3 Reasons Not to Read This Article on Reverse Psychology

This article has some real problems. It contains irrelevant personal information about me. It’s a list, a format that is getting to be a cliché (okay, already is a cliché). And I’m not a business expert, just a guy who has written a handful of (I hope) amusing books.

But still, I think you might find this article very useful.

That preceding intro was inspired by Adam Grant’s great new book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, which is full of interesting ideas, including the strategy of downplaying your idea when pitching a project. The old reverse psychology might have some science behind it after all (or at least strong anecdotal evidence and the blessing of one of America’s great business minds).

Before I get to that, some background: Adam Grant is a mensch. A professional mensch, in fact. He wrote the bestselling book Give and Take, which argued, essentially, that you don’t have to be an a-hole to be successful. In fact, being a compassionate and caring person — a giver — can actually help you in business. It’s worked for Adam — he’s got a PhD in psychology, is a professor at Wharton and consults for everyone from Google to the United Nations.

I loved Give and Take, and got to meet Adam in person (we both attended MTV’s video music awards a couple of years ago, and watched Miley Cyrus’s famously scandalous twerking. Our friendship was forged during a cultural crisis).

Adam’s new book is just as compelling as Miley’s twerking, and much more useful.

Here are three of my favorite points:

1) When pitching, try being brazenly humble.

Adam writes about entrepreneur Rufus Griscom who created the parenting website Babble. When Rufus was pitching the site to Disney, he had a slide in his deck that read “Why Buying Babble Is a Bad Idea.” Disney ended up buying Babble for $40 million.

Acknowleding the limitations of your idea can be good for several reasons: It shows you’re realistic, that you are confident enough to be humble, that you are honest and not out to bamboozle them with a smarmy sales pitch.

Of course, it has its risks. If done poorly, it can make you seem unprofessional. But when it works, it’s a powerful Jedi mind trick.

I’m a big fan of downplaying my ideas. My latest project is to help connect the world in one single family tree. I always acknowledge that in some ways this is a ridiculous idea. A lot of us feel we have too many annoying relatives to begin with. Who wants 7 billion more? But I talk about the upsides of the idea as well — like the amazing feeling knowing that you’re part of something bigger — and hope the positives outweigh the negatives.

2) Keep your day job.

Being bold is a good thing. Being reckless? Not so much. Many successful entrepreneurs kept their day jobs much longer than you’d expect.

Phil Knight kept his job as an account for five years after he started selling running shoes. Steve Wozniak kept his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard for a year after founding Apple. Bill Gates is famous for dropping out of Harvard. But Grant points out, he waited to leave school for a year after selling his software program. Also, he didn’t drop out, he got a formal leave of absence. And his parents bankrolled him.

When I got my first big book contract, I was too much of a wuss to quit my day job. I’d come home from my job as an editor at Esquire, take a disco nap at 7 p.m. and then write until 1 a.m.

But Adam tells me I wasn’t being a wuss. I was just being a smart risk mitigator.

“The most successful originals are not the daredevils who leap before they look,” Grant says. “They are the ones who reluctantly tiptoe to the edge of a cliff, calculate the rate of descent, triple-check their parachutes, and set up a safety net at the bottom just in case.”

3) Cultivate Vuja De.

We all know about Déjà vu — encountering something new, but feeling that we’ve seen it before. Vuja De, Grant explains, is the opposite. You encounter something familiar, but see it from a new perspective.

Consider the origin story of Warby Parker, the wildly successful online seller of prescription glasses. For all their lives, the founders accepted the statusquo: Glasses are expensive. They have to be. They’re medical purchases.

But then co-founder Dave Gilboa started looking at glasses with fresh eyes (sorry. Had to be done). While waiting in line at the Apple Store to buy an iPhone, “he found himself comparing the two products. Glasses had been a staple of human life for nearly a thousand years, and they’d hardly changed since his grandfather wore them. For the first time, Dave Gilboa wondered why glasses had such a hefty price tag. Why did such a fundamentally simple product cost more than a complex smartphone?”

He figured out glasses were hugely overpriced. There were plenty of ways to reinvent the process and make them cheaper.

I love the idea of Vuja De. I try to do it all the time. What parts of my life do I accept in their default mode, and can those parts be improved? If a Martian looked at the world, what would be most non-sensical?

In fact, one of my books was entirely based on Vuja De.

I wrote a book called The Year of Living Biblically in which I tried to read the Bible with fresh eyes and no preconceptions. My goal was simply to read it, and do what it said (including growing a massive and somewhat frightening beard).

Well, that’s it. I hope you liked the article despite its drawbacks. Oh, and there are a bunch of reasons not to follow me on LinkedIn. But please consider doing it anyway.

Want to learn how to focus?

Download my free guide — How to Focus: The 4 Best Secrets to Unitasking

I devoted a month to becoming the most focused person in the world. (Never quite made it; Buddhist monks can still out-meditate me with one frontal lobe tied behind their backs). But I did pick up some secrets. Here are four.