dear adam i have a great investment opportunity for you let me tell you about my startup i know we've never met but here's why you should endorse my book is your team hiring because i'd be a great fit every day i get dozens of pitches some come from strangers around the world others from people i know we'd love for you to come speak to our company can you fix our toxic culture you should really consider being my mentor will you make me breakfast daddy and let's just say some are stronger than others [Music] we all give pitches at work when you give a speech you're pitching a vision when you make a suggestion in a meeting you're pitching an idea when you apply for a job you're pitching yourself pitching can feel like selling but you don't have to be a great salesperson to give a great pitch and sometimes less selling is more [Music] i'm adam grant and this is work life my podcast with the ted audio collective i'm an organizational psychologist i study how to make work not suck in this show i take you inside the minds of fascinating people to rethink how we work lead and live today how to get your foot in the door with a great pitch and what to do if the door slams shut thanks to ukg for sponsoring this episode [Music] when you make a pitch it's often not the idea that leads to rejection it's how you present it in tech and entertainment there are tons of great ideas that initially got denied excite declined a pitch to buy a tiny startup called google blockbuster passed on a pitch to acquire netflix a dozen publishers turned down harry potter and multiple movie studios rejected star wars these ideas eventually found a receptive audience but in many cases you only have a chance for a short elevator pitch so you want to maximize your chances of a yes before the door closes a couple months ago a venture capitalist sent me a pitch from a startup founder named jessica holton i wanted to follow up on our conversation recently about potentially partnering with adam grant we believe he would be a strong addition to our investor and partner group as we seek i was intrigued she was clearly excited about her idea to make relationship counseling available online but as i read her pitch i had some hesitations i wrote down my feedback why do we need it how do we know if it'll work just close the three and a half million dollar seed round that was three times oversubscribed led by tmv with participation from serena ventures collaborative fund and lake house ventures okay they've convinced investors who are kind of a big deal but we have the best team in the world to build a brand that makes relationship health accessible best team in the world more than a little self-aggrandizing i sent them some tough love and i didn't hear back so i decided to call the founder and see if she wanted to talk through what happened i'm jessica and i am one of the co-founders of ours which is a relationship health company did you know when you wrote that pitch that you're pitching yourself to beyond work life not at all when you got my feedback how did you react well the first reaction truly was oh my gosh i was proud to know that you now know what ours is and clearly want us to succeed the second reaction was embarrassment and i felt a little defensive to be honest i thought the idea itself had merit but the pitch fell into some common traps that i see regularly not just in startup pitches but in meetings and job applications too and to her credit jessica had the confidence the humility and the courage to discuss them with me there are three big myths that limit the effectiveness of a pitch and i want to bust them because they often lead to bad advice oh i've gotten a lot of advice one is how to sell a vision sell that future paint a world where what our mission is comes true and becomes reality that's the first myth lead with your bold idea tell us how much better the world will be in the future when you're successful but research suggests that no one cares what you'll create in the future until you convince them there's something wrong with the present before you propose your solution you need to highlight an important problem in her pitch jessica led with a solution we seek to revolutionize relationship health you have this bold vision to revolutionize relationship health why does relationship health need to be revolutionized where is the proof that it's broken that that people are are in pain that they're struggling with their relationships that they don't have the existing access to the solutions they need why did you leave that out we left that out because we got feedback time and time again that when we tell the kind of more bottoms up story around how i got interested in couples therapy didn't paint as big enough of a vision as changing an entire industry we see couples all the time who love what we're doing and we help their relationship get better and we change their lives so to us it's like you know how a fish doesn't know it's in water and to us it's just truly a given that there's so much need and untapped demand for what we're building that to us it's obvious when you pitch your idea you suffer from what's called the curse of knowledge you've spent days months maybe years thinking about the problem it's so crystal clear in your mind that you often forget to explain it to others before people will believe that your idea will make the world better you have to explain what's wrong with the world right now this isn't unique to entrepreneurs in his most famous speech martin luther king jr didn't open with his dream before turning to his vision for tomorrow he spent the first 11 of his 16 minutes describing the injustice of today as communication expert nancy duarte explains you have to show people what's unacceptable about what is before they'll get excited about what could be as a job applicant instead of leading with what makes you a strong candidate start with what the company needs as a leader rather than opening with your vision tell us what the market demands there's actually very little data around couples therapy around couples who want to go to couples therapy we had this moment of well we could actually go do that survey and we could go find that data and so to be honest that's the reason why is you we wrote this email before we realized that and before we started going out there to find the data have you have you done that survey yet it's in progress right now great because i mean there's so many things that i would want to know from that right and i think frankly that's even something you could say right like we we know anecdotally there's a pressing need we're in the process of trying to document that need i think that what was missing from me in the pitch was there is a pressing need and the existing offerings are just not cutting it you're absolutely right and it starts with the problem and then a survey of what's happening right now and then a solution and i can very much see why that's more compelling than just i mean we could revolutionize everything right and what i'm hearing is a why does this need to be revolutionized yeah i can see you're passionate about improving relationships i think that that passion is what fuels me [Music] that brings us to a second myth that a great pitch is filled with passion i see this in so many founders they want to electrify the room with their energy but in a study of a business plan competition the amount of passion that founders showed had no bearing on whether judges decided to fund their pitches it didn't matter how much excitement they expressed the founders who got investments were the ones who were rated as thoughtful logical and fact-based in another study of over 1400 pitch videos founders who showed too much joy were less likely to get funded they weren't taken seriously and in a controlled experiment delivering a more animated pitch didn't increase the odds of success but having a high quality business plan did it's helpful to feel passion but what you need to show most is preparedness the most important step in convincing people to bet on you isn't to express enthusiasm it's to prove that you've done your homework think about the most impressive entrepreneurs you've seen on shark tank or dragon's den they're not always the most entertaining presenters they're the founders who know their numbers cold it gives you confidence that they'll make smart decisions and be ready for any crisis in jessica's situation i wanted to see what her team knew about counseling or about providing services to couples online especially if they consider themselves one of the first to market i guess i would pose the question to you like what would we have said besides a description of the team to ease that concern what i can't see in your pitch is what do you know about relationship health has anyone tested whether this works as well online as it does in person what do you know about providing services to couples online where confidentiality is potentially a huge concern privacy is a major issue and there are all these open questions right that would have signaled to me is okay you've identified a a gap in a market what i want to know is like have you really done your homework and demonstrated to me that you're the team that's going to fill that gap most effectively yeah so believe it or not there were several versions of this email that we iterated on that we drafted and i think whether right or wrong in our minds we said let's just get enough info there to open the door and at that point we thought that the external metrics of fundraising would be enough to say hey we we showed all of our investors that we have the chops that we have identified the opportunity in her pitch email jessica did highlight the strengths of her team we have the best team in the world to build a brand that makes relationship health accessible jessica myself a stanford business school grad and data driven experience builder adam a kellogg design and business school grad and creative community builder liz a world-renowned couples therapist and best which takes us to our third myth the key task in a pitch is to project confidence evidence shows that when people are considering working with you they care at least as much about whether you're collaborative as whether you're capable and i've found that one of the ways to signal that you're collaborative is to talk about some of your shortcomings it shows you're receptive to input and open to learning you might do that by seeking advice on one of your drawbacks sharing how you've grown from your mistakes admitting some of your uncertainties or asking a it might sound like a lack of confidence but it actually takes confidence to admit what you don't know of course this is tricky for female leaders who unfairly face plenty of barriers in stereotypes for example research shows that investors typically ask male founders about upside potential how will you win but female founders about downside risk how will you make sure you don't lose so for better or worse a lot of advisors told jessica that it was critical to express confidence one of the things that really came across was this idea of being more confident means speaking in grand terms i definitely had an allergic reaction to the best team in the world i'm like on what standard what are your data i think i might have called it self-aggrandizing i clearly see how in writing that sounds very egotistical and i see that you know there's whom i to say that i have the best team in the world this is really the first time that we were pitching in written form and it's it's a totally different it's a different world of pitching in words than pitching in a conversation that is not a distinction that i really thought through going into this conversation you come across as as warm and charismatic and approachable and curious and humble and nobody in a million years would ever judge you as arrogant from meeting you and in fact the concern would be that you seem so enthusiastic and joyful that especially as a woman people would unfairly judge you as a little pollyanna and in writing oh that goes away and it sounds like i'm awesome what you just said resonates so much i have this group of female entrepreneurs i'm in so many whatsapp groups all we talk about in a lot of ways is how to pitch more like a man and that that translates into be more confident yes men might tend to do that more and men are getting more funding but it doesn't mean that like one causes the other and i think that was missing i misinterpreted that and found kind of like a shortcut to be more successful is to speak in this case overly confident way that decreases my credibility and it shouldn't be your responsibility as a woman founder to have to figure out okay what kind of contortion act do i have to master to come across as appropriately confident but not arrogant and to show that i'm warm but not pollyanna i'm curious to hear like how do you advise people on having that humility and being that gentle leader or learning open curious leader admitting what i don't know and also effusing strength and credibility and inspiration it's a really good question i'm not saying you should come into the pitch and say we are completely unqualified to be running this company you've heard of imposter syndrome but we are actual imposters but i think that confidence is overrated and humility is underrated i think that the kind of confidence i want to see is what reid hoffman described to me once is confidence in your ability to learn as opposed to you know trying to show that you've already figured it out very much makes sense it kind of like makes my team more rigid than fluid and i can see how you know by me taking the statement of we have the best team in the world to do this it doesn't leave room for well what if we could be even better or what if that's different in a year when we're serving couples at different life stages or we go beyond couples the the research that i really like on this is on what's called signaling receptivity which again you i don't think you have to do because of your personality it comes across naturally but in writing i'd want to see that you're committed to both identifying and overcoming the limitations of your approach basically so i might suggest you know here's here's a current challenge that we're facing which also by the way is a potential advisor that makes me more interested in helping i think asking a question or two is another way to signal receptivity so when you write a pitch like this you could easily say if you are willing to talk to us here are the three initial questions that we would love to run by you which signals you're going to use my time well admitting uncertainty and acknowledging mistakes are probably the other two that come out in the research so acknowledging uncertainty would be saying we we know there's that a lot of people are struggling with relationship health we know that there are plenty of people who say that they want couples counseling we don't know yet if people will stick with it we don't know yet how that will go online at scale and that would be an example of this is an open question that we're excited to explore and i guess the last way you could do it is to to say something about how when we started the like the organization we actually made a relationship health mistake um and here's now how we're dealing with it and that only further reinforced for us the need for this third party um any reactions to those yeah two reactions my first reaction is i feel a lot like relieved to hear that i can in pitches admit that we don't know everything and i i didn't realize until just now how much pressure there was to feel like we have everything figured out and we have this plan and it's going to be really successful because there's a lot that we don't know yet the second thing is it dawned on me as you were saying this like we were emailing you to be an advisor and to get your advice and of course asking a question or showing where we have gaps is the best way to show you that we know that you would add so much value okay i have to ask do you want to try your pitch again i was afraid you would ask me that as you know we have seen over the past several years that couples increasingly are turning to couples therapy proactively to invest in their relationship and yet couples therapy today isn't serving their needs the right way it's antiquated it's hard to get started it's expensive and largely inaccessible to most people in the us over the past year adam liz tyler and i and our team have piloted several different approaches to couples therapy and what we've found is that this hybrid approach to couples therapy and relationship health incorporating both the magic of a therapist's relationship with their couple and the power of technology and content enables us to provide couples with proactive relationship health at any life stage in an effective and truly transformational way our model also helps alleviate the therapist capacity problem in the u.s by amplifying the therapists efforts and making their relationship with their couples more effective and we just closed our seed round we're launching in april of this year and we're at an incredibly special time where we could really value adam grant's input on the research side of our business where as you know we have not developed out to date thanks that was good that was i was nervous so good in fact that i'm now pitching her to take me on as an investor and advisor if you only have one shot to give your elevator pitch it helps to lead with the problem before the solution focus more on signaling preparedness than passion and show receptivity along with confidence but what if your pitching is part of an ongoing interaction like you want your boss to agree to a new project or your mentor to co-author an article with you if you have a whole meeting instead of a cold email how do you get your ideas heard and if they get rejected how do you revive them more on that after the break okay this is going to be a different kind of ad i play a personal role in selecting the sponsors for this podcast because they all have interesting cultures of their own today we're going inside the workplace at ukg [Music] my mom's white from the south and my dad immigrated from japan in the late 50s early 60s so they were married in 62 and at that time their marriage wasn't recognized bob wadanabe grew up in a small town in maine where he was no stranger to discrimination his family shaped his understanding of diversity and what he wanted to do in the world one i always wanted to be able to be in a position of helping folks that was something that was ingrained from my parents my mom was a nurse my dad's physician my brother's a physician and they're there as healers right they view that as a servant position not as a status position bob works at ukg where he leads efforts on diversity equity inclusion and belonging as hate crimes against asian americans increased starkly bob saw many people in pain so he worked with the company's employee resource groups to create a forum where people could share their stories we had some very transparent vulnerable heartbreaking discussions with folks a colleague was telling the story around bringing a small child to a playground and as they were approaching they were being yelled at get away take your virus away from us and people the video on the call you know folks were visibly tearing up you know they're in shock just mouthgate i can't believe this actually happened what year is this hearing that this actually happened it wasn't in the abstract it wasn't something you were just reading about in a newspaper other this is something that someone that you work with felt it impacted them personally not surprisingly these conversations were not easy part of being a healer is you want to fix things right this is something that's really difficult to fix now they have to give ukg a ton of credit they realize no action was the wrong action and so we started to get together have these difficult discussions knowing we weren't going to get it right so as you're going through it's just being there as that support system having that support infrastructure having that level of community is really going to help folks heal in that way and all of us move forward research suggests that supporting people has two components promoting their success and protecting their well-being the shine and shield it's kind of how it was brought up you know you shield your team from all the all the pain points and you take responsibility there and then when something goes well you shine a light on them and there's always that joke of my team's blame bob um so just let it run down to me i'll take it from there uh understanding that sometimes you just have to give space to find their edges and fall down and make that and then as they get back up and they're able to do that then you say hey look how great they're doing at some points in his career people have overlooked bob for that spotlight i'd have to have this conversation with some folks at time don't take my calm demeanor as you know don't conflate that with passivity the ironies that you have with the model minority myth is you have folks that you see as being hardworking they're humble that go into humility but some of those traits don't carry over to traditional american traits or western traits for leadership we've heard this sometimes explicitly where folks will say well ah they're too timid or they're too tempted to be leaders or they're not assertive enough bob leads by example his unwavering commitment to shining shielding and healing is helping to build better workplaces not just for today but for the future i have a daughter so she's gonna deal not only with the bamboo ceiling but also the glass ceiling so as we look to break through those it's really setting it up for this next generation of workers to be taken care of in a proper way or they don't have as many challenges or obstacles no matter who they are or what job they do your employees deserve to feel supported that's why ukg gives you all the necessary tools to help them thrive learn more by visiting ukg.com [Music] [Music] i was working for leonardo dicaprio's film and television production company as a junior executive and my job was to find great screenplays when franklin leonard was starting off his film production career he read hundreds of pitches for the next hollywood hit and most of the things that i was reading were not great and around that time i got an incoming phone call from a manager i believe was pitching me on a movie it would have been leonardo dicaprio you know i think he's an he's a oil industry lobbyist and then he discovers that there is a long dormant though now active volcano in the atlantic and a storm is going to pass over that volcano the volcano is going to launch like toxic fume into the air and this giant storm would destroy the entire eastern seaboard and i remember asking the manager like are you pitching me leo versus the toxic superstorm right and i remember him saying well when you pitch it like that it sounds ridiculous then i think i read maybe 30 pages and was like yeah this is as bad as i thought it was but franklin also read some exceptionally good screenplays that never saw the light of day eventually he decided to email a bunch of hollywood insiders asking what's your favorite unproduced screenplay then he circulated the list of their top picks that's when he founded the blacklist and for the past 17 years it's become an annual list of hollywood's uncut gems sometimes literally franklin has made a huge mark on the industry the films he's spotlighted have been nominated for more than 275 oscars and won over 50 including four of the last 13 best pictures and 10 of the last 26 best screenplays slumdog millionaire the king's speech a promising young woman the year before that jojo rabbit argo and spotlight today the blacklist also serves as an online marketplace where writers can get feedback and get discovered so franklin has deep expertise in what it takes to make a successful pitch especially when that pitch is made in dialogue with other people and even when that pitch takes place over time sometimes a lot of time sometimes over and over and over again there are bad pitches and there are good pitches for every idea on some fundamental level every time you pitch that is a new data gathering operation about how effective that pitch is you will learn what people respond to what people don't respond to and the pitch should be constantly retooled to be better unlike a cold email for an investment a hollywood pitch meeting is not a one-way street it's a two-way conversation i think people oftentimes fail to consider their audience it's really important that like your audience has a particular set of interests backgrounds experiences exposure and it's critical to be able to identify what those are and tell your tailor the story that you're telling to to them no matter what industry you're in or what kind of team or project it is when you pitch your idea think about it like a story it needs a protagonist a confrontation and a resolution i actually did that for this show once upon a time there was a social scientist who wanted to make work not suck after writing some books he started getting invited onto a lot of stages and soon he was spending more time sharing things he already knew then discovering things he didn't it dawned on him that he needed a podcast to turn the tables research identifies a couple ways to tailor your story to the audience one is to make your unfamiliar idea familiar by using analogies novel ideas often seem abstract and impractical an analogy can make them feel more concrete and feasible in tech many investors didn't get airbnb until it was described as ebay for homes in hollywood titanic made a lot more sense to studios when it was presented as romeo and juliet on a sinking ship although i still don't get why there wasn't room for leo on that raft franklin has found analogies helpful when explaining his own vision for the blacklist you're trying to communicate a series of ideas to another person so if i say google for screenplays if you know what a screenplay is great if you know what google is great you can probably put those things together and understand what i mean now if you don't know what google is that's not an effective analogy because then have to explain again what that thing is but it's ultimately about efficiency you want those analogies to be specific and and evocative like i've used the analogy of like imagine trying to put together the lakers roster but only from people that jerry buss personally knows or the people that he knows personally knows right you're not gonna win a championship you're probably not going to win a game and you may not even score because other teams are out there looking for the next giannis you know arakatunko and that's what hollywood should be doing we should be looking for the best storytellers and writers from around the world and then bringing them into the system so that we can all profit together and admittedly i will also tweak that depending on who i'm talking to if i'm speaking to someone who's european or sort of not american frankly i will more often than not use soccer which is sort of my sport of choice but being in la lakers is perfect i will also tweak it to nyx if it's a new york person another strategy is to think of yourself as a pitcher you're tossing a ball to a catcher and you want them to throw it back when that doesn't happen things go wrong research shows that when screenwriters are handed ideas late in the process their films end up being less creative and coherent they don't feel a sense of ownership over them when they have a hand in developing the idea they become motivated to invest in it it becomes theirs one of my favorite examples of that actually comes from apple when the team finally got steve jobs interested in making a phone it wasn't a full-blown pitch it was a half-baked idea they tossed over that he could catch and toss back they said yeah the smartphones for the pocket protector crowd are clunky but how beautiful would they be if apple made one more often than not whoever you're pitching you're pitching them not only on hey this movie's going to be great but it's like we're going to work on this together for a long time and so when i think about the the notion of making your audience a partner in the story that you're telling for me it's really again these are just sort of the fundamentals of rapport building in any conversation right i love the way you describe rapport building as you know really giving the other person a chance to see what it's like to work with you and also to feel like a partner in the project i would say go so far as to say it's critically important that any pitch ultimately end up being a conversation because whatever story you're telling and look maybe you have the most obvious story of all time and all you have to do is make the pitch and the person is going to be like where do i send my check i haven't seen a lot of those conversations happen bringing an analogy and inviting the other person to build on the idea can increase the odds of acceptance but many great ideas still get rejected there's no need to feel defeated there are strategies to revive your pitch in a recent study researchers tracked over 200 ideas at a healthcare organization what we found was that a quarter of rejected ideas still made it to implementation pat satterstrom is a management expert at nyu and she led a research team that spent nearly three years studying teams in clinics these seem like great places to understand how people who didn't have as much power typically in the clinic like front desk um employees would have an opportunity to share ideas and really try and understand how ideas made it or didn't make it to implementation over time it wasn't fast though sometimes it took 48 56 weeks to get there but they did eventually and what was interesting is that sometimes the person who initially brought it up was no longer there it already quit in frustration but the idea lived on because it was picked up by others who heard it through this process pat's team identified different techniques that people used when pitching an idea and the strategies that worked in healthcare mirror what franklin leonard has seen succeed in hollywood the thing about reviving pitches there's probably three routes to doing so the first is reconception you take what you have before and you reconceive it into something that seems at least a little bit different and then you take it back out and people are like oh this version i'm interested in right succession would fall in that category so succession was a script written by jesse armstrong was a feature script about rupert murdoch gathering his children for his birthday to basically decide who he was going to give the company to and you know people were fascinated by it but no one was going to make that movie but what jesse did was go back to the drawing board and said well what if it's not rupert murdoch what if it was a fictional person and fictional kids and what if it was a television show and obviously hbo bought it and it's one of the best written shows i've ever seen oftentimes part of the reason why pitches get passed on is that they're not workable as they're pitched it doesn't mean that the pitch is dead or the thing that you're trying to do is dead it means that you probably need to do it a little bit differently is a bit about reimagining the idea but it's also about asking questions to help people think differently about the idea so knowing what all the pushback's gonna be all the issues we're gonna be and developing asking questions about you know how this would work why it would work a second strategy is what franklin calls re-contextualization context changes all of a sudden hollywood knows this kind of movie works and they didn't have that information a year ago when the hunger games manuscript went out i remember reading the book in manuscript form and being told that female driven action doesn't work and it was too violent coincidental to me that wonder woman happened shortly thereafter right because it's like oh you can make the female driven action movie and you can invest a lot of money in it and there's a lot of money to be made but all of a sudden the industry now had information that said wait a minute if you if you make these movies well you make a lot of money enter paddy jacobs as a wonder woman enter captain marvel enter any number of other female driven action movies that have come about as a result of that and that is because the industry now said oh wait a second we have new information and we need to change our behavior with this new information you're showing that what seemed impractical yesterday is practical today yeah it is it is it's showing that what once was deemed unfeasible all of a sudden is actually doable that's a huge kind of paradigm shift for people you could ask yourself can i think of a situation where i have seen this idea work can i personally vouch for this idea being feasible and important you could ask yourself is there a small low-stake test of this idea that i can do to bring back data because data and evidence become so important from taking an idea that's disregarded to an idea that all of a sudden becomes feasible and a third approach is amplification getting other people to vouch for the idea i think that's what the blacklist does for people which is to say okay you pitched screenplay and they all passed but what if now all of a sudden there's an announcement that a bunch of people love that script right it's gonna make everybody else be like wait a second let me let's just double back and see see what i might have missed the first time that's definitely this idea of amplifying and legitimizing showing that it people who care about it people who are important but also just showing that this is something that has credibility to it by doing a small experiment or in this case collecting of some evidence as i've been thinking about amplification as a strategy it seems like a lot of people hesitate to amplify other people's ideas especially after they've been rejected because the thought is well i don't want to stick my neck out if that person already got shot down this is a risk to my career and yet i recently read some evidence showing that amplifying other people's ideas doesn't just help them get heard it also makes you look good it does it makes you seem like a team player it makes you seem like you were paying attention and it makes you um you know sound caring and concerned for others because this is not about me and what benefits me this is me thinking about the team thinking about the organization and if other people see it framed that way it actually reduces the risk quite a bit to you personally and it means that you know other people are grateful that you remembered what they said and especially if you can bring it up at a different time with a different problem or a different opportunity where the fit is better and that's an extremely important skill set that teams can cultivate pitches can feel threatening your ideas and your ego are on the line but it's worth remembering that when you make a pitch there's usually someone out there rooting for you to succeed when you apply for a job there are interviewers hoping you're a superstar when you propose a small project there are leaders wanting it to be a big hit when you pitch a startup there are investors praying that you're the next steve jobs and when you pitch your first film there are studios crossing their fingers that you're the next eva duvernay like at the end of the day the person that you're pitching to is also a human being and has human concerns and probably wants you to succeed they want you to pitch them the best idea they've ever heard because you don't like no one goes into it being like i hope this is terrible you're going to a receptive room in the sense that they want like everybody is hoping to walk down uh to the christmas tree on christmas morning and unwrap the best gift ever everybody's hoping for it so give them the best gift they've ever gotten tell them a story about a problem that you're gonna solve a story that you're gonna tell that they can be excited about and that they know that other people can be excited about too [Music] next time on work life the way that perfection's been built it makes us very sensitive and vulnerable to those setbacks and photos which occur all the time and of course that creates a lot of worry and stops us taking risks stops us pushing ourselves forward how perfectionism holds us back and how to overcome it work life is hosted by me adam grant the show is produced by ted with transmitter media our team includes colin helms greta cohn dan o'donnell joanne de luna grace rubenstein michelle quint ban ban chang and anna phelan this episode was produced by constanza gallardo our show is mixed by ben shano our fact checker is paul durbin original music by hansdale sue and alison leighton brown add stories produced by pineapple street studios special thanks to our sponsors linkedin morgan stanley servicenow and ukg for their research gratitude to colin kammerer on the curse of knowledge xiaoping chen and colleagues on preparedness over passion lin jiang and colleagues on too much joy tatiana kasharo and colleagues on likability allison for gail on the power of powerless speech my co-author konstantinos kudafaris on sharing your shortcomings muhammad hussein and colleagues on receptivity and persuasion dana konza and colleagues on asking women not to lose denise falchetti and colleagues on framing novel ideas justin berg and elisa you on getting the picture too late kristen bain and colleagues on amplifying voice and pat sadderstrom's co-authors michaela carricey and julia dibignino on voice cultivation [Music] anything else do you want to pitch me can you grow a beard daddy joke if i say big toes in it can i say that please please we're still recording by the way if you have to ask if you can say it the answer is probably not