20 - Power of Eye Contact / Kevin Kelly's Life Advice / Investing in Yourself
My takeaways from Michael Ellsberg’s The Power of Eye Contact
In terms of technique - don’t start just into one eye. Have a “soft gaze” where you hover around both eyes. Lasering in on one eye can be too intense and is better for intimate situations. Spend 4 to 5 seconds at a time looking at someone then take a brief pause. You want to show attention without staring at them the entire time.
Michael recommends a series of different exercises to try including making brief eye contact with strangers as you pass by. Other exercises involve having a friend participate and another involves sitting in a mirror and silently staring into your own eyes. I’m hesitant to try any of these myself.
Michael shared a story of how he was struggling to network at a party and was about to leave it early. He decided to change gears and just show an aura of friendliness and love. He thinks his change in body language and eye contact made an enormous difference that evening and he ended up making unexpected successful connections at the same party.
He interviewed various experts in the book and here are a few that I remember:
Several dating experts talked about how it’s important for women to make eye contact so they can express interest and show permission for guys to approach
Public speakers shared a few tips such as concentrating on one person at a time in the audience and avoid broad scanning of the audience. Counterintuitive but they say it works better.
Another speaking expert taught the “Touch, turn, talk” method where you touch on a point on a screen or a board, turn to the audience, and talk about it. It helps keep the audience on track and engaged.
A sales expert, Victor Cheng, said that belief and enthusiasm for a product is the best sales skill to have even if you don’t have any other formal training
Another sales expert taught the SEE method: smile, eyes, and energy. When you meet someone: smile at them, connect with your eyes for a few seconds, and show positive energy.
Michael created what’s called eye gazing parties where strangers meet at a bar and spend a couple minutes silently staring into each other’s eyes before moving on to the next partner. Sounds odd, but I’d be willing to try it if such an event took place near me (I don’t have any interest in trying to host one)
The book mentioned extra resources and bonuses at a website that’s no longer accessible. I did try to contact the author to ask about it and haven’t received a response. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My rating is ⭐⭐⭐ out of five. Interesting take on an underrated topic.
Kevin Kelly is a founder of Wired magazine and authored several books on technology and his predictions for the future. He is a frequent blogger and wrote an annual list of his best life advice for the past couple of years. He compiled his best ones and published it in his latest book. He’s been on a podcast tour recently too, joining hosts like Tim Ferris and James Altucher among others.
This is one of those books where I think “yes, that’s interesting and makes a lot of sense” and then I forgot what I just read. For me, it’s hard to remember good advice without having a memory hook like a story or an anecdote to go with it. Advice with personal experience or a story about a lesson learned is more powerful.
I’m mulling about making digital note cards with RemNote and see if I can practice a handful of these advice tips daily to see if it sticks better. Repetitive practice is better for long-term memory.
My rating is ⭐⭐⭐ out of five.
Another book by Michael Ellsberg who authored the eye contact book above and co-authored with business consultant Bryan Franklin.
This book uses a lot of its own terminology for the concepts they present
They call the traditional financial advice the FACD - Financial Advice Commonly Delivered. This is the stuff you hear like going to college, getting a corporate job, saving a portion of your paycheck for retirement, investing in stocks and bonds, and so on. The authors believe this model is outdated and unhelpful in the modern economic environment.
In contrast the authors present their own plan SAFE - Self-Amplifying Financial Ecosystem where you focus on “spending systematically” on investing in marketable skills that are helpful in any context and your own personal network. This spending is not just money, but your time, attention, and energy too. It’s a holistic view.
They call the marketable skills “Super Skills” and have four broad categories — Intrapersonal, Creative, Technical, and Physical. The goal is to develop these skills over a lifetime and find ways for those skills to combine with each other for greater effect.
For intrapersonal skills, they mention several areas like leadership and public speaking. They especially like sales and recommend taking a course to learn it. They describe “Holding Paradox” as the ability to deal with conflicting ideas or circumstances and still motivate the team to succeed as a key component of leadership.
For creative skills, they recommend frequent book reading and writing and listed different books to learn more about effective writing. They touch on superior design principles and learn better ways to build, present, or structure things. Another item they discuss here is that any creative outlet that you enjoy (without expecting to earn a living from) is an excellent use of your time and energy because it can fuel and inspire other parts of your life too.
The Technical skill area of the book was the fuzziest for me to understand. It talked about mental models and drawing diagrams of inputs and outputs to understand processes better. The authors then gave a couple of recommendations on learning financial modeling and systems thinking. They ended this section with a description of “the Marketing Crank” on how systemized marketing can be the most profitable system of all.
The physical skill section is a reminder that your health and well-being are worth more than any amount of gold. They told the story of a friend who ate fast food and a carb-heavy diet and was hospitalized with a diabetic coma. He was given the standard food pyramid advice to eat high-carb and he decided to eat a low-glycemic diet instead and had remarkable success. One of the co-authors believes his weekly 90-minute massage costing $150 per session is one of his best investments because it relaxes him and puts him in a better state of mind the rest of the week.
After the skills they recommend trying to build what they call “Advisor Equity” in that you build small ownership stakes in different companies because the founders are grateful for your advice and free work, so they repay you with an equity share.
This section seems limited in practical application. This might work in a few places like Silicon Valley (where both authors are based nearby) and I’ve never heard about this concept put into use outside of technology ventures.
The last area of investment in in your “tribe” and finding a diverse set of people to both learn and help while you all maintain the same values. They suggest joining groups or even hosting a monthly get-together for your tribe. The authors again dip into ideas that are more San Francisco and Silcon Valley-centric like joining shared housing and attending Burning Man. Though, they do make a fantastic point that the shift to single family homes and away from multi-generational shared housing was a unique and unsustainable post-WWII phenomenon that will not last.
The last major point is what they call “Heart Exchange Rate” about your purchasing decisions. You need to carefully consider your purchasing habits and ask, “Am I doing this for short-term desires and to impress others with status?”. Unless you can say no, you might want to consider and shift your spending towards the skills and your tribe as mentioned earlier or to whatever you find personally fulfilling and rewarding that increases the quality of your life. The authors shared several stories including one where a rich couple bought a luxury mansion on an island and later felt isolated and miserable before moving back to Arizona to be closer to friends and family. Their purchase in this case had a terrible heart exchange rate.
The authors are a little extreme with the idea of investing up to $10,000 a year towards the above and completely ignoring stocks, bonds, and real estate. Some of the ideas of this book seemed a little too San Franciso Bay area at times meaning that they’d more likely work in that environment compared to other places on average. Another aspect I found was that this book felt like it was written by consultants with its use of chart diagrams and its own buzzwords.
This book reminded me that I may want to take a sales course, try Toastmasters, or try an improv class at some point. In general, I agree that investing in yourself and your network are both particularly good things to do but I wouldn’t ignore long-term financial planning too.
My favorite part of this book might’ve been the story how Bryan’s dad, Lee, joined a construction company as its new president. In his very first day he joined a meeting with the company founder and a client, a cellular provider, which wanted to build twenty-eight cell sites in six months when the average time to build just one, according to the client, took 18 months. In the meeting, the construction company founder, Dan, readily agreed and said Lee would figure it out! Lee spent the day with a technical associate to create a mental model on how cell sites are built and to find ways to make the process shorter and faster. Dan in the meantime, without letting Lee know, went off to buy six plots of land that day for sites. The construction company was able to make it happen with a lot of creativity and hard work. Is there a lesson here about setting your sights impossibly high and achieving it anyway? I can’t imagine myself sitting at that meeting and going “yes!”.
My rating is ⭐⭐⭐ out of five.