Communication skills allowed me to get paid $15K for a 30 min talk.
These opportunities landed in my inbox multiple times over the last 5 years. I don’t consider myself a public speaker. And I actually sh*t myself before giving a live talk.
The reason I get opportunities to speak is that I’ve accidentally figured out a strategy to communicate in a way that allows anyone to have extraordinary levels of influence in their field or niche. It’s allowed my content to be viewed more than 1 billion times and for me to rack up millions of social media followers and subscribers.
Here’s the full strategy.
The simple form of communication everyone overlooks
Writing seems obvious.
Everyone can do it. Everyone already does it daily. Yet people don’t treat writing with the respect it deserves.
Writing sharpens your thinking. Writing is thinking. Writing forces you to put ideas into words. Writing is timeless. Writing forces you to get to the point.
The biggest thing writing does is help you share your ideas. Strangers aren’t attracted to us for our good looks, perfect sentences, or promises of fame and fortune. At its most basic level, people follow people online to stumble across interesting ideas.
When I figured this out my writing went to the next level.
I began looking for novel ideas most people hadn’t heard. It turned me into a researcher, and later, a curator of ideas. I realized someone else’s idea plus my insight was actually a new idea.
This made writing so much easier. I no longer had to be a genius. All I had to do was take an idea and become a good thinker. The more I wrote online the clearer my thinking became.
Most people’s thinking is so scattered because they’re busy, stressed, dealing with financial challenges, and can’t focus without looking at their phones. Writing daily prevents these epidemics.
You must write every day to become a great communicator.
Use the tool within you that everyone is afraid to use
This morning I was watching my two daughters play with each other for the first time.
They were so happy. My 10 week old baby laughed out loud for the first time too. I shouldn’t admit this but I had tears in my eyes.
Time stood still. Nothing else mattered. All the BS in the world vanished.
It reminded me of the secret to communication that builds real influence. It took me a lifetime to discover this and I never see it get taught.
Using raw emotion is the most powerful tool in history to communicate an idea.
When someone’s heart takes over while you’re communicating an idea, they listen differently. They see you in a different light. And you connect with them through your humanity. Communication through raw emotion can never be beaten.
Yet few people do it.
Why?
Corporations teach us to strip away our quirks, personality and emotion so we can be perceived as “professional.” But being professional is dry, boring, common, robotic, and forgettable. It doesn’t inspire. And it’s not persuasive.
Being professional dehumanizes us.
I’ll never forget a small financial services company I met. The CEO’s name was Mark.
He was a gentleman. I had many conversations with him. We talked transaction fees and SaaS platforms. It didn’t really go anywhere but we did some business together.
One day over coffee I ask him why he doesn’t drive a fancy car, live in the suburbs, or wear nice clothes. It seemed odd to me because his firm made tens of millions of dollars and had almost zero employees.
“I’ll let you in on a secret, Tim.”
He went on to tell me how business was just a vehicle. He used the money from his business to fund orphanages in his hometown back in Egypt. He told me stories of some of the people he helped.
I felt a wave of emotion come over me.
It was just so damn inspiring. His kindness was like nothing I’d ever seen before. From that day on I was never the same. I did everything I could to demolish roadblocks for him so he could keep funding orphanages.
The most odd part about this story is he told no one.
No one in his company or his network knew what he was doing. He only told me because he says I coerced it out of him and he thought he should tell his banker the truth LOL.
Using raw emotion is powerful.
Why few people use this tool
Using raw emotion in communication is rarely done.
I analyzed 250 LinkedIn posts last month from top business influencers—only 4 mentioned how they actually felt about something. The rest were tactical tips and industry news. That's the gap.
We’re taught to hide our emotions out of fear we might overshare or show weakness in a situation that requires us to look strong.
In a world of AI, where we’re drowning in information, and AI can already write better than humans, emotion is all we have left.
If you don’t use any form of raw emotion you’ll likely be ignored.
That means you’ll get hardly any opportunities, and the ones you do get, you’ll need to fight like a dog in a dog fight to the death.
How to use emotion
In every form of communication, tell people how you feel.
That's the best way to ensure emotion is present in your communication. Then when you feel the urge to hide your emotions just stop yourself.
Tell yourself: “What would a person of extraordinary influence do? They’d inject emotion. I must too.”
Another technique: take the bad things that have happened to you and use them to explain why you think and believe what you do. Make the bad things have value. Use them as motivation to move forward, not as excuses to stay stuck.
Communicate every day in public like your life depends on it
Because your life does depend on it.
It’s not easy at the start though. Whenever you attempt to publish anything online, you’ll inevitably worry about what other people think. The practical way I overcame this was I published a few articles in public.
They literally got zero views.
I realized real fast that no one is watching. Even if I sent my writing to people, they rarely read it. So fear of being noticed isn’t real when you publish in public once.
Once you're over that fear and you realize nobody gives a sh*t, the strategy is to communicate in public every day.
You don't build influence by communicating one good idea once.
That’s the mindset of a romantic artist who’s relying on hope and gatekeepers to bless their career. Real influence is built through consistent and intentional repetition of a library of ideas you’ve formed.
The more people see your ideas online and resonate with them, the more perceived influence you have over time.
That influence can be used for good or evil. Obviously, I recommend you use it for good—to inspire people and solve problems.
Influence at scale is easier to achieve than you think
Thinking logically is a superpower. It solves even the hardest problem.
To create influence at scale you need lots of people to pay attention. Makes sense. The shortest path to doing that is to 1) communicate in simple words 2) write concisely.
Most of us don’t do that by default. But if you want to communicate powerfully, you must change your ways.
Practice using 5th-grader words when you communicate. And practice writing emails that are concise and to the point.
Those two skills will take you to the top 1% of communicators.
Part of the reason is because most of the world doesn’t speak your native language. So simple words allow you to reach more people because more people have a chance of understanding you.
The other reason is that people unconsciously love simple communication. It places a low cognitive load on their brains which they secretly crave.
Here’s a painful example from my corporate days that’ll make you sound robotic:
We need to synergize our strategic initiatives to optimize stakeholder value.
This should become “'Let's work together to make customers happy.”
Short-form to long-form communication
Now, raw emotion is powerful—but emotion alone won't build influence at scale. You need the right distribution strategy.
There are different lengths of communication.
The longest form is books. The shortest form is 30-second TikTok videos that explode your dopamine levels and fry your gorgeous brain. In between you have tweets, newsletters, articles, etc.
To communicate in a way that builds influence you need a few different types of content. If all you do is publish books, you’ll never reach anyone because the chance strangers will find your book, take a chance on an unknown author, and give you 20 hours of their time to read the book is near impossible.
If all you do is publish short-form tweets, you'll never reach anyone at scale either. There's not enough depth to build a real connection or earn a follow.
Master communicators change up the length of communication.
They have short-form content to get attention and help get their name out there. But they also have long-form content to build trust and enable them to go deep on a topic people care about. The mid-length content is a nice hybrid.
Action: change up your content type to exploit the advantages of all three forms.
The best communication is about what you don’t say
The first time you write out an idea, it’ll be overweight in all the wrong areas and need an Oprah diet to trim the fat.
That’s normal.
Heavy editing of an idea is crucial because it helps sharpen the focus of your communication and, most importantly, saves people time.
If what you write is spoken aloud, the best thing you can do is insert silence strategically all the way through in the parts where you removed sentences.
Silence in your communication is crucial because it gives people a chance to think through what you just said and process.
The TikTok generation hates silence. It’s why they have audio via AirPods playing in their ears 24/7, then they wonder why they think like an NPC.
Use silence to help people think.
Highly influential communication does this
This might seem obvious.
But persuasive communication shows people why they should listen to you. This is done by showing people you have real results in the field you’re speaking about.
If you just talk in abstract ideas and theory, you come across as a pretentious wanker no one wants to listen to. This is why a lot of highly intellectual writing is ignored.
The reason people don’t include their results when communicating ideas is that they’re worried it will sound like bragging.
But if you never share your results no one will trust you.
This is the hardest strategy to adopt because it means you actually have to go out and live your life, do sh*t, and get results. That’s the opposite of what most of society does.
But if you are an action-taker and a builder, you have an unfair advantage. Use it.
Writing makes all other communication seem like you’re an articulate genius
I’m in the top 1% when it comes to public speaking. I’ve been in competitions to put my skills to the test. I don’t say this to brag. I tell you because I haven’t studied public speaking or shown much interest in it.
But every time I jump on a podcast or host a workshop with hundreds of people, I get feedback like ‘you're powerful at communicating ideas.’
I wish I could say it’s a god-given talent or it runs in the family. But the truth is public speaking was my number one fear as a teenager (that and snakes).
My secret to public speaking has nothing to do with public speaking.
Here it is: I’ve published more than 7000 essays online.
This means my brain is wired after 12 years of doing this to speak what’s on my mind and do it in a way that people find useful.
When I speak in public, I know what I am going to say because I’ve probably already written about it hundreds of times in my essays. This makes me seem like I have a great answer to every question in a podcast interview. Or like I’m confident and sure of myself. But that’s a lie.
I speak the way I do in public thanks to my writing habit. It makes everything easier. It clears out my mental sludge daily. And it helps me find different ways of saying the same idea many ways until it hits people in a way that they share it like crazy.
Hold this simple belief that’ll melt your mother’s heart
Believe your life has enormous value.
This is not how most people think. They don’t know their value and they constantly get underpaid and exploited by employers that thrive on people thinking their life has no value.
The moment you see your own value, everything changes.
It’s like a glitch in the matrix that sends out a herd of white rabbits into your life that shows you the path to freedom and wealth that you’d never seen before.
Communicating online is a selfless act.
It allows you take the value you’ve acquired using your skills & experience and help others. Weirdly, the more you write the more helpful you are to others. And the people who get all the opportunities and wealth in the world aren’t the highest IQ people.
Nope.
They’re the most helpful people.
Helpfulness is the missing part of many people’s lives. If they could only stop selling or talking, and just be helpful, they’d have everything they want and more.
But they won’t selflessly help others through an art form like writing because they think in terms of transactions. “Sure, I’ll help – when I get paid for it!”
Instead, I encourage you to think in terms of helpfulness. Start with being helpful and see where that takes you. You’ll be shocked when you do.
Bringing it all together
Every form of communication starts with writing.
If you can’t master basic forms of writing, you’ll never be a master communicator. Spend some time refining the skill. Practice in public every day. Use writing to share ideas which will naturally make you more influential.
Then take the art form of writing and use it to post Youtube videos, be on podcasts, speak live in front of audiences, and accelerate your career through helpfulness.
The more helpful you are, the more influential you’re perceived to be.
