Episode 723 | How to Be a Supercommunicator (and Why it Matters as a Bootstrapper) with Charles Duhigg

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to Startups For The Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and this week I speak with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Charles Duhigg. Charles writes for the New York Times and New Yorker magazine and has written three books including The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better, and most recently, Super Communicators. I wanted to have Charles on the show not to cover material from the book per se, but to figure out how to translate that into why being a better communicator should matter to you as a bootstrapper. Whether you’re having conversations at your day job, while you’re doing your side hustle, whether you’re doing sales demos, whether you are talking to folks that you have hired, contractors or full-time employees, or even communicating with your spouse or significant other as you try to navigate the frothy waters of building your company. Charles is extremely well-spoken and has a deep, deep understanding of this topic, so it was a pleasure to have him on the show. Let’s dive into our conversation. 

Charles Duhigg, thanks for joining me on the show.  

Charles Duhigg:
Thanks for having me on.  

Rob Walling:
It’s great to find to meet you. We were talking offline and I realized I’ve read at least two, maybe three of your books, but I hadn’t put together … Sometimes you just don’t put together that the author has written all these books. So Power of Habit, a lot of folks have probably heard of, as well as Smarter Faster Better, and most recently Super Communicators, and that’s what we’re here to talk about today. How to unlock the secret language of connection. And I know there’s a lot of listeners probably listening to this thinking, “You know what? I’m a software developer. I’m going to go indie hack my way and build a solo empire.” But you always need to know how to communicate with people, and that’s why I wanted to have you on the show today.  

Charles Duhigg:
Yes. Even if you are building a solo empire, you probably have a spouse or a significant other at home, and if you’re not communicating well with them, it does not matter how big your solo empire becomes. Communication is at the heart of what humans do, and it’s critical.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. And I used to be a not great communicator, and I’ve had to develop that over the past 10 or 15 years. I grew up left brain, introvert, developer, and so I would almost gravitate towards roles where it’s like, well, I just don’t need to communicate with people. Again, I’m going to be that solo person just doing my thing. And I’ve learned that the better I’ve got at communication … Partially through doing this podcast, to be honest. You talk for 720 episodes, you get a little better at it. But also dealing with the hard things of life, starting companies. As you said, working with my spouse on those. I think to get us started, there are super communicators, which the book is about, which are folks that are much, much better at communicating than what normies, we might call Muggles, as they call them in Harry Potter. But just define the term for us to set the stage.  

Charles Duhigg:
Sure. Absolutely. And it’s worth noting that all of us are super communicators at one time or another. So here’s a great way of demonstrating it. If you were having a bad day and you came home after this long day and you’re feeling lousy and you’re like, “You know what, I’m going to call someone I know calling this person will make me feel better.” Do you know who you would call? Does that person pop into your mind?  

Rob Walling:
Yep.  

Charles Duhigg:
Who is that?  

Rob Walling:
It’s a friend of mine named Brendan.  

Charles Duhigg:
Okay, Brendan. So for you, Brendan is a super communicator and you’re probably a super communicator back to him. And I’m guessing … And tell me if I’m getting this wrong, I’m guessing that one of the reasons why you love talking to Brendan is he knows what questions to ask you, and he proves to you that he’s listening and he shares things about himself. He doesn’t try and steal the spotlight, but he’ll share things about himself. And so it just feels really good to talk to him. So there are some people who can do this with anyone. There are some people who can be consistent super communicators. And the reason why is because they’ve recognized the skills that Brendan brings to his conversation with you and the skills that you almost unconsciously use in talking to Brendan, those are fungible skills. Those are skills that you can use with anyone once you recognize it’s a skill. It’s just like learning how to read. If you learn to read on nonfiction, that doesn’t mean you can’t read fiction or you can’t read a cookbook. It’s a completely fungible skill. Communication we’ve discovered is exactly the same, and so anyone can become a super communicator. It’s just a matter of understanding that there’s this handful of skills that you need to recognize the skills, and once you do, you can practice them until they become habits and use them with anyone.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. Well, let’s dive right in then. What are the skills? If someone’s thinking to themselves, I want to be able to communicate better, have hard conversations. And maybe it’s having hard conversations about firing someone. Maybe it’s having hard conversations about saying, “Hey, you’re not cutting it. I want to try to train you up, but I have to give you hard feedback.” Right?  

Charles Duhigg:
Totally.  

Rob Walling:
You can be an employee and have these conversations. You can be in your own company and have employees, but how do you get better at being a communicator?  

Charles Duhigg:
Yeah. There’s a handful of them. The first one is to understand what kind of conversation you’re having. This book really started when I fell into this bad pattern with my wife, which literally anyone in a relationship will recognize, which is I would come home from work after a long day, I’d start complaining about my day, and my wife very reasonably would suggest some practical solutions. She’d be like, “Oh, you should just take your boss out to lunch and you guys will get to know each other a little bit better.” And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. And I’d be like, “Why aren’t you supporting me? You’re supposed to be on my side. You’re supposed to be outraged on my behalf.” She would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice. 

And so I went to these researchers and I was like, “What’s going on here? I’m a professional communicator. Why do I, and everyone I know fall into this pattern?” And they were like, “Well, actually, we’re living through a golden age of understanding communication because of advances in neuroimaging and data collection. We really know what’s happening inside people’s brains for the first time.” And they said, “One of the things that we’ve learned is that when you have a discussion, you assume that discussion is about one thing. You’re talking about your day or you’re talking about your kid’s grades, or where to go on vacation. But actually every discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations.” And in general, these conversations, they tend to fall into one of three buckets. There’s practical conversations where we’re solving problems together or we’re making plans, but then there’s also emotional conversations where I might tell you what I’m feeling and I don’t want you to solve my feelings, I want you to empathize. 

And then there’s social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and to society. And they said, “What we’ve learned is if you’re having different kinds of conversations at the same moment, it’s really hard to hear each other. It’s really hard to connect.” Which is of course what was happening with me. I was coming home and having an emotional conversation. My wife was responding with a practical conversation, and as a result, we really couldn’t hear each other. And so the first thing that super communicators do really well is they just take a step back and they just asked themselves what kind of conversation does it seem like we’re having right now? Are we having an emotional conversation, a practical conversation, a social conversation? And there’s ways to flush that out and help you figure out what kind of conversation you’re having. But once they know, then they lean into it. They try and match the other person or invite them to match themselves. And within psychology, that’s known as the matching principle, that successful communication requires having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.  

Rob Walling:
As you’re saying this, I know a super communicator. It’s my wife, Dr. Sherry Walling. Folks who listens to the podcast will know. A, she’s a psychologist, so she’s trained, but B, she has empathy, and also she’s now a professional. She’s a CEO and founder coach. She’s an entrepreneur herself and just deals with a lot of entrepreneurs. Anyone who’s talked to her, who’s listening to this knows that she picks up on where you are and then goes with it. So that’s fascinating. I think that’s helpful for listeners who are listening right now, think of the person … There’s got to be someone in your life who is just amazing at this. And what is it? Is it that they pick up on the speaker, the other person where they are and meets them there? Do they also sometimes transition? You said there are three types but-  

Charles Duhigg:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s both of it. So let’s talk about how we figure out what kind of conversation we’re having. One thing we know about consistent super communicators is that they ask more questions than the average person. They ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. And some of those questions are very special questions that are known as deep questions. And a deep question is something that asks me about my values or my beliefs or my experiences. And that can sound intimidating. It sounds like that’s a big question, but it’s actually as simple as if you meet someone and you’re like, “What do you do for a living?”, and they say, “I’m a doctor.”, it’s natural to say like, “Oh, where do you practice medicine?” But a better question, a deep question is to say like, “Oh, what made you decide to go to medical school?” Because when I’m asking that question, what I’m really asking you is tell me about who you are. Tell me about your experiences, your values, the things that shaped you. 

And it’s an invitation. It’s not a mandate, it’s an invitation. But what tends to happen is that when you ask a deep question, when you ask someone how they feel about their life, instead of the facts of their life, they tend to tell you what kind of mindset they’re in. So the same person, that doctor, depending on the situation, depending on how they’re feeling that day, they may answer that question one of two ways. They might say something like, “Oh, I wanted a steady job, and I knew that medicine would always be a steady job.” Okay. They’re in a practical mindset right now. But that same person, if they’re feeling more vulnerable, they might say something like, “When I was a kid, I saw my dad get sick, and I saw the doctors and the nurses help him, and I wanted to be one of those people.” That person’s in a much more emotional mindset. 

And so once I know what kind of mindset you’re in, then I can match you. And I can say, “Oh, it’s so interesting you mentioned that. I’m a lawyer and I became a lawyer because I saw my uncle get arrested when I was a kid.” And I can also invite you to match me. For instance, when I come home and I’m talking to my wife and she listens to me complain and she emotes with me, at some point she can say, “I understand how you’re feeling. Do you want to talk about solutions? Because I think that there’s a way to solve this problem.” So what super communicators do is they ask deep questions to try and figure out what kind of conversation is happening, and then they match the other person and invite them to match themselves. And that can sound hard, but it’s actually very, very easy and very natural and graceful because our brain makes asking deep questions and matching into a habit very quickly.  

Rob Walling:
You’re so on point, and it reminds me of … I don’t know if you’ve seen it on Instagram, but there’s a text where a guy’s girlfriend texts him and says, “I just bought an ice cream cone, and the scoop fell off onto the sidewalk.” And he says, “Are we in a feeling and empathy mode, or would you like to hear solutions?” Total tone-deaf, but it totally links into what you’re saying, right?  

Charles Duhigg:
And yet what’s interesting is from the outside that seems totally tone-deaf, but when I come home and I’m having a bad day and my wife says to me, “Okay. Do you want to talk about solutions or do you just need to complain and get this off your chest?”, I actually really appreciate it. Because I’m like, “No, no, no. This isn’t a big deal. I just want to vent for a couple of minutes.” So asking maybe over a text is not the best way of doing it. There might be a little slightly more graceful way. But when you’re in that conversation, it actually feels good to have someone ask you, “What can I do to help you? What are you looking for in this conversation?” That’s not something that feels ungraceful, that feels actually very welcoming.  

Rob Walling:
Do you have any advice on how to transition from one type of conversation to another? And I want to give you a specific examples, so let’s say that I’m in a weekly or monthly one-on-one with someone who reports to me. And there’s often … Well, early, there’s chitchat, and then we get in like, “How are you doing?” There’s the emotional like, “How are things going over the past month? Is there anything we need to address in terms of your happiness here at the company?” And at a certain point, maybe you do need to transition that to being more practical, maybe giving feedback or whatever. But how does one do that elegantly?  

Charles Duhigg:
Honestly, the best way to do it … And there’s two things to do here. Let’s talk about a conflict situation and a non-conflict situation. In a non-conflict situation, if you’re like, “How are you doing here?”, and they’re saying, “Oh, I’m frustrated with this one thing, and my wife thinks I’m not home enough.” Listen. Say, “I’ve had that similar experience myself.” And at some point you can literally just say, “Look, we’ve been talking about how we feel. Is it okay if I propose a solution to you, if I make a suggestion?” What you’re really saying is, can I move this conversation from an emotional conversation to a practical conversation? Now, the fact that you’re asking permission to do it, almost inevitably the other person says yes, but it also feels like instead of you mandating that they have to have a different kind of conversation, you’re inviting them to match you in return. So that’s very elegant, it’s very graceful. It doesn’t feel weird. 

But let’s talk about a conflict situation where it’s hard to do that. So in a conflict situation, what’s really important is that we prove that we’re listening to the other person. And by conflict situation, I mean even if we just disagree about something. We’re talking about something where we just see things a little bit differently. So maybe it’s not a fight, maybe it’s not that hard a conversation, but it’s something where there’s a little bit of a difference. It’s really important to prove that we’re listening. And there’s actually a technique for doing this that they teach at Harvard and Stanford and all these other fancy schools that’s known as looping for understanding. And the reason it’s important to prove that we’re listening is because in many conversations in the back of our mind, we suspect that the other person is not listening, they’re just waiting their turn to speak. 

So that situation you described before where they’re complaining and you want to get a practical, if you just jump in with a practical, it seems to the other person, they’re like, “Oh, he basically sat there while I complained but now we’re talking about the thing he wants to talk about.” But if we prove that we’re listening, we overcome that suspicion that the other person’s just waiting their turn to speak. And what looping for understanding does is it has these three steps. Step one is ask a question, preferably a deep question. Step two is after the person has answered the question, repeat back what they said to you in your own words. And the key here is not mimicry. It’s to prove to them you’re paying attention. And more importantly, to prove to them that you’re processing what they’re saying. 

And then step three, and this is the one we usually forget, ask if you got it right. Because one of two things will happen. The first thing is they’ll say like, “No, I don’t think you understood what I was saying.” Which is really useful to know. The second thing is that they’ll say, “Yeah, I think you understood what I was saying.” And what we actually did in that moment is we asked them for permission to acknowledge that we were listening. And when they acknowledge that we were listening, they become more likely to listen to us in return. So when you’re in that conversation and you’re trying to transition to something, or when you’re in a tough conversation and you’re trying to move it from criticism to solution finding, if you prove to the other person that you’re listening to them, they become much, much more willing to match you, to join you in having a more productive conversation.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. You were saying that was more of a conflict approach, so that could be applied with a spouse, significant other, that could be applied at work. Yeah.  

Charles Duhigg:
Yeah. When we go in and we give someone some performance feedback that’s not overwhelmingly positive, when we have a partner and we disagree about how to move forward and we have to come to a consensus, if we prove to each other that we’re listening as our first and primary goal, that conversation is going to go much, much better.  

Rob Walling:
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I want to switch it up a little bit because we’ve been talking about close relationships, people you work with, significant others, life partners and such. There’s another element to communication, and I want to give you another scenario. So we host an event called MicroConf. We host it twice a year where a bunch of entrepreneurs, a couple of hundred entrepreneurs get together. And one of the most valuable parts of the event is what we call the hallway track, which is not the main track, it’s where you go out in the hallway and you’re talking to other entrepreneurs. So there’s a lot of introverted folks who want to connect with other founders, and they maybe are not sure, how do I do this well? How do I not ask the same three questions? How do I not stay on the surface? How do I make connections with those who I want to connect with? Do you have any advice for those folks?  

Charles Duhigg:
Yeah. Absolutely. There’s been a lot of experiments on this. And it’s interesting because I think the people who are introverts, they think that they’re at a disadvantage to being a super communicator, and it’s actually not true at all. In fact, one of the things that we know is it doesn’t matter if you’re an introvert or extrovert. Because these are skills, really, they’re skills that can be learned by anyone. Moreover, what we know is that people who are real super communicators consistently, if you ask them, were you always good at communication, they often say no. They say things like, “I had trouble making friends in high school, and so I really had to study how kids talk to each other.” Or, “My parents got divorced and I had to be the peacemaker between them.” And it’s the act of thinking about communication that makes someone a super communicator. 

This is what super communicators do, is they think a little bit more about just what’s going on here. So here’s the thing that I would say. There was this experiment that was done at Harvard Business School where they brought a bunch of students into a room and they said, “Look, you’re about to have a conversation with a stranger.” Telling someone you have to have a conversation with a stranger is one of the most anxiety producing things you can do for anyone. And they said, “But before you have this conversation, here’s what we want you to do. Take out a piece of paper. Just write down three topics or questions you might want to talk about. Stupid stuff like are you going to the party this weekend? I just saw Dune two and I thought it was terrible. What do you think about it? Just write down three things.” 

And so they did. They stuck them in their pocket, then they went and they had the conversations. And afterwards they asked everyone how’d those conversations go? And the participant said, “Interestingly, the three things I wrote down, they never came up, but I felt so much more confident and calm during that conversation. I felt like I could really focus on the other person so much better because I knew that if there was going to be that awkward silence, I knew what I was going to say. I knew what I had in my back pocket.” And for introverts in particular, but this is true for everyone, the thing that makes conversations hard is not the conversation itself, it’s our anxiety about the conversation. We’re thinking like, “I’m going to go into this hallway. I’m going to have to talk to five people I’ve never talked to before. It’s going to be exhausting. There’s going to be weird, awkward silences.” And so when we can remove that anxiety, it allows us to tap into our natural communication and listening and speaking instincts much more easily. So simply just writing down three things that you might want to talk about, that can change things entirely. And what’s important to realize is that the reason why this is so powerful is because communication is Homo sapiens superpower. It’s the reason our species has been so successful. 

So as a result, our brains have evolved to be really, really good at communication. Like an introvert’s brain and an extrovert’s brain, and someone who’s somewhere on the spectrum, their brain, all of our brains are really good at communication. And oftentimes what we need to do is we need to allow our brains to do what they’re good at. And when we’re anxious or when we’re uptight, or when we’re like, okay, my goal is I have 30 seconds with this person and I want to impress them how smart I am, that’s when we get in the way of our instincts. But the more we allow ourselves to just do what feels natural, the better those conversations are going to go.  

Rob Walling:
It reminds me of the first time you give a talk in front of a bunch of people and you know the material pat. You know it forwards and backwards, and then you get up in front and you freeze, and the blood rushes to your head and the hair stands up on the back of your neck, and you become just a … presenter. And you watch it back later and it’s like, ah, it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but it’s the anxiety. It’s not your ability to communicate because when you gave it to yourself in the bathroom mirror with no anxiety, it was a great … presentation. But when you get up in front of people …  

Charles Duhigg:
And in the 30th time you give that speech when you’re bored by it, so you have zero anxiety because you’re like, I know exactly what I’m doing. When all of a sudden on the stage you start doing these flourishes and these little charismatic things. It’s because you’re not thinking about giving the speech. You’re just giving the speech. And that frees your brain up to let all those instincts come out to be like, oh, here’s a fun joke. It’s never occurred to me before, but I’ll just try this joke out. And that’s why it’s so important that these are skills. Is because our brains are designed that when we identify these skills and we practice them, our brain makes them into habits very, very quickly. And once they’re habits, we don’t have to think about them. We get to just relax and let the habit take over.  

Rob Walling:
I mentioned to you offline that I listened to your book last week as I was driving around Iceland, and it was super enjoyable to hear about it. One thing that struck me … And I don’t know that you phrased it in this way, but I was thinking, man, I can get really good at unquote small talk based on some things you said in the book, even beyond the example we just used at a conference. But if you’re a salesperson, usually you want to build rapport in the first two to three minutes as you’re doing a sales demo. I interview hundreds of startup founders every year or two to get into the accelerator. There’s just a lot of times when I find a meeting someone new for the first time, I have a 20-minute call, I need to get rapport very quickly. And usually small talk is just garbage. It’s like, “Oh, where are you from? What’s the weather?” This and that. But you had examples of, here’s a question that most people ask, here’s how to ask it in a way that is much more effective. Can you talk us through that?  

Charles Duhigg:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So in the book, there’s all these stories. There’s the story of a CIA officer who asked to recruit an overseas agent that’s just terrible at it, or the Big Bang Theory. Why the writers of the Big Bang Theory were able to make it work. And at the core of a lot of those is just a reframing of what’s going on in a conversation. So let’s say it’s small talk. Let’s say you meet someone you’re trying … You don’t know anything about them. You’re trying to get to know them. And you say like, “Oh, what part of town do you live in?” And they say, “I live in the Heights.” That’s a dead end. But if your next question is, “Oh man, the Heights, that’s really interesting. What do you like about it up there? Why did you guys decide to move up there?” That’s a deep question. And what that person is going to say is they’re going to say something like, “Oh, my kids’ schools are near there and so we just wanted to be close to it. And there’s also this great community. We used to live in the valley and we didn’t know any of our neighbors, and now we live up in the Heights and we know all of our neighbors.” 

So at that moment, what you can do is you can reciprocate and you can say … Because what you just told me is you told me you have family, community is important to you. You’ve been in this town for a little while, long enough to at least live in two different places. I’ve learned so much about you just by asking, “What do you like about the Heights?” And at that point, I can reciprocate and I can say, “Oh, it’s so interesting. I have two kids also, and actually, we live over in a different part of town in Midtown. But it’s similarly, the reason I love it is because we just know our neighborhood and it’s such a diverse neighborhood. There’s all these people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s just really interesting.” Now we’re actually communicating with each other. Now we’re actually bonding a little bit. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to be best friends, but it definitely means that we are making a connection. We feel like we know something about each other. And all it took to do that was just to ask you a question about how you feel about something and then to reciprocate what I’m hearing.  

Rob Walling:
And is that something that you yourself do if you go to a dinner party?  

Charles Duhigg:
Oh, I do it all the time.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah.  

Charles Duhigg:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I do it literally all the time. I mean, there’s this guy named Nick Epley at the University of Chicago. He plays this game where he’ll get on a bus, and his goal within three questions of sitting down next to a stranger is to get them talking about their hopes and dreams. And he says usually it takes two questions because he’ll sit down next to someone and he’ll be like, “Hey, what do you do for a living?” And they’re like, “I’m an accountant.” And he is like, “Oh, did you always want to be an accountant? Was that your dream when you were a kid?” And they’re like, “No, of course not. Who has a dream to be an accountant as a kid? No, I wanted to be an astronaut.” And then they’re off to the races. They’re talking about their dreams when they were young. I do it all the time. Again, once you practice it once or twice, it becomes a habit and it’s so easy. It’s so easy to connect with other people simply by just asking them what seems like a fairly benign question.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. And that’s fascinating because it’s, when I first read the summary of Super Communicators before I listened to the book, I thought it was going to be about … I don’t know if you’ve read the book Crucial Conversations.  

Charles Duhigg:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
It’s about having hard conversations or being able to communicate complex things or whatever. But it really runs the gamut because you and I, just in this 20-minute conversation, have talked about small talk, we’ve talked about dealing with a significant other spouse, a life partner. We’ve talked about dealing with direct reports. We’ve talked about being at a conference, which I guess is small talk, but it’s different. The super communicator moniker that you’re talking about and that you describe in the book really does cover the gamut of person-to-person interactions.  

Charles Duhigg:
Oh, absolutely. And if you think about it, what do we consistently spend most of our time doing? We all eat once or twice a day or three times a day or more. We all sleep every single night. But if you were to actually log most of the minutes, you spend certainly in the top three, if not, the top one would be communicating with other people. It’s like asking your kids, how are you doing, you’re getting to school today, ordering a coffee, talking to the barista to give her your order, calling the person you’re working on some project with. Communication is at the core of what we do. And so you’re exactly right. Being a super communicator, it’s not about hard conversations, it’s about all conversations.  

Rob Walling:
And that actually brings me to an interesting question, and you may have addressed this in the book. I definitely was daydreaming a bit, staring at the volcanoes in the mountains as I was driving through Iceland. So something that occurred to me is a lot of my communication is via email and DM and Slack. It’s not verbal. You and I on this, again, in the last 20 minutes, we talked a lot about verbal. Does it change? Is it different when you’re typing?  

Charles Duhigg:
The same principles apply, but the important thing is to recognize that each form of communication has slightly different rules. So one of my favorite examples of this, just to put it in context, is about a hundred years ago when telephones were first becoming popular, there were all these articles that appeared that said no one will ever have a real conversation over telephone. Because think about it, up to that moment, all conversations that happened basically face-to-face. And they said, “Look, if you can’t see the other person, you’re not going to be able to understand what they’re feeling. You’re going to miss all their facial expressions, their gestures.” What’s interesting is that at the time, they were exactly right. So if you listen to early phone conversations or transcripts of early phone conversations, what you see is that people basically use them as telegrams. They would call up and give someone a grocery list or a stock order, but they didn’t know how to have a back-and-forth. 

Now, by the time you and I were in middle school, we could talk for seven hours a night on the phone, and they were the most meaningful conversations of our lives, and that’s because we learned the rules for talking on phones. One of the rules … And you still live by it, I live by it. We all do it subconscious without even realizing it. When we’re talking to someone on the phone and we can’t see them, we over enunciate our words by about 15 or 20%. We put about a third more emotion into our voice because we know the other person can’t see our facial expressions. We do that without even thinking about it. Now, the thing is that there are slightly different rules for phone conversations than face-to-face conversations. The same thing is true of DMS and texting and sending a messages with emojis and sending an email versus having a Zoom call. 

When we get into trouble is when we forget the rules. Or it’s not even like we forget the rules, we just don’t pay attention to them. So I know that if I’m going to send you something hard, if I can do it over voice, that’d be great, and if I can’t, it’s definitely better to do it over email than it is over text. That’s not a huge discovery. But when we’re moving really fast and we’re just thinking about ourselves and we’re just thinking about getting the information across, we forget to remind ourselves what are the rules of texting versus DMs versus something else? That’s when we suddenly send that text that the other person reads, and they get pissed off because they took it out of context. So the only real difference … All the same principles apply, the difference is that there are slightly different rules and slightly different strengths or weaknesses for each channel of communication and we have to remind ourselves of that.  

Rob Walling:
And if folks want to dig in deeper, they can buy Super Communicators wherever greater books are sold. Amazon. I got mine on Audible, of course. And folks who want to keep up with you. They can head to charlescuhigg.com. That’s D-U-H-I-G-G. Or you’re also C. Duhigg on Twitter/X. Charles, thanks so much for joining me today.  

Charles Duhigg:
Thank you for having me. This has been so much fun.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Charles for joining me on Startups for the Rest of us. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Obviously a little different than some episodes of this podcast, but I like to broaden my own horizons, as you can tell, from … I think I’m at 904 audiobooks in my Audible account, and sometimes I like to share topics that may not be in the direct focused wheelhouse that you might experience week to week on this show. But know that if you come back to this podcast again next week, it will continue to have content, information, insights, and hopefully inspiration to motivate you to continue building your company. My mission is to multiply the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups, and that’s why I record this podcast each week. That’s why it focuses on building incredible businesses that may not change the world, but they can change your life and the life of those around you. Thanks so much for joining me this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 723.