Quora Answer: How Do You Present Your Ideas in an Impactful Way?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “How could you present your ideas such that they would have more impact?”

What you want is for the audience to buy in.  That means getting them to see the idea from their perspective, and making them a part of this vision of something greater than themselves.  Everybody wants to be a hero, and everybody wants to be part of the next great thing.  When people are invested with something, they become its greatest proponents.

When crafting your pitch, you have to know who you are speaking to, their motivations, and their values.  Align your ideas with this and appeal to their self-interest.  It is a waste of time to appeal to the better natures of people, because benevolence does not close deals, self-interest and greed does.

Beginning with an opening statement, a leading question.  This, done well, puts them immediately on your side of the equation.  If the question elicits outrage, even better, because anger motivates people better than any other emotion, and people emotionally invested do not think it through carefully.

Have a cogent, coherent argument that explains your idea in not more than three points.  If there are twenty benefits, it is a waste of time talking about the rest because people only focus on two or three things.  That is the limitation of the human thinking process.  People are easily bored when inundated with information, and a bored audience switches off.  You have lost your chance.

Finally, have a call to action, what you really want from them, whether support, money or permission.  This call to action must tie in with the opening rhetorical question.  It creates a clear relationship between the source of their outrage and the solution.  If you can do this well enough, you can sell ice to the Inuit.