How do I know that? Because I’ve been in countless business situations in which the best idea wins the day. It doesn’t matter who has what job description. If your idea is the best of the bunch under consideration, you’re in charge.
Usual Frame: The boss is in charge.
Reframe: The person with the best ideas is in charge.
Why did seventeen-year-old Greta Thunberg have so much influence on the climate agenda? I’d say it’s because she did the best job of communicating. That’s another way to grab power from the bottom—be the best at communicating something the masses want to hear. You’d be shocked and appalled if you knew how much power a political speechwriter has. That’s a dirty little secret of politics; speechwriters have great influence on policy because if it sounds good when spoken, a politician wants to say it. That means a speechwriter can easily bias a speech by making the catchiest parts support their worldview.
Usual Frame: The experts are in charge.
Reframe: The best communicator is in charge.
Another source of power is competence. If you’re the most competent person in each meeting and that fact becomes apparent to others, suddenly you’re in charge, like it or not. Being competent is an extreme superpower. Everyone wants to hire you, work with you, promote you, buy from you, have babies with you, and be your friend. We are drawn to the competent, and that gives them power.
Usual Frame: The boss is in charge.
Reframe: The most capable people are in charge.
On the downside, competent people end up doing most of the work. That must be why so many people avoid being competent.
Here’s a reframe that can help you identify powerful influencers before anyone else sees them coming. You can think of power in the modern world as the product of persuasion talent multiplied by the size of your audience. If you are persuasive but no one is listening, that won’t help anyone. And if you have a big audience but no persuasion training, you are squandering an opportunity. When you see both—as we observed with both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and candidate Donald Trump in 2016—you can easily predict they will have a big impact.
Usual Frame: The people in charge have the power.
Reframe: Power = (Persuasion skill) x (Audience size)
Now that you’ve been exposed to a few examples of power illusions, you might find it easier to spot misleading power dynamics on your own. My default belief in every situation is that I’m the one with the power. I recommend you start with that assumption, too.
Mind-Reading Isn’t Real
If you have ever experienced something called “a relationship,” you know even the people closest to you can’t tell what you’re thinking much of the time. And if you have experienced the horrors of using social media, you know strangers routinely assign secret motives and nutty opinions to you.
Have you ever been accused of thinking something you were not thinking? Of course you have. It’s a daily occurrence for some of us. As a public figure, I’m falsely accused of having terrible motives every day. Literally every day. This gives me a privileged view of how bad people are at discerning others’ motives based on scant clues.
When I watch Bill Gates get involved with the most pressing issues of our time, I think he’s trying to help. My assessment of his motives is that he took care of all his own needs and those of his family, so he is turning outward to help “the tribe,” which in this case is all of humankind. I see Gates taking on the nastiest, most intractable problems of our time at great personal cost and risk. So to me, he appears to have good motives. Obviously, his philanthropy also gives him cover—in a physical security sense as well as reputationally—so one could argue his self-interest is the prime motivator. I see his actions as 100 percent compatible with his self-interest and well-intentioned.
Am I right about Gates? I don’t know. I can’t read minds.
Other people look at the same set of facts about Bill Gates and conclude he is running some sort of global money-making scheme that involves scaring the public to boost his pharma and nuclear investments, to gain control of the world to turn us all into masked and sterilized slaves full of fake DNA, or something like that.
I probably succeeded in convincing you that other people—including me—are bad at discerning the motives of strangers. But you might still think you are good at it. And that’s the problem. We all believe we are. At this very moment, I’m writing a book that tells you people are bad at mind reading, and I know that to be true. I also know that several times today I will imagine incorrect motives in the minds of strangers. My only defense is the reframe I keep in my mind and often repeat.
Usual Frame: I can discern people’s motives by their actions.
Reframe: Mind-reading isn’t real. Humans are terrible at discerning motives.
This reframe is more powerful than it seems. Once you tune your brain to spot instances of “mind-reading” by others, you can push back on their arguments by reminding people that humans don’t know how to read minds. In my experience, people retreat from their absurd accusations about you when you call out their inability to read minds. You might still have to explain your real motives, but it helps to do a controlled burn of your critic’s magical thinking about mind-reading before you tell them what you are really thinking. Try it.
Basket Case Theory
Sometimes it feels as if everyone I know believes they are weird (and they are) while they also believe most people are non-weird (they are wrong). I call this the Basket Case Theory. Most of us feel as if we’re hiding a secret when we’re around so-called normal people because we don’t feel we are normal, so surely others will notice.
I first learned of Basket Case Theory from a friend and tennis partner when I was in my twenties. The original context was our dating experiences. We kept meeting normal women who would, over time, slowly reveal their hidden traumas and anxieties until we came to see them as Basket Cases (a term denoting someone with debilitating mental and emotional issues). In time, I came to see Basket Case Theory as a useful description of all humans, male and female.
Usual Frame: Most people are normal, but I’m a basket case.
Reframe: Everyone is a basket case once you get to know them.
Basket Case Theory has a lot of utility. It keeps you from getting too starry-eyed about a new relationship until you see what horrors are in the basket. You start to develop realistic expectations of other people, which can prevent disappointment. It also gives you permission to be one of the basket cases yourself since the whole idea is that no one is exempt.
Sure, you’re a weirdo. But so am I, and so is everyone else we know, albeit in different ways. That’s a healthy place to be mentally. It can crush your self-esteem to imagine people around you as healthy and happy and awesome, but you’re not. It should ease your mind to realize that once you get to know others well, their problems are ones you wouldn’t want. We are a civilization of basket cases pretending to be otherwise. You won’t find an exception. At best, you might find someone who doesn’t complain too much. I’ve searched my entire life for the one complete person who hits all the right notes and feels all the right feelings. As far as I can tell, that person is hiding or does not exist. And I take comfort in that. I don’t mind being a weirdo in the land of weirdos. It’s only uncomfortable to be a weirdo if you think others are not.
(Pssst. They are.)
I have a unique window into the basket case phenomenon because I am older than most readers of this book, so I’ve seen the unbroken pattern for decades. I also have the type of job that signals to people I’m open-minded and non-judgy. That means people tell me everything. Even when I don’t want them to. People confess all manner of crimes to me (serious ones), and they know they’re safe to do so. They also confess their deepest desires and mental issues because, again, they’re safe to do so. I start with the basket case assumption about everyone, so any details I learn about a person won’t change my opinion.