3 Jedi Mind Tricks to Help You Survive in the Brutal World of Business

They don’t teach you these counter-intuitive hacks in school.

From academic writing to business communication

I wasn’t always a corporate warrior.

Before I sold my soul to capitalism, I was a scholar. Or at least, I thought of myself as one. As a scholar, your primary motivation is truth. You discover connections between different phenomena. You read what smart people have to say about different topics. You think you know a lot about how society works.

Yet, at some point, I made a switch. I exited the hallowed halls of academia and became an evil marketer. I changed my job description from “seeker of truth” to “manufacturer of false needs.” Along with this transition, I also discovered that all the writing and communication skills I had learnt in academia was close to useless.

Useless.

At first, I thought it was simply a matter of using easier words and using shorter sentences. But soon enough, it was clear that this was not giving me the leverage I needed to survive in the brutal dog-eat-dog world of business. I wasn’t convincing people with my ideas. Even though I had done the research and covered all possible options and even unloaded all the different outcomes, I had trouble getting approval or buy-in from management or my co-workers.

This led to a whole lot of time wasted on reworking my proposals. I didn’t know why, and it took me a long time before I finally learnt the truth…

And the truth is, business communication is very different from scholarly communication.

If you’re from the academic world looking to jump into business, this might give you a few hints. These tricks are so counter-intuitive it might not even make sense when you first read it…

But, if you can master just a one or two of them, you’ll find your business communication improve tremendously. They’re so powerful and potentially manipulative that I liken them to the mind-tricks employed by the Jedi in the Star Wars universe.

But meditate on the principles contained here, and hopefully you’ll realize the truth of what I’m preaching.

I’m here to help you survive in the brutal world of business.

Let’s get started.

1. Don’t say what you want to say. Instead, say what people want to hear.

Did you get that?

In the scholarly world, you’re making an argument based on your research. You share your findings. You assume that your reader comes from the same background and have some kind of interest in your field of research. They have the time to evaluate and read your work.

The same cannot be said for the world of business.

There are all kinds of people in the business world. People who want to go to the top. People who want to escape. People who just want to make it through the work day. People who couldn’t care less either way.

Start by knowing knowing your audience. Tailor your message to your audience.

Then, decide the key message you want your audience to take away. Tell it like the way they would like to hear it. Is the person a reader or a listener? Do they prefer to debate ideas or brainstorm? Are they from a marketing background or are they from tech?

Remember, in business it’s never about you.

No one cares about you. People only care about themselves.

Which is why whatever you say needs to be what people want to hear.

Otherwise, the message will never even get through in the first place and you will spend an agonizing amount of time trying to understand why.

2. Don’t let your audience think. Decide for your audience what you want them to think.

Now we’re starting to get into the mind control part.

In academia, you’re presenting evidence to build an argument. You try to be as objective as possible, presenting all the available theories and marshalling all the evidence (in theory, at least if not in practice).

If you ever make it to Ph.D. level, you need to defend your dissertation. This means that after you submit your massive research tome, your panel of judgers will think through your entire research and try to poke holes in your research. They will have a lot of time to think through your research. And question you they will. This is a necessary step to ensure that the work is properly peer-reviewed. It’s basically one of the foundational norms of science and scholarly work.

Yet, in business, if you let your audience think, you’ve screwed up big time.

You see, the biggest secret in business and most of life is, people don’t want to think.

People would rather expend their calories by searching for the hottest restaurant in town so that they can load up the calories again and start all over again.

This means that people want to have the thinking already done for them, so that they just need to pick between Option A or B.

Your managers don’t want to have to think. So, just make the decision for them already.

How do you do this? With supporting evidence to say why A is better than B. You have already done the analysis in advance. Lead them through your message. Structure it in threes. I’ll say it again. No more than three points.

1, 2, 3.

Make it easy for them to follow. Hypnotize your listener.

And then, make them think that they arrived at the conclusion through their own independent judgment. Make them think that they made the decision when in fact, you were the one that made it for them.

Don’t make them think. Think for them.

3. Don’t explicate.

Oops, I used a difficult word and broke my own rule. Don’t be like me.

In academia, you provide every single detail. Every single reference. When I submitted my master’s dissertation, I had 15 pages of references. Each page had around 12 citations. That’s almost 180 citations.

I had to learn the hard way in business.

No one cares about the details. It’s too much to remember. No one has the time to figure it out.

If you explicate and explain every single detail, you’ll end up confusing your audience.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Simplify as much as possible. Don’t write prose loaded with a lot of jargon. Use a lot of point form. Use images if it’s something accepted in your industry. Keep things short and straightforward. Give just enough details. The bare minimum. If you’re asked, you can always supplement. Don’t use a lot of words. Use very short and simple words. Even better if you can use one word.

Keeping your message simple and focused is hard to do. But it will unlock doors you never knew were so easy to open.

It’s not easy. But, don’t give up.

The Force is with you.

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