185. Say Less, Mean More: Craft Compelling Communication
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I have a few go-to podcasts in my playlist that help me to be better in my personal and professional life. The Happiness Lab with Dr. Lori Santos of Yale is always on my list. You might have heard Lori recently in our mini-series on communication, well-being, and happiness. Her podcast is all about

how to lead a happier, more purpose-driven life. This season, the Happiness Lab is releasing happiness how-to guides to give you important lessons like how to handle feelings of inadequacy, how to build meaningful relationships, and how to be inspiring. Join me in listening to the Happiness Lab wherever you get your podcasts. Getting to the point is critical in all communication, but especially storytelling and pitching.

My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

Today, I'm excited to speak with Guy Kawasaki. Guy is a renowned author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He was chief evangelist for Apple in the late 1980s and early 90s. Currently, Guy works for Canva, which he co-founded. He hosts a podcast and has authored many books, including his latest, Remarkable, Nine Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference.

Guy, I had a great time chatting with you on your remarkable podcast. It's such a fun conversation. I'm looking forward to our conversation here. Before we get started, I'm excited to share that our February newsletter is out now. It includes insights into how to engage your audience, especially when they might be distracted, and advice on how to be better at small talk. Sign up to receive our free monthly newsletters at FasterSmarter.io.

Well, I hope we can exceed what we did there. Well, thank you so much. Should we get started? Yes. When you craft a story, what are the things that you are thinking about in terms of sequencing, how you start, how you end? What's your thought process? It starts with the understanding.

awareness that you have to entertain your audience. I think too many people as speakers, they think, oh my God, I need to inform my audience and I need to like get my pitch across. I need to get my story across. You know, my people are telling me these are the three key points.

And so what happens is you're working from forward from what you want to do. I want to get my three ideas across, my three key selling points across. And what you have to do is you have to understand that it's not about you, it's about them. And if your audience wants to be entertaining, which is basically every audience.

I think if you entertain people, you have a chance of informing them. But if all you're trying to do is inform them and not entertain them, you're not going to pull it off. First and foremost, what I hear you say is that stories are natural and lean into just the comfort and natural way in which we tell stories.

And second, thinking about your job is to engage and entertain the audience. And through that, you can inform them. And deciding the appropriate level of information, a lot of lessons in that has to do with reminding yourself what your purpose is, which is to engage and entertain and make sure that you just tell the stories as you normally would. Conversation much better than formal presentations. I bet you if we had 100,

CEOs or CXOs out there and we said to them, how many of you believe that the top priority in a presentation is to entertain? It would be like zero. Well, just as a personal story on that front, when I was coming up

in the academic world learning how to be a teacher. One of my mentors recently passed away was Phil Zimbardo, and he pulled me aside and said, as a professor, your job is to transmit knowledge and information. But the way you do that is by entertaining. You have to connect, be relevant and engaging. And then the students want to learn. And that makes it so much easier. And I think the same is true in storytelling and business.

I want to switch our gears here and talk about a form of storytelling, which is pitching. And I know you spend a lot of time coaching people on pitching. What is the advice you find yourself giving over and over again about what makes for a good pitch? The problem with most pitches, it starts off with the fundamental idea that the purpose of a pitch is to get a check.

And so people have this fantasy that I am going to just, you shock and awe, this is going to be Desert Storm 3. They're going to just be so shocked and awe, they're going to ask me for wire transfer instructions.

And right there, you're wrong. And that screws up the rest of your pitch because the purpose of a pitch is not to get the money. The purpose of a pitch is to stay in the game and not get eliminated. So as long as you're not a no, you still can be a yes.

A pitch is a path to the next step, which is due diligence. So just don't get eliminated. That's problem number one. Problem number two is that I think in every entrepreneur's life, they have gone to some panel or watched some YouTube video where there's a panel of venture capitalists and some moderator who says, so what do you look for in a deal that

And every venture capitalist says, I look for a world-class team with a world-class product in a world-class market. And then the panelists, they keep going and say, yeah, I'm looking for a really great team. And we stand by our team. We believe in our team. We stick with our team. And so everybody hears this and they think, oh my God, so I got to convince them that I have a world-class team. So the

The CEO stands up in this pitch and spends 15 minutes telling his or her life history. My great-grandfather came over in the Mayflower. He landed in Connecticut. He created this hardware store, which became Ace Hardware, and he made a

a ton of money. So he endowed a chair at Dartmouth and I got into Dartmouth and from Dartmouth, I had a summer intern at Goldman Sachs. And the next year I had an internship at McKinsey. I came out West. I worked for Google. Then I worked for Microsoft. I took my .NET class.

And like 15 minutes later, like, what the hell do you do? Is it hardware, software or whatever? So what I tell people in a pitch is you got to think there's two kinds of airplanes. One airplane is a 787 and the other kind of airplane is a

fighter jet. So if you're at SFO and you're in a 787, you have two miles of runway. You can just go buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh. And 1.9 miles later, you're up in the air and the miracle has occurred. Guess what kind of pilot you need to be in a pitch? You need to be Tom Cruise, right?

So in the first 30 seconds, you say, my name is Guy Kawasaki. I'm chief evangelist of Canva. Canva is in the business of democratizing design. We're an online design server. So you can create graphics faster than you can boot Photoshop. That's the Tom Cruise explanation.

Two things. One, have the right goal. The right goal is to just get to the next step. It's not to get to the check. It's not to get to the price. It's just to get to the next step. And then second, get there quickly. It's not about building up all the credibility and explaining everything. It's really about what's the value you bring and get it up.

quickly. I think that's great advice, not just for pitching, but for communication in general. A lot of people take a long time. There's a lot of buildup. And I think that's really important. I also think, and I believe you believe this too, that a lot of pitching is listening to understand what is needed and what's important to people. It's not just about coming in and saying all of this. The other thing I recommend I'd like to get your opinion on is a lot of people create one pitch and they just deliver that one pitch across all different audiences. You have to tailor it

after you give the pitch about 20 or 30 times, every time you're going to hear one different thing and you go back to your office and then you make that fix. And after you do this 20 or 30 times, you take back your presentation and you start from scratch and you let the 20 things that you've heard and you've trying to add, somebody said, I want to know about the patent structure. So you added a patent page and somebody said,

I want to know about the legal repercussions and trademark implications. So you put that page in and then somebody said, how are you on DEI? So you put a DEI page in it and pretty soon you've covered every objection. And now you're not Tom Cruise anymore. Now you are flying a

Pan Am 747 cargo jet. I think that's really an important point for people to think about. If you continually build, change, build, change, build, change, you can end up with something that's not what you need. And sometimes it's, let's just start fresh with the input and information that we had learned. And that helps.

I want to shift gears to even be more specific. I know you have very strong beliefs on slides and how slides should be designed. You've actually become very famous for your 10-20-30 rule. I'd love for you to share a little bit about that specific rule, but in terms of when you think about slides or things that we add to support our communication, how should we be thinking about that to be effective and not distracting?

Being a big David Letterman fan, I figured out that 10 is about the magic number. And I would make the case that if you think you need more than 10 slides to convince someone you have a viable business, that means you don't have a viable business. Ideally, you could convince people in one or two slides. I think the ideal pitch is you have 10 slides ready to roll, but you get to the second or third slide

And you say, would you like a quick demo? And you start a demo. And the next 50 minutes, you're talking about the demo. And you never get to slide 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, because people are so entranced by your demo. That's a very good sign. So that's kind of where I'm coming from there. So anyway, the 10, 20, 30 rule is maximum 10 slides.

You should be able to give those 10 slides in 20 minutes. I mean, there have been like Nobel Prize winners give 18-minute TED Talks. I'm giving you two more minutes than them because you're not a Nobel Prize winner. But in 20 minutes, you should be able to explain anything. And then the 30 points is because I think people use much too small a font and they put

Complete sentences and whole paragraphs. When you put a sentence or a paragraph, it's because you don't know your material well enough. If you need that much text, you don't really know your material, which is your problem. So Nancy Duarte, one of my heroes from Duarte Design, she has something called the glance test.

And the way the glance test works is you put up your slide. People glance at the slide and then they look at you. And if you put up a slide and they're like, the strategic focus of my company is to enable shareholders to receive...

A reasonable return on equity while enabling employees to self-actualize their goals by providing a patent-pending, curve-jumping, paradigm-shifting solution to the problems at hand while killing as few whales as possible. And now I'm back to the speaker. Steve Jobs' font size was like 190 points.

You and I, we're not Steve Jobs, so that's why I'm saying 30. Interesting. Yeah, it's almost a heuristic. Yeah, the number of words on a slide implies how well prepared they are. So 10, 20, 30. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30.

30 size font. I often say the mantra should be what's the least amount of information I can put on a slide to add value. Again, it comes back to the fundamental question. People who put a lot of text on the slide think it's because they're going to use shock and awe to get wiring instructions. Again, that's a false assumption. So words versus images. Do you find images, graphs, charts can be

as valuable, more valuable than just having words, bullet points. What are your thoughts on that? I believe I agree with that. However, I would say that the danger here is that like everything else in pitching, less is more. And some people think if I put four images up, it's better than three. Three is better than two and two is better than one. But you will flunk the glance test.

Because if there's four images, like dolphin, there's a picture of a seagull, there's a picture of Steve Jobs, and there's a picture of the sunset. Oh, what were you saying again?

I'm going to switch gears. You also do what I do. You host a podcast. It's a great podcast. You've had wonderful guests. What are one or two things that you have taken away over all those interviews that you've done in terms of a learning that you've had or some insight that you've gained as a result? I think one of the most, if not the most, insight I've gained from my podcast is from someone who has an office about a mile from here. And her name is Carol Dweck. So Carol Dweck wrote the book,

And it's all about the growth mindset. You can have a growth mindset and believe you can learn new skills and do new things. Or you can have a fixed mindset and believe you can't. And that was a fundamental book in my life that, you know, yeah, I want to be on the right side of that dichotomy. And everybody who's remarkable has a growth mindset. There's nobody with a fixed mindset who's been remarkable. Okay.

Carol's work is really important because a lot of people get locked into that fixed mindset and they limit themselves. Carol Dweck's work was great as it is. And then Mary Murphy just put the icing on the cake because Mary Murphy's insight is, yes, a growth mindset is primarily in your head. But if you have a growth mindset in your head, but you're in an organization that has a fixed mindset,

it ain't going to work. So you need to have a growth mindset in a growth mindset organization for it to be optimal. I think even Carol would say that was a brilliant insight that added to her theories. Before we end, I'd like to ask all my guests three questions. One I make up just for you and one is similar across all. You ready for that? Fire away. I know you have a passion for surfing. I'm curious, how do you use that

to help you be better at what you do. I think all of us should have some kind of physical activity that we use or have that helps us focus and channel. I'm curious, why surfing and what does it do for you? Surfing is not a means to an end. It is the end in itself.

So if you said to somebody, why do you do CrossFit? They will say, I want to be in fitness. I want to lose weight or whatever. Why do I surf? Because I simply love surfing. It's not a means to an end. It's the end itself. So that's number one.

And what I love about surfing, and I started at 60, which is 55 years too late. I started at 60. Surfing is the most difficult thing I have ever tried to learn because there are so many variables. There's the water, the speed of the wave, the direction of the wave, the shape of the wave, the other people in the water, the reef, the kelp, the wind, the tide.

And it is both anaerobic and aerobic, and it requires great balance. And you're out in the ocean at dawn, and it's like surfing is the most fun you can have legally. I appreciate that it's something you're passionate about. And I love that you took it on later in life.

Let me ask you question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? There's nobody you could admire more than Steve Jobs. I saw him speak several times or many times, actually. And he had such a way of telling a story.

Talk about passing the glance test. You could look at his slides for half a second and come back to him. He could really do a demo. He had a sense of timing and pace. And, you know, he could sense when the audience, you know, wanted to hear this or that. He was truly magical.

I think it's kind of like the story that if you hear that Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant always took more free throws than anybody else on the team, you would say Kobe and Michael are naturally endowed. Why did they have to take more practice shots? I don't know which comes first. If you're naturally endowed, you practice more or you practice more so people think you're naturally endowed. But in addition to the growth mindset, there's the work of Angela Duckworth, which is the grit to mindset mindset.

And I would say that the flip side of the growth mindset is the grit mindset, because if you're going to grow, you're going to face failure. So you need to persevere in failure, which is grit. Final question for you, Guy. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I will tell you that the most important thing is, duh, you have to have something to say. Yeah.

Because not everybody has something to say when they try to create a communication strategy.

So you need to have something to say. And, you know, at an extreme example, I talk to a lot of people and they say, I want to write a book. And I say, why do you want to write a book? He says, well, I want to position myself as a thought leader and a visionary. And I want to build credibility. I want to increase consulting. I want to increase speaking. That's why I want to write a book. You write your book when you have something to say, not because it's going to help position you. So

I think that's the number one thing. That's 95% of the battle. You have something to say. And I heard you say earlier that making sure that it's entertaining and engaging and that it's relevant to the audience. When we were talking about pitching, you talked about that. And I think, but first and foremost, you have to have something important to say in

And certainly, Guy, you did. You shared with us many concepts that I think are really important. Be present for your audience. Tell the story as naturally as you can. Make sure that when you use slides, that there's a purpose to those slides and you're not just throwing a lot in. And an important point also is be willing to start fresh, to start new. And that's a really important lesson I need to take. Thank you for your time. My pleasure.

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about slide design, please listen to episode 82 with Nancy Duarte. To learn more about pitching, please listen to episode 47 with Stephanos Xenios. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Ibrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.

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