I write these letters to reflect, gain perspective, and improve my communication skills. My hope is that it helps you do the same.
From the summer to fall of 2022, I tried to convince everyone and their mama about Blockchain technology.
I had just got into a few communities based on some NFTs I purchased the year before. Any opportunity I got, I’d talk about the value of digital authentication, provenance, and life-long royalties to support artists that you love.
The hype really picked up and people started asking about it.
They’d DM me to get my opinion.
I was happy to share it too.
Then October 2022 came and its fall winds brought with it the FTX downfall and crisis. One of the biggest financial frauds of our time. It was carried out on the premise of the safe blockchain.
Everything went down.
Those curious DMs turned into “I told you so.”
I found myself trying to defend the technology.
I was fighting a losing battle.
So I decided to stop.
I decided to stop convincing people. I need to convince myself. I started writing my newsletter a few weeks after that. I launched my own blockchain-backed book project afterwards.
And that book will be out in a month.
It makes me think about the difference between talking, persuasion, and influence.
Are they all the same?
Was my initial approach just self-serving?
Self-love gone bad
We are so in love with ourselves that it’s hard to think about other people.
Regardless of what you say to the world about how much you care and how selfless you are, you are most times thinking about yourself. The problem is that most of what we want in life cannot be achieved in isolation.
You need other people to reach some of your ambitious goals.
You need supporters.
You need investors.
You need a team.
You need friends.
So what happens when everyone is thinking about themselves?
It becomes: take, take, take.
It becomes: “the pot is not big enough for all of us, so I’m just going to get mine.”
It becomes: crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down.
This is how humans have behaved from time.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
You can put your awareness of your self-interest to your advantage and use it to help you, the next person, and your community. If everyone is in it for themselves, the person that can abstract from their own self-interest and think what is in it for the next person can create solutions for both people.
The one that can think about what is good for the entire community, can build for the entire community.
Knowing that what is good for the community is also good for them.
This still serves your self-interest but serves the community too. It starts with self-awareness of who you are, and then moves on to empathy. Being able to understand things from another person’s perspective.
This is the foundation of effective communication.
It’s the way you build your persuasive skills in the short term and become influential in the long term.
3 Steps From Overthinking To Influencing
Overthinking is a problem.
Most times we are overthinking about ourselves. Even if you had an important presentation. You will overthink it because you are concerned with how you will look afterwards. “If it doesn’t go well, will they reject me? Will I be banned for life?”
Oh noooo.
There’s only so much you can solve in your mind. If you really want to make change, you have to find your way out of the safety of your mind, take action, and learn how to influence people along your mission.
When you learn your style, you’ll be able to build solutions, connect with people, and live a more well-rounded life.
Here are three steps on the influence path.
1. Why Talk?
You have to start with a reason.
Why do you want to communicate?
Why do you want to share that thing?
It is instinctive to want to interact with your fellow human being. We are social creatures, communicating through language and symbols is what we’ve always done.
But too much talk without direction leads to echo chambers. Humans turned to parrots.
Ideally, you want to turn your mode of communication into a self-reflecting loop. Without being excess, just ask “why?” It allows you to refine what’s important to you and why you want to do it.
I write a lot.
It brings me clarity in the process.
I share my writing to see what resonates.
When someone responds to it, I feel less lonely in my thoughts.
For me, I use it as a way to find myself as I navigate through the world. It allows me to hone in on my interests and prioritize what I want to talk about.
Start by asking “what are my interests and why will I want to talk about them?”
Write it down. Externalizing your thoughts really helps.
2. Learn “People-First” Persuasion
You can’t persuade without empathy.
Most of us act like we are thinking about the best interest of the next person. A lot of times, we are thinking about ourselves. The way we get our way is through manipulation – guilt-tripping and establishing some false authority.
Real persuasion starts with selflessness.
Start by thinking, how can the person on the other side benefit from this. A lack of empathy has been the achilles heel of a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs.They spend all the time talking about how great their product is and all its fancy features, when the customer only cares about what’s in it for them and the benefits.
Persuasion is communication that starts with empathy.
3. Influence in Silence
Persuasion is day-to-day communication, influence is just there, built over time.
Do you have a friend or a family member that when a certain topic comes up, you think “hmmm, I wonder what that person thinks about that?”
That person has influence.
They don’t have to persuade you. They have built trust in that topic over years. They don’t have to be in your face, persuading you all the time. It’s just there.
For instance, I have some people in my life that when we’re talking about music they ask me: “So Nifemi, what do you think?”
I’m like: “why are you asking me?”
I like music just like the next person. But I did write an entire book about music. I then wrote a couple other books afterwards. It has influenced the way people perceive what I know. But it started with communicating my interests.
Day-to-day talk can be noisy, persuasion is eloquent, influence is silent.
That’s why Freddie Gibbs said “Real Gs move in silence like Giannis.”
Do your work and your influence will build.
Get it out….
Clear communication is a self-enforcing loop.
There are different phases. It starts with self-awareness to understand interests, then empathy to persuade, and patience to build influence.
If you use it as a self-reflective process, the influence will feed back into your interests, directing your next set of communication.
But you can’t do it all in your mind.
You have to externalize it.
Interact with your world.
Speak, write, document.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
P.S. If you’ve read this far, do you mind replying to this email with the answer to this question: would you rather be persuasive or influential?
