307: Persuasive Speaking with Carmine Gallo

Pete Mockaitis
Carmine, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Carmine Gallo
Oh, thanks, Pete. Thank you for the opportunity to help our listeners become more awesome at work.

Pete Mockaitis
I think this is going to be a really fun one. To kick it off, I understand that there’s a special creature in your life, not a person, Double Doodle. What’s the story here?

Carmine Gallo
Isn’t that the most ridiculous name? It’s a Double Doodle, which we got a couple of years ago, so his name is Rocky. He is – I don’t know why they call them Double Doodles because they’re actually a mix of three breeds. It’s Lab-

Pete Mockaitis
It’s Triple Doodle.

Carmine Gallo
Yeah, triple – it’s like a Triple Doodle. It’s a Lab, a Poodle, Retriever.  The Poodle – it gets the smarts from the Poodle and retrieves like a Lab, and it’s just a wonderful dog, but for people like me who’ve got some allergies with the animals and the pets, this is great. I get the best of both worlds. I’m glad that breed exists.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, intriguing. The name, Rocky, what’s the back story?

Carmine Gallo
Okay, well, with a name like Carmine Gallo, okay, you can start putting the pieces together. I’m Italian, Sylvester Stallone, Rocky, you know? It kind of goes back to the movie. What can I say?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. I loved the Rocky movies so much when I was a teenager. I rushed to the video store actually of all places, to rent them and watch them in quick succession. Which one is your favorite?

Carmine Gallo
Well, Pete, I’ll tell – the first one. I actually liked Creed, that last one that they did I thought was very good.

But Pete, I’ve got to tell you, in the last few years, Rocky has taken on a completely new experience for me and not just because of my dog. I wrote a book on storytelling prior to this one, storytelling in business. It’s called A Storyteller’s Secret.

I began speaking and interviewing a lot of Hollywood producers and Hollywood type of people because if you really want to understand storytelling, why not go to the source? The Hollywood folks who do it well.

Well, Rocky has the greatest dramatic arc of any Hollywood movie. Most producers will tell you that. I started looking at it completely differently. It helped me as a storyteller in business.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, you say the greatest dramatic arc, what makes it the greatest?

Carmine Gallo
In Hollywood, you need to have that three-act structure. All successful Hollywood movies have that three-act structure, which is the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. Star Wars obviously falls into that genre as well. In fact, George Lucas studied narrative and storytelling while he was writing Star Wars.

But in terms of Rocky, the man is down and out and not just a little bit. His best friends are turtles; he breaks thumbs for a living. You’ve got to start really down and then so that arc of that you’ve got experience of reaching success is even more dramatic.

Of course there’s hurdles and ups and downs, but the beauty of Rocky is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that at the end – a happy resolution doesn’t mean you win the championship. He didn’t win. He didn’t win, but his-

Pete Mockaitis
Spoiler alert for those that didn’t see the first Rocky yet. I’m so sorry.

Carmine Gallo
But as long – Pete, this is the important part – as long as the hero of your movie undergoes some sort of transformation, that’s what’s important to storytelling. The hero has to be a better person because of the experience. We can actually apply that to business very directly.

It’s really interesting talking to Hollywood types, which I actually included some of the things they talked about in my new book. I talked to some Hollywood producers and screenwriters about how to craft more compelling narratives.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. Let’s maybe back up for a second. Your company, Gallo Communications Group, what are you all about there?

Carmine Gallo
I write books. I do a lot of public speaking and keynotes. Then a third of my business is communication advising.

I used to be a journalist. I was a trained journalist. I went to Northwestern, worked for CNN, worked for a number of different media outlets for about 15 years. Then I transitioned into helping executives of all types, in all fields become more effective and more persuasive at telling their stories, giving presentations. I sort of became a presentation coach.

But since then I’ve evolved into an author of nine books and a communication advisor to some rather large brands. In fact, I like to say there is not any day that goes by when you are not touching a product or using a product or eating a product, I do a lot of agribusiness too, through whom the leaders or the business people who actually make those products haven’t gone through my workshops.

Pete Mockaitis
Impressive. Very cool. All right, so then your latest, the book is called Five Stars, what’s the main idea behind this one?

Carmine Gallo
Five Stars, the subtitle is The Communication Secrets to Get From Good to Great. In a nutshell, it’s in the age of AI, artificial intelligence, I make the argument that mastering the ancient art of persuasion, we can talk about what that means, but mastering the ancient art of persuasion, is no longer a soft skill. It really is the human edge that will make you irresistible and irreplaceable in the work place.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, there we have it. That is a thesis statement for you.

Carmine Gallo
And I’ve never been more confident, Pete. I’ve never been more confident about a book. I’ve written books on Steve Jobs and how he delivered presentations. I’ve written books on how to give a TED-style talk. I’ve written books on storytelling in business.

I’ve never been more confident that the one skill that sets people apart from the rest to go from average to transformational leadership is the ability to communicate emotionally and effectively with another person.

The whole book is really a ton of examples of people in a wide range of fields, from CEOs down to college graduates who are being promoted above their peers, who can credit directly their ability to communicate more persuasively as the secret sauce, the secret ingredient that sets them apart from the rest.

That’s the whole metaphor of Five Stars. It’s not enough to be average anymore. You can’t be average. Not even good is good enough. You have to be exceptional. How do you get there? That’s why I try to tackle.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, now you mentioned – you talk about being persuasive. I’ve been studying up on copywriting lately and your fascinations or bullets associated with the book are very on point, so it seems like you already have street credit and authority from me just by reading your book descriptions.

I can’t resist, I’m just going to ask if you directly off of there, so is this indeed the skill that Warren Buffet says raises our value by 50%?

Carmine Gallo
Warren Buffet is fascinating. Warren Buffet was giving a discussion. He was in a class, I believe it was Columbia University. This was when I first started studying Warren Buffet and persuasion and public speaking.

He’s giving a talk at Columbia University to a class of MBA students, business students. They said, “What is the one skill that you think we need to excel in the workplace?” That was one of the questions. He said point blank, “You have to develop your skill as a public speaker.”

He said, “If one of you comes to me today, I’m willing to invest like 100,000 dollars in your future earnings for any of you because of your degree,” because of your degree, Pete, right? Because they have a business degree. The degree counts for something, but then he said, “And if you’re a good public speaker, I’ll increase your value by 50% on the spot.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there we have it.

Carmine Gallo
That’s when I started really focusing on the ability of certain people to be more persuasive, to have better presentation, better communication skills. It really does set them apart.

But I think what’s really empowering for all of our listeners today, Pete, is to understand that anyone can develop this skill. A lot of people – men and women, young and old alike, it doesn’t matter where you are in your career. I’ve met them all from Millennial to senior CEOs – most people do have a reluctance to either speak up or to speak in front of larger groups or groups of people.

It’s a very natural nervousness that we have. To the extreme it’s called stage fright, but we all are a little reluctant to be judged by our peers in a social setting. There’s an evolutionary purpose to it from what I’ve read. It’s really fascinating. But we have to kind of get over that hurdle, those nerves, and we have to really embrace the opportunity to speak in front of groups and in front of people at the workplace.

But what’s empowering, Pete, is that I have met and I have heard from a lot of billionaires and CEOs, and very persuasive, very successful people that they too had a real fear of public speaking, not just a little nervousness or being uncomfortable, but a terrible, paralyzing fear of public speaking.

That’s another reason why I like the Warren Buffet story because he’s very open and candid about the fact that when he was a young rising professional in the stock brokerage industry, he had a terrifying fear of public speaking.

He said he went to a Dale Carnegie course and dropped out of the course because he was afraid to speak in front of anyone. He finally got through the course a second time and he said that was the greatest thing that could ever have happened to him, but he had to get over that.

To this day it’s the only degree – I saw this in a documentary – it’s the only degree that he has framed in his office, above and over the business degrees. They’re not in his office. It’s the public speaking certificate. That’s why this content, what we’re talking about today, Pete, is so important to all of your listeners because it really is the skill that will set them apart.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I want to dig into that reluctance point a little bit.

I think some skeptics or those who maybe are just not into doing the speaking, the persuasion, might think, “You know, Carmine, really don’t the best ideas rise to the top? Won’t sort of the good, brilliant ideas be the ones that win while the ones that are intrinsically bad will just fall apart on their own lack of merits?” What’s your take on this one?

Carmine Gallo
Pete, I can trace throughout history – but let’s go back say within 200 years. The greatest movements of our time were triggered by people, by individuals, who had the gift of persuasion, who were better at communicating than other people.

You can go back to the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, which actually I’ve analyzed all of that and it had all of the elements that Aristotle talked about in persuasion: ethos, pathos, logos, all that.

But if you really want to get into it, you can look back at people like Abraham Lincoln, who Doris Kearns Goodwin said was a better storyteller. People came from far and wide, from villages all over to hear this magnificent storyteller.

John F. Kennedy, we would never have put a person on the moon if it had not been for John F. Kennedy being able to blend both the emotion and logic. He was a poet and a leader. There’s actually studies on that that he was persuasive and emotionally resonant.

There’s a great story that I talk about. I didn’t really know too much about this, but in the 1850s I guess people didn’t realize that infections is why people died in hospitals. In Britain there was the Crimean War and Florence Nightingale, I didn’t really know about this story, but Florence Nightingale, she was early STEM. She knew more about science and health than anybody.

She realized, “Oh wait a minute, people are not dying of battle wounds; they’re dying of infections because there’s germs in the air and they’re infecting people.” We didn’t know this at the time. She had to convince the British society at the time, who said, “Well, you’re a woman. What do you know about science and health care?” She said, “No, I’m actually certain about this.”

She was dismissed. She was completely dismissed outright by the men at the time, so she created the first pie chart.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Carmine Gallo
She created this colorful pie chart way before infographics ever were introduced to actually show people visually why people were dying in hospitals. It was because of that that the scientists of the time said, “Wow, that’s pretty persuasive.”

Pete, I can tie this to almost any great movement of our time or any great experience that has transformed society, we can actually trace it back to somebody who was a really, really good communicator. There’s a ton of examples. One third of my book is history.

Pete Mockaitis
I think it’s intriguing. Now, I’m going to kind of go a little farther here with the devil’s advocate play.

Carmine Gallo
Sure, absolutely. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I would say those seem like good and true ideas. Infections are problematic. Freedom, independence is good. Maybe could you share an example of how great persuasion made a terrible idea that should have lost, in fact win and take root?

Carmine Gallo
Well, see now you’ll get me into trouble with that because there’s certainly a number of issues. You could look at politics. You could look at all sorts of different issues of our time where – and this is something that I study.

There are a lot of complicated issues out there, a lot of complicated issues in business and in geopolitics. The ability to communicate those issues and explain those issues really, really clearly is something that a lot of people really need to understand, and study, and take seriously.

Narrative, for example is being studied everywhere, Pete. Narrative, storytelling, is being studied in hospitals. It’s being studied in healthcare because we know that doctors are not the greatest communicators. It’s being studied in science because you can have a great idea as a scientist, but if you cannot persuade another person of that idea, then those great ideas get lost. That’s problematic.

In fact, over the last year, I’ve actually been contacted, I’m not exaggerating, by about five different departments within the US military, doing completely different things, but they are all studying narrative because it’s crucial to study why people behave in a certain way.

In my opinion, Pete, regardless of whether it’s in business or any field, if you can really get good at understanding narrative, I think it’s an amazing skill that will help you succeed in any industry, in any field.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well let’s talk about how that is done. In practice, how does one master this narrative of persuasion, inspiration?

Carmine Gallo
Yeah. One more thing before I forget and I’ll get into right into that Pete.

One of the reports that I read that kind of prompted me to write a book just on the art of persuasion. I read a report last year, 94% of hiring managers will say an employee with stronger communication skills has a better chance of being promoted, than an employee with more years of experience but weaker verbal skills. That’s the why. That is the why behind this book.

Let’s get into, well, how do you do it. Well, one is to recognize that persuasion is something that actually does come naturally to us. Storytelling, for example, is a big part of persuasion. That is something that is innate in us. It’s part of our DNA.

You may have heard about the history or the science of it, but there’s a lot of science now, which shows that the way we connect with one another is through storytelling, telling anecdotes, telling stories about one another. That’s the best way of transferring ideas from one person to another. This has actually been shown in the lab with neuroscientists I’ve talked to.

But it comes naturally to us. We are natural storytellers, Pete, until we get into the business world. Then all of the sudden we open something called PowerPoint, which is – I have nothing against PowerPoint per se. I’ve actually seen beautifully designed presentations.

But it is one of the least effective ways of transferring an idea to one another, especially using bullet points, which is why you never saw a bullet point on a Steve Jobs presentation. He used a different presentation software, but you never saw bullet points. He had an intuitive feel for story and for narrative.

This is something that very much comes naturally to us. What I like to do and I think this has been very effective in terms of helping people through this because I know how abstract this could sound, Pete. Storytelling, narrative, persuasion, it sounds so abstract. The formula was handed down to us 2,000 years ago. We know how persuasion works. We know it. Science proves it.

We know it because 2,000 years ago a really smart guy named Aristotle gave us the formula for persuasion. He said in order for me to convince you of anything, I need to do three things. I need to have three things. He called them appeals. You may have heard about these before and so have your listeners, but it’s worth repeating.

One is ethos, which is my credibility, my integrity. Before you interviewed my, Pete, you went online. You kind of looked at, “Oh, he’s got nine books and here’s how well they’re doing.” That’s my credibility. That is part of who I am before I even enter a conversation.

Then I need the data. That’s what Aristotle called logos. I have to make a logical argument for you to accept my idea. I need to deliver data and information and facts, like the one I just delivered to you, the 94% of hiring managers. I need to do that as part of my persuasion toolkit.

But without pathos, which is making an emotional connection to you through the power of story, then the other two don’t matter.

I have studied TED speakers, for example. I’ve studied the most viral TED talks of all time and I’m pretty close to the TED conference too. They know of me. I know them and I’ve worked with different TED speakers. The best TED talks are the ones that blend all three.

If you want to be persuasive, ethos, we can set that aside. That’s just establishing credibility for who you are. That’s your resume. Those are your credentials. But you have to be able to use facts, figures, data, and logical reasoning in order to convince your boss or your team to accept an idea or to take action for an idea.

But what I have found, especially in the great TED speakers of all time, 65% of their presentations fall under what Aristotle called pathos, which is story, emotion. You have to have a right balance.

Pete, when you walk into any conference room in corporate America today and you watch a standard PowerPoint presentation, it’s 99% data, 99% logos and only 1% maybe pathos. It needs to be more of a balance. I argue a higher element needs to be emotion and story followed up by the data.

It is hard to get across to people because I think people are just – I’m not going to say they’re not courageous, but I feel like they rely too much on the data because they think that they’re being more persuasive that way, where really the smartest people and the people who are the most successful in the fields very much use a combination of both emotion and data.

I can give you a perfect example of that if you’d like.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I do want to hear that example. It’s true I’m thinking about some of my favorite TED talks, like with Amy Cuddy, hearing her journey of transformation, like she didn’t think she was good enough and then oh by the way, if we look at the cortisol levels in blood after engaging in power posing and they are different. It’s like, oh, well, there you have it. It’s kind of hard to argue with the data.

Carmine Gallo
Pete, let me stop you there. Perfect. Amy Cuddy, Harvard researcher. Perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Carmine Gallo
All right. I’m going to stop you there. Do you remember any – she had a lot of data in that TED talk. Do you remember anything? I’m going to put you on the spot. I’d love for you to ….

Pete Mockaitis
I think there was a bar chart that – I don’t remember the specific numbers, but I was like, “Whoa, that’s definitely quite the drop,” was what I remember.

Carmine Gallo
Yes, but what’s the first thing you remember?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, she had her story associated with she felt kind of outmatched in the academic environment, like maybe she didn’t belong there.

Carmine Gallo
Pete, you just confirmed the thesis, which neuroscientists are concluding in the lab. You and I as human beings are wired for narrative, are wired for story. It is the most effective way of recalling information that we have. It’s the most fundamental verbal tool that we have in our toolbox.

Pete Mockaitis
When you talk about courage maybe being the missing element. I guess, okay, I’m going to put myself in the shoes of someone about to give a presentation to let’s just say a vice president of a corporation with tens of thousands of employees.

Carmine Gallo
Let’s say confidence. Maybe confidence more than courage.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I’m wondering – I guess it’s a little spooky one to buck the trend of the norm of what you see all the time and two if you start and say, “Pete is a customer in Chicago, who purchased our product and Pete was having some difficulty opening the packaging.”

I guess I’d be a little concerned that the executive there would be like, “Do you have any idea how busy I am? How about you get to the point right away so that we can make this meeting shorter and I can continue generating gobs of shareholder value?”

Carmine Gallo
Oh, Pete, we can handle that one too.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it.

Carmine Gallo
Okay. Everything falls under storytelling, but let’s be clear.

When I talk about storytelling in business as a way of setting you apart from your peers and everyone else, it doesn’t mean necessarily, “Oh, I’m going to tell you a personal story,” or, “I’m going to tell you a story about this persona.” It simply means using the elements of persuasion, and story, and pathos, that we know work.

Here’s another element. Remember at the very beginning of this conversation we talked about Hollywood movies. All successful stories, whether they are books, movies, plays, or presentations have a structure, a formula. There has to be the setup, the conflict, the resolution. There’s no successful Hollywood movie that actually doesn’t really fall in those three buckets.

It’s a formula that works throughout all of time. They’ve traced books back thousands of years. There are hundreds of years. The stories in the oldest books follow this formula. It’s not something that we just made up. This is how the brain works.

If you’ve got ten minutes in front of your boss, you can think of that story structure. It doesn’t have to be a particular story. It can simply be the structure of narrative.

You can start with, “Here is where we are today. Here’s the status quo. Here’s what our company’s dealing with today. Here’s the hurdle. Here’s the problem that is manifesting itself or the problem that is going to come up if we don’t handle this particular issue today. Here’s what the world, our industry, our company will look like once we’ve handled the issue.”

If I’ve got ten minutes in front of you and I have to make an argument for something, I’m still going to be thinking in narrative structure, Pete. I’m not going to spend ten minutes telling you this amazing story of somebody whose life was transformed by a product because you’re right. My boss is going to say, “You’re wasting my time. I don’t have time for this fluff.”

But I can still grab your attention by saying, “Here’s the state of our company today. Here’s a conflict that’s happening and this is going to cause a lot of problems for us. Here is the potential solution or maybe three solutions that we can choose from. Here’s how the world, our company, will look after either of these is implemented.”

I’m still using a narrative structure. I can also use metaphor and analogies. Warren Buffet is a big fan of this. This goes back to Aristotle as well.

When Warren Buffet talks about something complex, like financial strategies, he’ll often use a metaphor. He will compare the abstraction to something concrete. Metaphor has been found to be, again, one of our most effective verbal techniques.

But that still falls under Aristotle’s pathos or emotion. Aristotle gave us these formulas thousands of years ago and we can use them today to really stand out in any field.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of the three part evolution there and the storytelling arc and pathos, you’re seeing that even if you’re not telling a quote/unquote story insofar as an individual did a series of events and this is what unfolded, it’s still a story if you start with, “Here’s where we are today. Here’s the problem and here’s what it looks like if we fix it versus don’t fix it.”

Then I guess for the logos, you’re just sort of laying out the data associated with it, like, “We’ll lose 43 million dollars if we don’t fix it,”

Carmine Gallo
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So that’s sort of like it’s integrated into that pathos arc.

Carmine Gallo
Pete, “We will lose 43 million dollars if we don’t take this action,” that is the logos. Then I can follow that up with, “Here is an example or an anecdote of a company that was in our similar position and did not take action,” that’s the pathos. That’s the story.

You’re still using the elements of narrative and everything we’ve learned about connecting with people emotionally, but you’re just simply putting it into an abbreviated form.

Pete, this is a big deal. The ability to speak – and we can move past storytelling – but the ability to speak concisely and clearly in ten minutes – ten minutes is actually a good rule of thumb – is something that very few people have but everyone can build on it.

I was at – and I wrote this in the book and I had to be very careful about what I said, but I felt pretty good about it. Last year I was actually invited to kind of a secretive Air Force base in the middle of the desert. It was one of those –

Pete Mockaitis
Is it where they have the aliens, Carmine? Come clean right now.

Carmine Gallo
It was close to it. It was close to it.

Pete Mockaitis
You saw alien corpses over there.

Carmine Gallo
I was actually asked by a very – we’re not going to call him secretive, but it’s a very elite group of Navy and Army officers who are the top 1% in those particular departments. They are dealing with – they’re the ones being trained to deal with some of the most sensitive global issues of our time.

I went to their class. I actually sat there for about four hours listening to this class. They had one of my books as their required reading. They were dog-eared. They were looking at them in paperback. It was all marked up. They’re actually using one of my books. I thought it was fascinating.

Then near the end of it I said, “Why? Why would they need this kind of book for the most complex issues of our time?” Pete, I’ll never forget what the instructor said. They said, “Carmine, when these officers graduate this program and they go into the Pentagon or the White House or they go all over the world, they will have sometimes ten minutes to make an argument.” That’s it.

Why should we take this direction over another one? You have to be able to tell your argument, make a persuasive case in as little as ten minutes, but wow. You would think there would be a little bit more debate about some of these issues. But you understand where that’s coming from.

I think that’s something – I’ve heard this in business as well. Andy Grove at Intel, would give you ten minutes to give him a presentation.

People would go in there with these stacks of PowerPoint slides. They were ready to talk for 60 minutes and he said, “You’ve got 10. If you cannot express your idea in 10 minutes, clearly, succinctly and in a compelling way, I’m not interested.”

You see, Pete, it really does get back down to this idea that whether it’s through the elements of persuasion, the elements of narrative, or simply the ability to communicate your idea concisely and in a way that engages both my emotion, and my reasoning, and my intellect in a short amount of time, that’s a pretty powerful skill.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is. I want to make sure we get to hit two quick tactic tidbits right before we shift into hearing your favorite things. First, these fascinations, so compelling. What is the brain hacks Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, and Picasso used to unlock their best ideas?

Carmine Gallo
I think you got that from one of the chapters of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well yeah, I’ve got to know. It’s here.

Carmine Gallo
That is a fascinating brain hack. I’m sure you’ve come across this before, but it’s the idea of getting out of your industry and looking outside of your industry for the most creative ideas, so connecting ideas from different fields and applying it to the field or topic that you’re working on today. That is the secret to creativity, to kind of jumpstarting your creativity.

That’s why people like Steve Jobs, if it wasn’t for Steve Jobs, you know this story.

But if it wasn’t for Steve Jobs taking a calligraphy course in college without any indication that it was going to be used for anything other than just a creative outlet, if it wasn’t for that course, we never would have had this beautiful font and typography and desktop publishing that we have today because he brought it into the Mac.

He did this all the time. I did a lot of research on the Apple store. The Apple store was not inspired by another computer store. An Apple store was inspired by the Ritz Carlton. It’s fascinating. That’s why they do not have cashiers, but they have a concierge greeting you at the front. That’s why there’s a bar in the back of every Apple store. It doesn’t dispense alcohol; it dispenses advice, called a Genius Bar.

That’s a fact because I learned it from some of the top retailers who worked on the Apple store. This was the genius. The genius was looking outside of your field for inspiration. You have to be able to kind of follow your passions, follow your creativity and trust that something is going to connect.

Walter Isaacson goes into it in his book, Leonardo da Vinci was surrounded by people in Florence who were not just painters and sculptors, but they were artists and they were merchants.

Just by being around people who were outside of his little echo chamber, today we call it an echo chamber, Pete. We surround ourselves by the same like-minded people, who think the same and act the same.

Instead you have to kind of get out of your zone and start talking to other people and reading things that you wouldn’t otherwise read and traveling to places you wouldn’t otherwise travel because, and scientists have told me, that is the best way of getting your brain to think completely differently and creatively about problems that you’re working on.

That’s why Lin-Manuel Miranda came up with Hamilton only after he picked up a book that he rarely would have read, which is a history book on Alexander Hamilton, and went on vacation to read the book. That’s when the ideas came to him, not when he was sitting in front of a computer screen.

The best ideas, the most innovative ideas in the world in almost every field, actually happen, there’s a lot of science behind this, actually happen when people are outside of their field. It’s so fascinating to me.

But the reason why I put it in a book on persuasion, Pete, is because those people who can think outside of their field and can bring in different elements from completely different fields and associate these ideas, are much more interesting communicators.

I’m sure you’ve seen that too. People who read a lot like Bill Gates, a voracious reader, they’re interesting people because they are looking outside of their field for inspiration. Would you agree with that Pete? What do you think?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. It’s cool I was just at the new just insanely gorgeous Apple facility on the Chicago River there, downtown here. It was so funny. I didn’t even know exactly what we were stepping into. Once we got there-

Carmine Gallo
I haven’t seen it yet.

Pete Mockaitis
It was like, “Whoa, what is this beauty I’m beholding?” Then you go down the stairs and you say, “Oh, it’s an Apple store.” I didn’t even exactly know what activities transpired in this Apple sponsored building. It was really cool.

Carmine Gallo
I’ve actually never seen that store yet. There’s actually a really, really good lesson here, by the way, for all of our listeners. Steve Jobs asked better questions.

When they were creating the Apple store. He did not ask, “How do we sell more computers?” That was not the question he wanted answered. He asked, “How do we enrich people’s lives? How do we enrich the lives of every person who walks into a store?”

That’s why the Apple store looks the way it does because he asked more empowering questions. Really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
That is excellent. Now I’d love to hear some of your favorite things. Let’s hear a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Carmine Gallo
I actually came across a quote that I heard in a TED talk last year. I’ve been using it a lot and I put it in one of my chapters in the book. It’s actually by Gary Kasparov, the chess champion who lost to IBM computer. Remember that? A long time ago.

He gave this incredible TED talk that – and it inspired me to write more on my book. He said there’s only one thing or “There’s one thing only humans can do and that’s dream, so let’s dream big.”

Pete Mockaitis
I do like that. Thank you.

Carmine Gallo
Oh man, I love that because – that’s where I realized there is a human edge here. There is a way for us to outsmart the smart machines that we’re building, but it requires us getting back to what we do best, which is making those emotional connections to each other.

I love that though. It’s like that’s true. There’s only one thing we can do and that’s dream. A machine can’t dream, so we might as well dream big.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, thank you. How about a favorite book?

Carmine Gallo
Okay, I read about 75 books a year because I write a lot for different platforms. My favorite recent book is the same book as Bill Gates said is his favorite book of all time and that’s Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.

You may have heard of that Harvard psychologist who has 500 pages of evidence as to why we should actually be very, very grateful for the life we’re living today because we’ve made so much progress in every measure of living, which is pretty amazing.

But it’s a hard book to get through. There’s some wonderful passages, but it’s 500 pages of data. There’s not a lot of pathos going on there.

My favorite category, Pete, recently has been those kind of progress books. There’s Hans Rosling’s book is called Factfulness. I would start with his. I would start with Steven Pinker’s book. I’d also read a Swedish historian named Johan Norberg who wrote a similar book. There’s a number of books in this category. I call them progress books.

But I’ve got to tell you, Pete, after reading about five of these books in a row and speaking to three out of five of the authors, you’ll never complain about anything again. Pete, it’s weird.

I won’t complain about a delayed flight. I won’t complain about being in a long line in Costco. Because you look around, you realize, wow this is – never in the history of civilization have I been able to access this much food in one place or get from here to where I have to get in a few hours. Yeah, you get to a point where you actually you feel so grateful that it’s hard to complain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s awesome. What a transformation and a value to install a permanent upgrade of gratitude inside you just by reading five books. That’s a good trade. Very cool.

Carmine Gallo
We need that. All of your listeners need that because if they want to set themselves up as leaders and as people who aspire for more, especially in their career and workplace, they can’t think like the average person.

These books will teach you that there is a bias psychologically toward the negative, which is why it’s so easy for all of us, Pete, to go negative. But if you want to be a great leader, you’ve got to stand out. You’ve got to see things for what they are and you have to be much more positive. But it takes a little work. It’s actually kind of hard to do, to reframe everything like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hm. Could you share with us a particular favorite resonant nugget, something you share that really seems to connect, get retweeted, note taken profusely?

Carmine Gallo
Yeah. I wrote this two books ago. I wrote a book on the TED talks called Talk Like Ted. I made an observation that in – I go back to Steve Jobs, I know I’ve mentioned him several times – but one of my first communication books is about Steve Jobs, so I know a lot about Steve Jobs and Apple.

At the end of his last major public presentation, again, he asked an empowering question. He said, “What makes my heart sing?” He said, “It’s the intersection of technology and liberal arts that makes my heart sing.”

I actually used that question. I said this is a great question to ask ourselves because if you ask what you do, then it’s pretty factual. It’s pretty unemotional. “Carmine, what do you do?” I’m a communication advisor or an author.”

Then if you ask, “What are you passionate about?” which is a very good question to ask and I ask my clients that all the time, “What are you passionate about?” you still don’t get a really deep response. I can say, “Well, I’m passionate about communication skills.”

But then if you ask, “What makes your heart sing?” then all of the sudden you get completely different reactions from people. For me what makes my heart sing would be to help people with ideas that can potentially change the world, articulate those ideas in a way they get heard.

When you ask what makes your heart sing, you can try this with other people. I do this with clients all the time, Pete. In order for me to really elicit the best communication messages, and the best presentations, and the best stories, I ask people what makes your heart sing. It’s very interesting.

But anyway, that is a portion of one of my books that actually gets retweeted and posted on Instragram quite a bit. I saw how it resonated with people. I didn’t know that at the time. I just thought it was, “Hey, that’s a cool way of looking at the world,” but it seems to resonate with a lot of people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like it. I’m going to try it out and see how that plays in opening conversations with people because I think it can get right to some fun stuff quickly.

Carmine Gallo
Oh, use it as one of your questions. Yeah, I can’t wait to hear what people say. Use that as one of your questions and you’ll see that their answers are unexpected, very different than what you would think.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Carmine, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Carmine Gallo
CarmineGallo.com is going to be the easiest way to get ahold of me or remember me. It’s a good Italian name, so it’s kind of hard to forget. But CarmineGallo.com, that’s where you can join my newsletter. You can learn more about all of my books including the new one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and do you have a final challenge or call to action to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Carmine Gallo
The final call to action is understand that you have an edge in the workplace. You have the ability to be irreplaceable and irresistible if you master the ancient art of persuasion. Ancient being critical because it’s a formula that we know works and we know how it works, and we can prove it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Well, Carmine, thanks so much for sharing this time and expertise. I hope your book, Five Stars, is a smash hit. Good luck in all you’re up to.

Carmine Gallo
I hope so too. Thank you very much, Pete. I put a lot of work into it and I’m very optimistic and very confident about it. If people want to just learn more about that, they can just look it up, Five Stars. It’s sold everywhere or TheFiveStarsBook.com. But you can also get it through my website, CarmineGallo.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect.

Carmine Gallo
All right. Thank you Pete.