Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…And by the way, what Dana Carney will tell you, and what common sense will tell you, is that these are skills that can be mastered. Robert de Niro was not born Robert de Niro, in the sense of acting skills are learned. How you show up, how you command the room. There's a guy named Regis McKenna who is older than God, who's famous for running a very, very, very fancy public relations firm in the Silicon Valley. And his biggest contribution to life, as well as by the way to his personal wealth, is that he made Steve Jobs Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs began, Steve Jobs couldn't convince you to buy water if you were dying of thirst. He could not give a presentation to save his life. And Regis McKenna and his team took Steve Jobs under their wing and created Steve Jobs, a man who could sell anything to anybody. These are skills. This is not about personality. This is not about undergoing some kind of cosmetic surgery or whatever. These are skills, everything we've talked about, networking, showing up, all these things. These are skills that can be learned. I have a list of some of the stuff you actually recommend for looking and appearing powerful. So I'll read a few and I'm curious what else comes to mind. So do not read from notes. Make eye contact. Keep it brief. You say that anger can be a signal of power because it's outside the norm. It's kind of breaking the rules. Don't apologize. It's kind of the opposite. More gestures, which is interesting. Open body posture. Louder voice. Okay, I'm going to speak louder now. I like this. Okay, what else comes to mind as ways to appear powerful? Invading people's personal space. So gentle touching, standing close to someone. We're not talking about sexual touching, we're talking touch on the arm or the shoulder, shaking people's hands. That's a way of I think being more powerful. But you've covered the main ones. Eye contact. One of the problems with Tony Hayward of BP is that he's been given a statement to read. You cannot read something in front of you and make eye contact at the same time. So he looks like he's scripted. He looks like he's insincere. Jack Valenti, who I had the privilege of knowing, who for 38 years was the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, and typically rated one of the number one or number two most effective lobbyists in Washington DC, said to my class when he came to my class, which he did, "I never appeared before Congress with notes. I wanted them to believe, which was by the way, true, that I was in complete control and complete mastery of the material, and that I did not need notes or a bunch of assistants around me to help me. That I, as the head of the MPAA, understood the motion picture industry." And then he would give you a little aside about how it was the one industry that consistently had a budget surplus in trade. He would talk about how many jobs he created and he had all this stuff at his fingertips. But basically his command of the material made him more powerful. It's interesting, Jack Valenti was five foot two inches tall and he came, talked to my class, and the next class I said to people, "What are your reactions? What are your thoughts?" And a woman raised her hand and said, "He feels taller than he is." And I thought that was an assessment that was both true and insightful. When the five-foot-two Jack Valenti appeared, because of his presence, because of his body language, because of his Texas drawl, because of how he moved on the stage, he felt bigger. You would not say he did not feel five-foot-two.…

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