Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and the bestselling author of three books: The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and his latest, Supercommunicators, which was published this year. Charles is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards, and he currently writes for The New Yorker and several other publications.
Charles joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about habit formation, how to become an excellent communicator, and much more.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Charles Duhigg On The Power Of Habit And Supercommunicators
Our quote for this episode is from Paul Meyer. “Communication – the human connection – is the key to personal and career success.” My guest, Charles Duhigg, has a lot of insights to share on communication and more. Charles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and the best-selling author of three books, The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better, and his latest, Supercommunicators, which was published in 2024. Charles is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and Georgia Polk awards, and he writes for The New Yorker and several other publications.
Charles, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me on.
I’m excited to have you here. I keep twenty of the most impactful books I read on my desk. Your yellow and red copy of The Power of Habit is right in the middle. A little bit of a full-circle moment here.
Thanks so much. That’s nice of you to say.
I’m always interested about the beginning. If you think about your childhood, what were you passionate about? What were some of the experiences that you think might have led you down the path that you eventually ended on?
I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have nine siblings.
What number are you?
I’m third from the bottom. There are two more ahead of me. When I was in high school, I was so into debate. Debate was my entire life. I spent all of my time getting ready for debate tournaments, going to debate tournaments, and caring about debate tournaments. That was a profound experience because one of the things that it taught me was how to work hard and persevere.
I then went to college. After college, I started a company in Albuquerque, where I grew up. I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t know what I was doing, so I applied to business school. Halfway through my first year of business school, we sold the company. As a result, suddenly, I was in business school, and I was like, “I don’t know what to do for the rest of my life.”
What was the business?
We built medical education campuses for universities. It’s a super weird thing. I started it with my father. It was very specific and odd, but it worked well.
That business school paid off.
Yeah, except that halfway through it, I suddenly didn’t have a job anymore. I realized I had all this freedom and I was trying to figure out what to do with that. Between 1st and 2nd year of business school, you get an internship and it’s usually at a place where you hope you’re going to get hired. I got an internship in real estate private equity in New Mexico. I was trying to decide, “Should I move back to New Mexico and go into politics? Should I run for office?”
I would walk into the job every day, sit down, and make spreadsheets all day long. The best part of my day is that sometimes, I would let myself listen to a This American Life episode on my computer. Sometimes, if it was a hard day, I’d let myself listen to 2 but never more than 2 because I didn’t want to run out of them. At the end of the summer, I thought to myself, “If the best part of each day was listening to This American Life, I probably should go try and make This American Life stories. I should probably listen to that.” I decided to become a journalist. I spent the second year of business school figuring out how to be a journalist. I’ve never looked back. It has been great since then.
What was your big break or your big story in journalism?
Lessons From Investigative Reporting And Modern Journalism
I don’t know that there’s one big break. I wrote a series about Apple that won the Pulitzer. That was great. The thing about journalism is its shelf life is 2 or 3 days tops. Nobody goes back and they’re like, “I want to read that newspaper story.”
Maybe a couple of years ago. Now, it may be down to a minute or hours.
That’s exactly right. I write for The New Yorker in addition to books, The New Yorker is a little bit different. Magazine journalism can still be something that people read for a little bit longer. The big break for me was getting hired by The New York Times and learning and focusing on becoming an investigative reporter. Being an investigative reporter is different from being the other kinds of reporters in that you work for months before something comes out. Much of the newspaper is fast-twitch, and you have to figure out how to be okay with that.
I had another guest who started as an investigative reporter. We were having this discussion. I won’t try to bias you. It seems like most publications or a lot of people are influenced by the outcome that they are looking for before their investigation, which, to me, was always the opposite of the point of investigative. There’s so much politics tainting journalism.
The question you’re asking isn’t, “Does the reporter have a predisposition before they go in?” You can’t make up the facts. You go in and try and find out.
You can’t make up the facts but you can make facts support a narrative if you want to.
It’s pretty hard, to be honest with you, because you’re going to get attacked relentlessly if you do. Let’s take, for instance, The New York Times’ investigation of Trump’s taxes. Some people might say, “They’re going after President Trump. They’re going in assuming that they’re going to find something involving his taxes.” The truth of the matter is that every president has released their tax returns except for Trump. Whether he’s a Democrat or a Republican or whether you like him or dislike him, it’s very natural to say, “Why won’t this guy release his tax returns? What’s going on there?”
When you find, lo and behold, that he has not paid taxes in a decade, and not illegally but because he is using loopholes in the IRS code, I don’t think that that’s coming at things with an agenda as much as recognizing that the people in power deserve scrutiny. When we scrutinize, we scrutinize not for all the things that they’re doing well but for the things that we ought to be worried about that they don’t want us to know about.
That’s fair. You spent a lot of time looking at Apple and its transformation in its role in the economy. I’m curious. What did you discover in that reporting, looking back, that was particularly prescient and that has continued even under a different regime?
We’re still dealing with it. The basic finding for the Apple series is the reason Apple is producing overseas is not because it is cheaper labor. It’s because China, in particular, has labor that the United States does not have and they have supply chains that we do not have. The United States produces many wonderful top-level engineers. That’s why Silicon Valley exists. That’s why there’s so much innovation.
We don’t have the volume in the middle.
When it comes to someone who needs enough engineering to run a production line but doesn’t need a PhD, we have many fewer people like that. That impacts our ability to do manufacturing.
There’s a big push to bring chip-making and a lot of things back. Do you think we’ll be successful at that or do you think it requires retraining a whole group of people?
We will be successful because there are two things happening. Commodity-level engineering has become so commonplace that it’s no longer a competitive advantage for a particular nation-state. The second thing that’s happening is that with sufficient support, you see education programs and people move into jobs that they weren’t considering otherwise.
Singapore is a great example of this or Taiwan where if you create the demand for jobs, then the supply will begin to equalize it. Historically, the issue for the United States has been that we weren’t creating demand for mid-level engineering jobs. If you went and got a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering and you weren’t a great coder, there was no point in getting the Master’s. You either get a PhD or an undergraduate degree.
If we open all of these huge facilities under the CHIPS Act, they’re going to need people.
That’s the theory. There’s a certain amount of onshoring of skills that the United States needs to be safe going forward. The way that we do that is we create the demand for those jobs.
You were focused on Apple. The book that launched your career as a household name was The Power of Habit, which I spoke about. It’s one of the more widely read books in America. What led you to that? Were you doing something else or did you develop an interest in that area?
A couple of things. My newest book, Supercommunicators, is very similar in this respect. I got to this place where I was doing well at The New York Times and I was a very successful journalist. I thought to myself, “If I’m so smart, why do I have so much trouble getting up and going running in the morning? Why do I have so much trouble getting myself to eat a salad instead of an unhealthy sandwich?” I got curious in trying to understand what we know about habit formation, so I started reaching out to researchers. They said that we’re living through this golden age of understanding how habits function in our brains. That’s where the book came from. I wanted to solve my own problem.
That’s usually where a good business comes from.
The Power Of Habit Formation And Its Three Components
That’s exactly right. With supercommunicators, it is the same thing. I’m a professional communicator. I couldn’t figure out why I kept having communication problems with my wife, my coworkers, and the people who matter to me. I called neurologists and neuroscientists and asked them. They said, “We’re glad you called because it turns out, we’re living through a golden age of understanding communication. We understand what’s happening inside people’s brains for the first time when they talk to each other.” When you find something like that, it feels like a real opportunity to share that knowledge, which is a relatively new knowledge of the world.
We are living in a golden age of understanding communication. We now understand what’s happening inside people’s brains for the first time when they talk to each other.
We’ll get to Supercommunicators, but first I want to get to two principles from The Power of Habit. I know but some people may not. Can you talk a little bit about the three fundamentals of habit, which are the cue, routine, and reward, for those who have never formally understood that?
Sure. We tend to think of a habit as being one thing. It’s like, “I brush my teeth,” or “I go for a run in the morning.” About 40 to 45% of what we do every day is a habit. Every single habit in our life has three components. There is a cue, which is a trigger for this automatic behavior to start, the routine, which is the behavior itself, and then finally, a reward. Every habit you have has a reward. When you brush your teeth, there’s a reward.
The reward might be not getting cavities.
That’s not an effective reward. The reason why we brush our teeth is because they add some oils to the toothpaste that make our gums tingle. We’ve come to associate that tingling sensation with clean teeth. For instance, if I take a shower and I don’t brush my teeth, I don’t feel clean because I’m missing that tingling. That’s the idea. If you want to create habits or if you want to change habits, you have to identify the cues and the rewards in order to figure out what the gears are that you can fiddle with.
If you want to create or change habits, you have to identify the cues and rewards to figure out what gears you can fit with.
You need to change all of them. You have to identify the queue and then figure out how to rewire the reward.
No. This is known as the golden rule of habit change. Let’s talk about creating a new habit. If you want to go running in the morning or go exercise with your friends, the first thing you do is choose a cue. Put your running shoes next to your bed so you see them when you wake up. You lay out your running clothes so you jump into them as soon as you wake up. You then go for that run for maybe two blocks, half a mile, or whatever it is. When you get home, give yourself a reward.
A Hershey’s Kiss.
It could be a nice long shower, a smoothie, or something that makes it feel rewarding. What your brain will do is it’ll start to associate that cue, that routine, and that reward in a thicker neural pathway. As a result, an electrical charge can move down that pathway more effortlessly than previously.
Does it work the same for good habits versus bad habits?
There is no such thing as a good habit or a bad habit. It’s what we decide.
A habit that you want to do more of versus a habit that you want to do less of.
If it’s a habit that you wish to discourage, then if it has a really strong reward, it’s going to be harder. If you say, “I’m going to go running in the morning and my reward is going to be a kale smoothie,” that’s a terrible reward. Nobody likes kale smoothies. If you put enough peanut butter and dates in it, maybe it tastes okay, but you have to give yourself a reward that you enjoy.
I had Professor Katy Milkman on. One of the things she was saying was that the thing that seems to work the most from a negative incentive, like if you want to lose weight or otherwise, is something you set up where you donate $100 to your political adversary. It’s interesting. She said that that’s not a positive reward but it was so painful that you didn’t want to do it.
It’s worth noting that positive rewards are about 5 to 9 times more powerful than negative rewards. Think about how most people go running. They wake up in the morning, go for a run, and come home, and then they run late, so they rush through their shower. They jump in the car, take the kids to school, and then they get to their desks and they’re sweaty. They’re effectively punishing themselves for exercising. Your brain pays attention to those rewards and those punishments.
You can use negative rewards to try and change your behavior. The problem is they’re very costly. You have to have a massive negative reward, and a small positive reward will have as much impact. The truth of the matter is if you write a check to the American Nazi Association for $1,000 and then it automatically gets sent because you didn’t work out that day, odds are you are not going to write that check again. Habits work because they’re stable, repetitive, and iterative.
It may work for a single time.
What it’s doing, frankly, is drawing your attention to the behavior. If you hated Nazis enough, you would run every single day. For instance, when we tell people, “If you don’t exercise today, I will shoot you,” they exercise every single day. The negative reward is very costly.
I have to remember the cue, routine, and reward. The other big takeaway for me from that book and a lot of other people was the notion of a keystone habit. It’s this one habit that serves as the gateway to improve all other habits. My son has to read his book, Make Your Bed, before school. He’s reading it. We’re focused on that.
How Keystone Habits Impact Personal And Professional Success
We hear a lot about the keystone habit personally, whether it’s exercise, making your bed, or otherwise, I thought it was interesting. There are a lot of business leaders here. Your example of Alcoa and how people in the professional context think about the one thing that can start to change everything in their organization is a powerful concept.
For folks who don’t know the Alcoa story, when Paul O’Neil, who eventually became treasury secretary, took over Alcoa, it was already a relatively safe company, but it was a company that was at war with itself with the unions and management. They would have multi-state strikes. They would dress up dummies as managers, throw them over light posts, and set them on fire. It was a bad environment.
Paul O’Neill comes in and says, “I’m going to tell you the number one thing that we’re going to focus on, which is worker safety. We are going to be the safest company in America,” which is ridiculous. It’s an aluminum manufacturer. They handle 10,000-degree molten metal every single day and they’re like, “We’re going to be safer than an accounting office.”
What happened is two things. Number one, it’s a way of talking about our values. When we choose a keystone habit and say, “This habit is the most important thing. This is what we’re going to focus on,” we express a set of values to our organization. The second thing is that oftentimes, if we choose the right habit that changes how we see ourselves and our priorities, it sets off chain reactions in an industrial landscape that other things have to get better.
When we choose a keystone habit, it becomes the expressed set of values of the organization.
It turns out that, for instance, the safest way to make aluminum is to make it the right way every single time. The only way to make it the right way every single time is to make sure that all the safety protocols are in place and that they are being observed every single time, not just because violating the safety protocol makes workers unsafe but also because it was diminishing the quality of the aluminum itself.
If Paul O’Neill had come in and said, “We’re going to make the best aluminum and we’re going to make tons of money,” the union would’ve been like, “Blow it out your ear.” When he comes in and says, “Worker safety is the most important habit that we are going to focus on,” then it gives you the ability to have a conversation about what ought to change where everyone can buy in rather than fight each other.
Is he still alive?
No, he passed away a few years ago.
I was going to say, “I wonder if he’s available for a consultation with Boeing.” Boeing stranded astronauts. It goes from worse to worst every week.
I might write about it at some point. I’ve been doing a little bit of reporting. This is the power of keystone habits. The number one focus became on hitting the schedule.
There are a lot of different industries that could probably do that that would be better suited than aerospace.
That’s exactly it. That’s not a terrible thing. On the other side of that, all these other companies depend on Boeing. If we’re going to send shuttles up into space, then we need things delivered on time. The question is, what’s the top priority? Is the quality of our product more important than hitting the schedule, or is the schedule more important than safety and quality? Secondarily, how do we signal that to the organization? If I say, “You should be safe and you should hit your schedules,” everyone’s going to be like, “What he is saying is hit the schedules.”
A good example is Paul O’Neill, going back to Alcoa, about a year after he stepped into the CEO role, there was this beloved executive who was a VP at Alcoa. He had been there for 30 years. There was a problem at one of the plants in Mexico where there was a gas escape or gas leak. Some workers got sick and they were sent home.
The guy never told Paul O’Neill. He never reported it up the chain. Part of their safety protocols was that you always report stuff like this up the chain. Paul O’Neill called him in and said, “Did this happen?” The guy said, “It happened. It wasn’t a big deal, so I didn’t report it up the chain.” Paul O’Neill said, “You’re fired.” It was front-page news the next day in the Wall Street Journal. The reason why Paul O’Neill fired that guy was to send a message, “Safety is the number one priority. If you violate that, no matter who you are, you will get fired.”
That’s what’s important for leaders when they think about keystone habits. It’s not just how we choose the habit but how we prove the habit. Honestly, we all know that the times that you send messages are when you hire, when you fire, or when you pay someone. If somebody sees someone get fired because they did a great job in all things but skimped on safety or product quality, then it sends a message, “This is number one.”
This is where a lot of college leaders have lost their campuses because no one has been fired. Everyone’s like, “Let’s test those boundaries and those rules because we don’t see any consequences to it.” We’re going to see soon whether anyone has learned anything from a leadership standpoint.
I think they have. Being a university president is a hard job. In many ways, it’s a lot easier to be the CEO of a big company like Boeing.
Maybe not now. That’s a real Sophie’s Choice if you want to be CEO of Boeing.
One of the things that happens on a university campus is because of this shared governance model. The CEO of a university doesn’t have the power to fire.
We’re starting to learn. No one understands. It’s different at these schools who have authority.
Also, when you think about it, you have all these students. If a student acts like a numb skull but not a dangerous numb skull and your job is to teach that student, should you kick that student out or should you say, “Our job is to convince you that this was a stupid thing to do and you shouldn’t do it again.” They’re difficult choices.
The problem is when you have a rule and you say it’s the rule and tell people there’s going to be a consequence, and then they break the rule and you withhold the consequence. Any of us who have led people or had parents know what comes next. I’m not saying you have to be draconian, but if you look at someone like Florida, they highlighted, “If you break the rules, the consequences will be real.” In a lot of these other schools, the student body overrules the leader trying to enforce the rule. It’s a hard lead.
The goal there is not to maximize profit or to maximize output. The goal is this more amorphous educational goal.
It is complicated. I should put that as a poll on LinkedIn, like, “Would you rather be the leader of Columbia or Boeing right now? What is the least desirable job in America?” In any of these jobs, you need to be a good communicator. Your latest book is Supercommunicators. You talked a little bit about the genesis of that. What are some of the traits that you found in a supercommunicator? Also, how much of this is innate versus learned?
It is 100% learned. This is the thing. Nobody is born any better a communicator than anyone else. Every single time we meet someone who’s fantastic at communication, it is not because they were born with a gift of gab. It is because they learned certain skills. Anyone can learn those skills. They’re transferrable.
I’ll push you on that. There are people who are naturally extroverted and like talking and there are people that don’t. I’m not saying that they couldn’t learn it but they’re not comfortable with that stuff.
The science does not agree with you.
I’ll have to disagree with the science. You could teach me how to swing a baseball all day long and I will never have the hand-eye coordination of some other people.
That’s true. When it comes to physical activities, there are things about your muscle makeup and fast twitch versus slow twitch. Let me ask you. Do you consider yourself someone who’s good with people? If you’re at a party, are you the person awkwardly in the corner or can you make conversation with folks?
I’m an extroverted introvert. I’m very good conversationally with people I know and like to do that but I have no interest in walking into a room with a bunch of people I don’t know and starting up random conversations. I could but I don’t have an interest.
You are proving the thesis that I’m offering, which is being an extroverted introvert is not a thing. That’s like, “I’m a pregnant unpregnant person.” Perhaps your natural disposition is that you would prefer to read and be on your own, but you’ve taught yourself how to be good at dealing with people. It might also be true that your natural disposition is not that you like to be alone. It’s that you don’t want to be at a party where you don’t know anyone and you’re tired.
We get digression but there’s an energy thing there. What I’ve seen with people is an energy thing. What gives you energy and what takes away energy in terms of recovering?
When it comes to communication though, it’s all learned skills. It’s worth defining what a supercommunicator is. There’s a simple way to do this. I’ll ask you a question. If you were having a bad day and you came home and you wanted to call someone who you knew would make you feel better, do you know who you would call?
Yeah. There are probably a couple of people.
Who’s one of them?
I’d call my wife.
Why? Your wife is a super communicator for you and you’re probably a super communicator back for her. What does your wife do when you call her that makes you feel better?
She would listen and she’s very empathetic.
My guess is that those skills, listening and showing empathy, are those skills that she uses with other people as well.
Yes.
Are those skills that you’ve ever tried to imitate?
Sure. I’m not as good at them, but yes.
You’re not as practiced. It’s not as much of a priority for you. We are all supercommunicators at various times in our lives. We all have had those moments when a friend calls and we know exactly what to say or we walk into a meeting and we know exactly how to win over everyone to our point of view. There are some people who are consistent supercommunicators who can do this with almost anyone. They can connect with almost anyone, and it’s not because they are born that way.
What is interesting is if you talk to consistent supercommunicators and ask them, “Were you always good at communication?” They’ll often say no. They’ll say, “I wasn’t very popular in high school so I had to study how kids talk to each other to make friends,” or, “My parents got divorced and I had to be the peacemaker between them.”
I’ve had a bunch of people on this show who are in fields around getting to know people and they were Army brats and they went to a new school every year. It was a survival mechanism. They had to figure out how to integrate.
It’s a skill that you learn under pressure. What’s interesting is that your wife probably does not think about her listening and her empathy as a set of skills, but they are. If she recognizes them as skills, it can occur to her to say “I can use these skills with anyone. I use it with my husband and my kids, but I can also use it with a stranger on the bus. I can also use it with the person when I call in to complain about my credit card.”
Why Asking Deep Questions Builds Better Connections
Supercommunicators simply have recognized that there is a set of skills that help us connect with other people. They see those as skills and therefore, they make them more fungible. One of the biggest ones is what you mentioned. They ask a lot of questions. Consistent supercommunicators ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. They tend to ask a high number of deep questions, which are questions about your values, your beliefs, or your experiences. Those can sound intimidating as a casual question but it’s as simple as if you meet someone who’s a doctor.
Good communicators ask 10 to 20 times more questions than the average person. They listen deeply and engage authentically.
They want to understand at a deep level.
Instead of asking, “What hospital do you work at?” it is asking, “What made you decide to go to medical school?” or, “What do you like about being a doctor?” Those are questions that invite us to talk about who we are.
In terms of being a communicator, it sounds like it helps them to be a good receiver. Are you saying that they need to receive that in order then to communicate and deliver the message that they think is effective?
Let me ask you. When you go into a meeting, don’t ask any questions, and tell people what you think. They never speak, so what would you say?
If you ever had an extraordinary sales leader, they all ask questions.
It’s not just because they’re trying to learn about you, which they are. It’s because of some other stuff and other skills that supercommunicators have. When they respond to those questions, they prove that they’re listening to you. They prove they’re paying attention. They often repeat back what you said. They ask if they got it right. They try to build on it to show that they’re processing it. There’s a technique for this known as looping for understanding.
What’s important there is that if I believe you are listening to me, I become much more likely to listen to you in return. I can’t help but become more likely to listen to you in return. It’s hardwired into our brains. You’re right. Asking questions is about getting the other person to speak but also about setting yourself up to speak.
This is the other thing about deep questions. It’s very natural with a deep question to answer our own questions. It’s like, “You became a doctor because you saw your dad get sick. That’s so interesting. I’m a lawyer and it happened because I saw my uncle get arrested when I was a kid.” We’re communicating with each other, and because I’m proving that I listened to you, you’re listening back to me.
You talk about three types of conversations, practical, emotional, and social. What is similar or different about success in those three conversations?
The reason why this is important, and one of the big findings of neuroscientists, is that we tend to assume that discussions are about one thing. We’re talking about my book, where to go on vacation, or kids’ grades. Every discussion is made up of multiple kinds of conversations, and those conversations tend to fall into one of those three buckets, the practical, the emotional, and the social.
A practical conversation is when, for instance, we’re trying to make plans together or we’re trying to solve a problem together. We’re using the prefrontal cortex. The whole goal of communication is to become what’s known as neurally entrained for our brains to begin looking alike. That’s when we feel connected to each other. If we’re both talking about practical stuff and we’re using the prefrontal cortex, we can achieve that entrainment.
I can already see where men and women run into trouble with this.
Let’s say I come and I’m having an emotional conversation. I’m telling you how I feel.
I want to solve your problem.
You want to solve my feelings. I’m using the amygdala, the deep interior of my brain. You’re using the prefrontal cortex. There’s very little chance we’re going to become entrained. In fact, this is known as the matching principle. What the matching principle says is that communication requires people to have the same conversation at the same moment. That doesn’t mean we have to stay in that conversation. Once we get aligned on an emotional conversation, we can move to the practical, the social, and the emotional together.
Communication requires people to have the same kind of conversations at the same moment. But once we get aligned on an emotional conversation, we can move to the practical together.
People that are better partners than me, I’ve heard a tactic where you come to me with that. People who have more patience than I do would say, “Are you looking for me to listen here? Are you looking for advice?” They try to even set that context.
My wife and I do that all the time. In fact, teachers in schools do this. If a student comes up, they should ask them, “Do you want to be helped, do you want to be hugged, or do you want to be heard?”
It occurs to me as you say that, in this context, why that’s such a powerful tactic.
It’s the three kinds of conversations, the practical, the emotional, and the social. The thing is that I don’t have to match you. I can invite you to match me. If we’re not having the same conversation at the same moment, then your wife’s going to get frustrated because you’re trying to solve her emotions. You’re going to get frustrated because you can’t figure out why she keeps complaining when there’s an obvious solution there.
Let me ask you. In this world, to me, there’s a good and a bad. There’s becoming a supercommunicator to make great connections or otherwise, but then we also have these supercommunicators who are probably learning these skills to stoke fear and division and they’re good at it, too.
The thing about communication is that communication is a tool, just as an axe is a tool. You can use an axe to build a house or to chop someone’s head off. It has much more to do with who’s wielding the tool.
Are the tactics the same? The supercommunicators tap into emotional.
Honestly, if anyone tuning in who hasn’t been to a Trump rally and a Harris rally, you should go. What you will see is that when they’re on that stage, and we don’t think of this as being a conversation, the speaker is proving to the audience that they’re listening to them. When people start applauding, they’re leaning into it. They’re saying more on that topic. For people who are supercommunicators, it’s the same tactics and the same tools.
The truth of the matter is it’s not as easy to manipulate people as we think it is. There’s been all these studies of, for instance, scams, like who gets caught up in Nigerian prince scams and stuff like that. Inevitably, what they find is that the person who got duped knew that it was a scam but there was some reward there that was enough to cause them to ignore knowing that.
It wasn’t that they didn’t have doubt.
Nobody thinks that a Nigerian prince is going to send them $1 million but they love that someone calls them all the time. It feels exciting. None of us have ever met someone who randomly got $1 million from a prince. There’s something there. It’s very hard to dupe other people.
They’re good at building a connection.
When these demagogues or when these leaders use these tactics, it’s not that they’re tricking us. They’re not pretending that they’re something that they aren’t. They’re telling us what they believe and what we want to be true, whether that be that the world can become a more just place or that Americans are being pushed out of their jobs by immigrants. It’s not like they’re duping us into believing a world that already exists. They’re reinforcing a world that we already believe in.
I’m trying to understand what Elon Musk’s strategy is. That might be a whole separate episode.
I don’t know. I wrote a story about Musk and Tesla a number of years ago. I don’t think his goal is to be a supercommunicator with people who don’t already agree with him. He’s very comfortable talking to people who are predisposed to agree with him and egging them on. Lots of people do that.
He bought a very expensive microphone to do that with. What are other misconceptions about good communicators or mistakes that people make where they think, “This is going to help me communicate well,” and it does not?
There are a couple of skills. We talked about asking more questions, particularly deep questions, and proving that you’re listening. There is this activity known as looping for understanding, where you ask a question and repeat what you heard in your own words to show you’re thinking about it. You ask if you got it right. The other thing that happens is that people get confused about what the goal of a conversation is. They think, “The goal of this conversation is to impress you. The goal of this conversation is to convince you that I’m right and you’re wrong or that I’m smart and you should like me.”
It’s amazing to me that people still do this. I’ve always said, “How many fights have you had in your relationship where, at some point, your partner said, “I was wrong and I now agree with everything you said.” It has never happened.
It’s natural that it shouldn’t happen. It raises this question. If the goal is not to convince the other person that they’re wrong, what is the goal of a conversation? The goal of a conversation is for me to understand how you see the world and to speak in such a way that you can understand me. If I understand you and you understand me, we will feel connected on some level. That connection is enough for us to forge a relationship. People make a mistake when they go into a conversation and they think, “I want to convince this person. I’m going to say something clever. I want to convince them about how smart I am,” or, “I want to convince them that I have the best idea.”
You have no connection to do that.
If you go into a conversation saying, “My whole goal is to make a connection with this person. I’m going to listen to them and I’m going to prove to them that I’m listening. When I bring up my ideas, it’s going to be stuff that they can relate to a little bit,” that is going to be much more successful than saying, “I’m going to go in and I’m going to win this conversation.”
There’s a formula that one of my previous guests, Malik, had shared. He worked on a lot of change with the youth. The formula is connection plus challenge equals change. I always liked that. Sometimes, when you go into these things, through some challenge, you develop some connection that you need, but a lot of times, without the connection, you don’t have the right to challenge.
That’s exactly right. What’s important there is that it recognizes that a relationship is not about agreeing with each other. A relationship is about being able to discuss where you see things differently. If you think about the moments that we’re most proud of in American history, they are inevitably times when people who disagreed with each other had a conversation and came together.
The constitutional convention was a couple of dozen people who hated each other’s guts getting together for months at a time, screaming at each other, and then coming up with a constitution. Communication is the Homo sapiens’ superpower. It is the thing that makes us so successful. We’re all good at it. Our brains have evolved to be great at communication. We have to understand the skills that allow that instinctual greatness to come out.
What differs between online versus in-person with a lot of this stuff?
Challenges And Benefits Of Online Communication
It’s a changing thing. A good example of this is many years ago, when phones first became popular, there were a lot of studies that appeared that said no one would ever have a real conversation on the telephone because, up until that point, all conversations happened face-to-face.
Now, you want to get people on the phone.
Exactly. What’s interesting is, at the time, they were right. For the first fifteen years of phone usage, people used them like telegrams. They would call up, give a stock order or grocery order, and then hang up. By the time we were in middle school, we could talk on the phone for seven hours a night. It’s because we learned how to use phones.
Without realizing it, if you’re on the phone, you will over-annunciate your words by about 1/3. You’ll put about 20% more emotion into your voice because you know that the person can’t see you. You’re not doing it consciously. You’re doing it unconsciously. You know the rules of a phone conversation. We are learning the rules for online communication. Our kids are learning them much faster than we are because they’re much more practiced and they have fewer habits from the past.
We have not perfected the art form yet.
I have not. Maybe you have.
Angry typing and yelling at people on Twitter is probably not our highest form of online communication.
Probably.
That is the problem. Good communication needs to be conversational and synchronous. A lot of this is yelling and asynchronous.
Good conversation is an exchange. It’s a back-and-forth where I say something and I believe you are listening to me and you say something and you believe I’m listening rather than waiting for our turns to speak. That back and forth of what’s known as an exchange of vulnerabilities or an exchange of authentic reciprocity is what makes us feel connected to other people.
We’ve all got a lot to work on, for sure. We can keep going, but I know we have to wrap up here. Where can people learn more about you, your work, your writing, and your books?
If you Google me, Charles Duhigg, my website will come up. My books, The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators, can be bought anywhere you buy books, whether it be on Amazon, Audible, or your local bookseller, which is a great place to buy them. I’m on Twitter @CDuhigg. Luckily, there are no other Charles Duhiggs in the world, so if you Google me, you will find me.
Thanks for joining us. I hope we get a chance to do this again. I’m sure there is a whole bunch more we can talk about. Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
‐‐‐
To our audience, thanks for tuning into the show. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d appreciate it if you could leave us a rating or review as that is what helps the most new users discover the show. Thank you again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Charles Duhigg
- @CDuhigg on X
- The Power of Habit
- Smarter Faster Better
- Supercommunicators
- Make Your Bed
- Katy Milkman on How To Make Lasting Change In Your Life
- Abdul-Malik Muhammad On Affecting Organizational Change
