Curiosity and me (Part One)

Ever since I was born, I seem to have been a curious person. Well, that’s nothing unusual in itself: we are all born curious. But my curiosity has always had an enormous appetite — insatiable, I should say. At times, it has nearly cost me my life as I experimented with dangerous endeavors. 

Yet neither those close calls nor the occasional crossing of boundaries has ever managed to tame that voracious trait of mine. 

Curiosity often carries a negative connotation, as though being curious meant being nosy or meddlesome. But if that happens to be the price I pay for satisfying my thirst for discovery, who really cares? 

Looking back, I believe curiosity has served me remarkably well. It has helped shape the person I am today, with all my flaws and virtues, and I have learned to accept both. In fact, I would go even further: to me, curiosity is one of the measures of how intensely we experience being alive. It keeps us alert, open to new possibilities, and eager to learn. 

Perhaps that is what we call lifelong learning, or even permanent education. Whatever the name, I see no reason to stop as long as there are questions to ask, things to discover, and ideas to challenge. It’s not the first time I write on the subject. In a following blog we’ll delve deeper into the amazing treasure trove curiosity represents. 

Keeping us motivated (Part Two)

For those of us who are older and have accumulated decades of experience, we just have to think back to the times when we were extraordinarily motivated. What were we thinking then? Why did we believe it was possible? What did we tell ourselves? Motivation isn't some mysterious external force that is brand new to us, we already possessed a personal instruction manual for producing it! 

Let’s not interpret the low tide as failure, and this may be the most important secret. As motivation naturally goes up and down, we should never interpret every downturn as "Something is wrong with me," this would add a second problem to the first. Instead, we should just observe "That’s it, the wave is going out. This is part of the cycle," and we won't blame the ocean because the tide is low, but we simply prepare for the next wave and there’s something wonderfully liberating about that perspective. 

It could be that my opening metaphor was a bit misleading, motivation may not actually be a wave that comes and goes, but the wave is the enthusiasm that fuels our motivation. In its deeper sense, our motivation can become something more stable and become a decision about what matters enough to continue doing even when enthusiasm temporarily disappears. 

We could say that it gives us two different engines as enthusiasm will say "I want to do this!" and our commitment continues “I still do this even when I don't particularly feel like it." Finally, the most successful people may not be those who experience the biggest motivational waves, but the ones who have learned to keep moving during the troughs while remaining ready to exploit the peaks.

Even though I cannot surf and would have love to use a ski analogy, this could lead to a rather beautiful formulation for our collection of reflections, “Don't try to live permanently on the crest of the motivational wave. Learn to surf!”

Keeping us motivated (Part One)

For those of us who thrive on motivation just like a toaster needs to be plugged-in, motivation is like a wave, it comes and goes, and when it's moving away from us, it can be tough to experience. So, what are the tricks and secrets for rekindling it? 

Through this metaphor there’s an important distinction that perhaps the secret isn't to keep motivation high, but to know how to catch the next wave—and what to do while the tide is out. Often, we treat motivation as a prerequisite for action, in that motivation leads to action, that in turn leads to results. Yet, in practice, the chain of events frequently works the other way where action leads to progress, progress to satisfaction and then the latter creates motivation.

This reversal may be one of the most useful "secrets" as we shouldn’t wait for the wave. It’s absolutely true that when motivation disappears, our instinct is often to say, "I'll get back to it when I feel motivated again." That's dangerous because motivation can become increasingly distant, and out of sight turns fast into out of mind. 

Instead, it’s a good idea to significantly lower the re-entry threshold by saying "I'll work on it for five minutes" or "I'll only read two pages," the objective isn't to accomplish the task, but just to restart the engine. Quite often, five minutes becomes twenty, but even when it doesn't, we have broken the inertia. Another good trick, when motivation is low, is not to make the goal smaller, but instead lower the starting point. 

Don't say, "I need to exercise", but "I'll first put on my shoes." Our brain has much less resistance to beginning than to committing to a whole project! Yet another trick is to make the activity something you look forward to, like putting on music we love while exercising or pouring a particularly good coffee while writing. 

Also, motivation becomes fragile when an activity turns into an obligation, and we should remind ourselves why we’re doing it. Not the superficial reason—the deeper one. For instance, "I want to learn Spanish" becomes "I want to experience the pleasure of suddenly being able to communicate with all the Latinos in Park City." 

Tomorrow we’ll conclude by digging even deeper into that matter, so please, be there!

Be careful what you wish for!

Over the past weeks, as the mid-term vote approaches, electoral signs have started to invade most Park City front yards. One of them that clearly stands out is non-partisan and cares more about what keeps this community alive: winter snow! 

“Vote Super El Niño" is a lighthearted Ski Utah marketing and community campaign launched ahead of the 2026–27 winter season to unite skiers and snowboarders after a dismal, low-snow previous winter. 

Ski Utah is the state's ski industry trade association led by Nathan Rafferty and its seasonal goal this year is to provide us all with fun, non-partisan relief from political election season by rallying residents and visitors around a shared hope for heavy snowfall. 

This fun campaign coincides with high meteorologic expectations for a strong or "super" El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific, but as we say "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it", is a popular warning that getting a lot of snow could turn into far too much, just like what happened this summer and continues to happen in Portillo, Chile!

Real tools for persuasion? (Part Three)

To fine tune our persuasion strategy, we need to get into that elusive "sweet spot", the missing component I was looking for in asking my initial question. Here are the boundaries that we must pay close attention to. With too little assertiveness we accommodate, but with too much demand we create resistance.

If there’s too much emotion in our tone we might lose strategic clarity. With too much dry logic, we won’t connect with the person. Same thing with talking, when we can’t keep our mouth shut, we give the other person more opportunities to object. Conversely, the same holds true when we listen excessively, we often miss the chance to clearly state what we want. 

The sweet spot might therefore fall somewhere in between, like by successively moving from clarity to empathy, to confidence, flexibility and to detachment. That very last trait, detachment, may very well be the hardest one to acquire, but the most powerful. When we are in my late seventies, just like me, we may actually have an advantage that we didn't have decades ago. 

We’ve accumulated thousands of experiences of attempted influence—successful ones, botched ones, negotiations, disagreements, misunderstandings, compromises and moments that makes us suddenly realize, "Ah, that's exactly what made that person say yes." We have in fact accumulated a remarkable personal laboratory that can be treated as a lifetime of persuasion attempts as a dataset. 

Now, instead of asking "Why didn't I get what I wanted?" we should wonder "What was happening in the other person's mind at the moment I succeeded—or failed—to influence them?" 

This is how, given enough time, we might discover our own personal theory of influence, and perhaps that is the elusive element I was looking for—not a magic formula for controlling other people, but a progressively refined ability to recognize when to push, when to listen, when to offer, when to withdraw, and when to let the other person feel that the decision is entirely theirs. 

That, in my view, brings the whole process much closer to mastering influence than mastering persuasion. If I had more of this when I was younger, I would have sold more ski lessons and far more ski equipment and retired even early!

Real tools for persuasion? (Part Two)

Persuasion is full of paradoxes, just like this one: the harder we try to control someone's conclusion, the more strongly they may resist being controlled. In reality, to be powerful and effective, persuasion should be as invisible as possible. Just consider the difference between: "You should do this because…" and "How do you see the situation?" 

If the second proposition appears much weaker and less dictating, it invites instead the other person to construct the reasoning themselves. And this is the clincher, once individuals have articulated an idea in their own mind and own words, they are no longer receiving a third-party argument. They are fully invested in participating in the creation of the conclusion. 

This is one reason good negotiators, therapists and astute folks often ask questions rather than making statements or demanding specific actions. 

They’ve understood that the goal isn't necessarily to force an idea into someone's mind but to involve them in helping them discover the idea themselves. More importantly, what I mentioned yesterday as my "burning need" to convince is made of a string of important variables that often frame our demand. 

It goes just like this: let’s suppose that we desperately need someone to agree with us. If they don't know precisely why, they can often feel it as our tone changes or as we talk too much. We anticipate objections even before they arise. We become attached to particular words and react emotionally to some anticipated resistance and all that staging ends up weakening our influence and the final outcome. 

There is enormous power in being able to think: “I strongly prefer that you agree with me, but I don't need you to.” That psychological position gives us room to listen, adapt and even walk away, and paradoxically, it often makes agreement more likely. One could argue that the real objective isn't persuasion and this where my opening statement helps me guide the discussion further. 

As I wrote, I’ve spent a lifetime encountering situations where I needed something from another person and had to persuade them to give it to me or just do it. Still, over the years, I found out that the outcome didn’t work well for me. Perhaps expecting total victory was the wrong metric? If instead of wondering "How do I get this person to give me what I want?" I had thought "How do I move the situation as far as I reasonably can toward a mutually acceptable outcome?" 

I might have set the stage for something much more productive, because it was much easier to achieve. That small change is enormous as it stops trying to win the person's mind, but starts trying to improve the outcome, keeping in mind that sometimes, the best influence strategy can actually be to concede something that costs us little but is still highly valuable to the other person. 

To conclude our discussion, we’ll explore the details of that strategy in our next blog, so please, stay with me!

Real tools for persuasion (Part One)

During my lifetime, and probably because I was in sales most of my professional career, I’ve been confronted many times by the burning need for convincing others, and by mastering the process of persuasion with various outcomes that rarely turned one hundred percent in my favor. It’s true that we all learn an awful lot on the job, through trial and error. 

As years have passed and I am now retired and far less involved with negotiating, I often wonder where research and thinking are headed these days to define the best practices in terms of seizing and controlling that elusive element? At first sight, my interrogation could have revolved around the quintessential question "How to become more persuasive?" but this was not quite the avenue I was truly pursuing and the result I was looking for.

I’ve been in fact asking whether the need to persuade itself can be understood, managed, and perhaps transformed into something much more powerful and efficient than what I used to do. That elusive element I’m trying to describe is in fact influence—the ability to move another person's thinking or behavior, when we have no direct control over them. 

As we can all imagine, there has been enormous research and findings on this topic, but one of the most interesting conclusions is that influence is not primarily about having the best argument, as I often found out. This has forced me to research the subject a little bit more and I found that the key to that question is about understanding what happens inside the other person between hearing our argument and deciding what to do about it. 

Unlike what we first assume, the first obstacle is rarely logical and simplistic, like in the following succession of events: I present some compelling facts, then the individual understands them, in turn they agree and then they execute. In reality, human beings don't work that way very reliably, instead they filter information through identity, emotion, prior experience, self-interest, trust and—perhaps most importantly—their desire to maintain their autonomy. 

Let me clarify, if someone feels that you are trying to make them agree with you, a curious thing is likely to happen: they become more resistant precisely because they feel their freedom is being threatened. In our upcoming blog we’ll look at alternative strategies for convincing others...