
As, as writers, do we have to adapt to, uh, the brave new world we're in where people are, uh, socialized by TikTok and, um, jumping from one screen to another, like has the, has the challenge evolved with our use of technology?

[00:18:51] Todd Rogers:
See, I, I don't have a historical perspective on it, but I, uh, the way I have come to think about it is the switching costs are so much lower for changing what it is we're reading.

It used to be a printed thing. You have to put it down, find something else that may take four seconds, may take a minute. Now it takes a quarter second to move to the next thing. So the, the, the, like, the cost of moving to something else, to foraging through some other information zone is so much cheaper, and then the production costs of producing more information and delivering it to people have gone down.

So the supply has massively gone up and the switching costs have gone down. So we may have the same minds, we just live in a different information ecosystem.
[00:19:32] Anne Morriss:
And the bar, like the, the bar, the performance bar for us as writers in that context seems materially higher. Like, I gotta get, it's so easy for you to ignore me and move on to another shiny object that, that I gotta do more work to keep your attention.

[00:19:48] Todd Rogers:
Uh, yes, it's even… It, it is definitely all those things combined to make it harder for a writer to achieve their goal of communicating effectively to a busy, distracted reader.

[00:20:00] Anne Morriss:
Will, um, AI save us from ourselves? Will the Todd Rogers chatbot be the solution to this whole problem?

[00:20:07] Todd Rogers:
We have trained on our, on our website, uh, this GPT-4 on the principles and then tuned it with pre-post emails and thousands of people use it every day, which is ki—it was really cool that it basically just rewrites your email in a skimmable way.

And it's really fun because I, I use it in my teaching and I'm like, look, like, it’s hard to give 24/7 coaching. It's hard to give coaching to everybody at the same time. It's hard when we do multiple sessions to let people see what it might look like. And it's not the final word, but it's really a helpful teaching tool for, like, internalizing this thing I wrote.

I thought it was pretty skimmable. And then it's like, “No, you could… This is…” and it will reorganize ideas. So one of the principles is put, one of the sub principles is put similar ideas next to each other, uh, you know, like related ideas next to each other, and it’ll, like, reorganize the ideas and then add structure to make it skimmable, just as a coaching tool.

[00:20:58] Frances Frei:
What's the website? My gosh. What's the website? Tell where, everybody needs to know right now.

[00:21:04] Todd Rogers:
Writingforbusyreaders.com. Yeah.

[00:21:06] Anne Morriss:
That's extraordinary.

[00:21:08] Frances Frei:
I, I mean, I feel like my dirty little secret when I've been reading things is that I jump around, but I haven't wanted to confess it to people. So you are making me feel, you're just legitimizing my dirty little secret. And so, uh, just for that, I thank you.

[00:21:23] Todd Rogers:
Frances, you are not alone.

[00:21:25] Frances Frei:
I feel seen.

[00:21:26] Anne Morriss:
So, um, Todd, if we go back to your beautiful list of principles, which, uh, which is the one that trips people up the most?

[00:21:36] Todd Rogers:
There is one that I think surprisingly is difficult for people because of the way we are educated, which is making reading easy. And, so I just start with a couple of facts. The median 50th percent US adult reads at roughly the ninth grade reading level. So the level we, at which we teach 14 year olds to read. 20% of US adults read at fifth grade reading level, the level at which we teach 11 year olds. And when we, when we like, think of that, well, how do we make it easier for them to read in a, like, more inclusive, when we're communicating to the public or, or to anyone? Common words are better than uncommon words. Short words are better than longer words. Simple grammar is better than complex grammar.
[00:22:28] Anne Morriss:
You’re breaking my poet's heart on this.

[00:22:30] Todd Rogers:
I, I think Hemingway won the Pul—Like, we, this is the go-to response to that is Hemingway won the Pulitzer with The Old Man and the Sea, written at a fifth grade reading level. Like, one can do beautiful, poetic work. Uh, but it, it can be hard. But, but one of the, the, the cool thing, and I think here's, like, this is the logic of it to me, is by far the coolest thing that I learned in writing the book and spending two years, like, reading all this other literature that I had no idea about is this eye tracking research where they’ll—

[00:23:03] Frances Frei:
Yeah.

[00:23:03] Todd Rogers:
They, they'll lock you in and then watch you read. Word, word, word and then period, and there's this thing called the period pause effect, which is people just stop at periods.

And, which is a reasonable thing 'cause the period is telling you the idea is over, and then they'll sit there and often have to go backwards and reread if the sentence was too complex or they didn't understand it or like, what's the idea? I don't get it. And so the longer the sentence, you wouldn't understand. The longer the pause, the more complex the sentence, the greater the risk someone's gonna go, have to not understand it and go backwards, and all of that naturally suggests that's when they're gonna quit, right?

You're making it hard for them, given that the default behavior is quitting when it comes to reading. Like, we wanna make it easy so that we don't give them a reason to quit.

[00:23:50] Frances Frei:
You'd have me rethinking my whole life, Todd. But let me, let me, I have a, I have a playful example that I'd love. Just want some word association.

Traffic signs. Pillars of beauty? Just making the problems worse? Like what's your… and Anne and I spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of traffic signs. So…

[00:24:13] Todd Rogers:
I…

[00:24:16] Anne Morriss:
The marriage is alive and well, Todd?

[00:24:20] Todd Rogers:
So I… Yes. Yes. I mean, I've already been injected into two battles. One is with you and Anne and your kids about whether to use grammar, correct grammar and then—

[00:24:30] Frances Frei:
In text.

[00:24:30] Todd Rogers:
The debate about in text. And then—

[00:24:33] Frances Frei:
Yeah.

[00:24:33] Todd Rogers:
We didn't even talk about emojis, which is a, you know, I, a, a short but complicated answer. Um, traffic signs, I, I think the goal even more urgent—

[00:24:44] Frances Frei:
Yeah.

[00:24:44] Todd Rogers:
—than anything else, to be super clear. And there is a, there's a thing called the Center for Plain Language, which I love. They give an award, they give an award called the WTF Award, uh, which is a sign that is inscrut—like, uh, incomprehensible signs in public, public places, and they have, they have one… WTF means words that failed, words that failed. The sign is “Persons shall remove all excrements from pets pursuant to…” That, it's a real sign in a park.

[laughter]

I mean, it's, eh, there’s only two outcomes. One is I understand what those words mean and it's too difficult. I'm moving on. The other is, I have no idea what those words means, and I'm moving on. Like, so the goal is quick, easy comprehension. And sometimes that could be images, sometimes, but no matter what, like given that you're, you're talking to everybody, and the median US adult reads at a 14-year-old reading level, like, we wanna make it easy. It also is, you're also, for people who can read it, it's just unpleasant. They're gonna move on.

[00:25:44] Anne Morriss:
Alright, give us your your hot take on emojis.

[00:25:45] Todd Rogers:
Emojis can be helpful if we all agree on what they mean, but there are these incredible surveys, and the Wall Street Journal has published a couple of these where even totally basic emojis, we, people over 40, uh, interpret a smiley face as "That makes me happy. I agree. That's good.”

Young people interpret as sarcasm, as like irony. And like that, that'd be like literally pretty close to the opposite of what I always thought it meant. And so, uh, they can, they can be helpful as long as we agree, but we should know that, like, a lot of these things are interpreted in totally diverse ways, which means that all we're doing is injecting confusion into—and lack of clarity into—our writing [when] we use them as long as we are not absolutely certain that they understand what we think it means.

[00:26:36] Frances Frei:
Wow.

[00:26:37] Anne Morriss:
They are not the modern hieroglyphics that I was assuming.

[00:26:42] Frances Frei:
I just always felt inadequate for not knowing them.

[00:26:47] Anne Morriss:
Todd, you are awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[00:26:50] Todd Rogers:
Oh, this is really fun. Thanks for having me, Anne and Frances.

[00:27:08] Anne Morriss:
Frances, what did you learn from Todd Rogers?

[00:27:12] Frances Frei:
Professor Rogers? I learned that communication is a form of leadership. So when we think about leadership, leadership is about making others better. Uh, first as a result of our presence and in a way that lasts into our absence. Um, I have been guilty of communicating in a way that's all about me as opposed to communicating in a way that is, um, other-centric.

So I have been too self distracted in my writing, and that's what we find with leaders are often self distracted, and when we liberate them to be other-distracted, beautiful things happen for them and for performance. So I was super struck by the parallels between communication and leadership.

[00:28:01] Anne Morriss:
You know what? I think we titled one of our chapters in, in our book on leadership, Unleashed, “It’s Not About You”. And that's the mantra that kept running through my head through this entire conversation is if I just put that frame on everything, then the, the, uh, you know, these principles just, just reveal themselves.

[00:28:23] Frances Frei:
Thanks for tuning in. If you have a work problem you're feeling stuck on, we would love to help. Send us an email at fixable@ted.com or call us at 234-fixable. That's 234-492-2253.

[00:28:37] Anne Morriss:
And you don't have to send us a good email. The bar is low.

[00:28:41] Frances Frei:
We’d love to talk to you.

[00:28:52] Anne Morriss:
Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

[00:28:56] Frances Frei:
And me Frances Frei.

[00:28:57] Anne Morriss:
Our team includes Isabel Carter, Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Corey Hajim, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash.

[00:29:09] Frances Frei:
This episode was mixed by Louis at StoryYard. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.

[00:29:16] Anne Morriss:
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