Ben Guttman | The Power of Simplicity: How to Craft Clear and Compelling Messages

Srini Rao

 Ben, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Ben Guttmann

Sounds good. How long do you want to go? Got it. Perfect.

Ben Guttmann

Thanks for having me, Srini. It's great to be here.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So you have a new book out called Simply Put Why Clear Messages When and How to Design Them. And to my pleasant surprise, you were actually also one of the co-founders of the book marketing agency that I worked with on my book, an audience of one. But before we get into the book, I wanted to start by asking you, what is one of the most important things that you learned from one or both of your parents that influenced and shaped who you've become and what you've ended up doing with both your life and your career?

Ben Guttmann

Oh, man, that's a good one. So neither of my parents had like real jobs, if that makes sense. So my mother growing up was he was a social worker, and my father is an attorney has his own private practice. And then his father was he came over after the war from Czechoslovakia, and he had a little like deli kind of diner in Manhattan.

And his father had like a grocery store in Czechoslovakia and so on and so forth. My mother's father was psychiatrist. And so nobody in my family had like a job. They all kind of made a job. They started a business. So when I left college and I said, Hey, I kind of want to maybe go out of my own and start a marketing agency. Well, there wasn't this kind of subtle pressure of, well, you really shouldn't do that. You know, what are you, what are you doing? There was this, this kind of low grade support that you always had.

when you're home for Thanksgiving or Rosh Hashan or whatever it is, that you're able to be with people that kind of get it. And I come, I appreciated it at the moment and looking back, you know, a decade or two decades later, it, uh, it was so important.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, I mean, going out on your own fresh out of college, no paycheck or anything like that, how do you navigate the uncertainty of that without losing your mind and feeling like you're going to end up homeless?

Ben Guttmann

Well, I gotta say it's probably the easiest time to do that. And for many people. So I now I also I'm an adjunct. I teach at the same college at Baruch College here in New York. And I had my final last night. So the last time I saw the students for the semester and I tell them that you're at this moment and everybody's unique, but on average, the you have the least amount of other obligations in your life. You don't have a mortgage or as partner or a pet or a kid or ailing parents. And

You are used to living like a college student used to having no money used to not, you know having expensive things This is the moment where you have the opportunity to kind of not make that much money for a little while And see what happens out of that it gets it's not saying it's impossible the older you get but it gets a little bit harder The golden handcuffs so, you know, i'm you know, i'm fortunate to have again, you know supportive, you know family in an environment where? that was possible to not make as much money, but

It's easier then actually than it is now.

Srini Rao

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I it's funny you just say that because I have a note somewhere in my knowledge base that'll take the biggest risks when you have the least to lose. To your point, that's often when you first get out of college. But what I wonder about is why people don't actually see things that way and why they feel so pressured to go and say, OK, I got to go do this stable thing. They don't really seem to understand that they have like sort of this blank canvas, because I remember giving this talk to my high school AP English teachers class like right when my first book came out and it was.

mind-boggling to me to listen to a bunch of high school seniors, absolutely just petrified and worried about what they were going to do with the rest of their lives. And I was like, how can you possibly know you've barely lived a fraction of your life?

Ben Guttmann

Oh man, and I don't know if this is getting better or worse to be honest, because in some ways it's getting better. You see these positive examples of people starting businesses and being entrepreneurs and independent creators at all ages, that certainly is helping. But there's also been this interesting kind of context collapse with a lot of younger folks. And I noticed this again with my students, they're 20, 21 years old. And when I was 20 or 21 years old and I was on

You know Facebook at the time maybe I would see other 20 and 21 year olds who were living the same type of life With the same type of you know, no money and no real job and kind of figuring things out But now these kids are looking at tik-tok, which has everybody it has people who are 15 Two or 25 35 45 55 so people who have all sorts of money and experience and there's I think this kind of

Angst a little bit of saying well, I see this person on this on this video who has this really expensive Car or this nice piece of clothing or whatever it is going on this fancy vacation I kind of have to do that and so maybe there's like this Pressure to spend more money and then therefore kind of maybe make more money Then they would have had if they were just kind of looking at their peers

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Well, I think there's a sort of counter side to this entire narrative too, is, you know, in that like, you know, when books like The Four Hour Work Week came out, this sort of became this dominant cultural narrative of like, you know, quit your job, travel the world, you know, work four hours a week, sit at a desk, and everybody knows Tim Ferriss works way more than four hours a week, I think. And so, because I think that one of the things I realized, and I remember saying this to somebody on a podcast was like, look, in one way, we've almost planted seeds of dissatisfaction where there weren't any before.

start to feel inadequate. I had a listener once who emailed me and said, I'm sorry, your guests are amazing, but I have to stop listening because this is making me feel like shit about my life. And I kind of empathize with him. I thought, you know what, I don't blame you. Like I often feel that way too when I talk to my own guests. Because to your point, like, yeah, you have the least to lose, but I also think that we don't take context into account when we kind of just shout these platitudes from the rooftops of, oh, quit your job, change the world and all that other bullshit.

Ben Guttmann

Yeah. Well, you know, there's the old, I think it's Teddy Roosevelt quote, comparison is the thief of joy, right? If, if we compare ourselves to other people, we're all you know, especially in this age of, you know, TikTok and Instagram, everything else, we're comparing to the highlight reel of everybody else, especially people on a podcast, right? Like, we're gonna talk, you know, for an hour here, and, and I'm not going to tell you about all the kind of, you know, the failures and awkward stuff and whatever else we're going to talk about, you know, the cool things. And so

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Ben Guttmann

you know, when you see other people talking about things or showcasing things, it's their highlight reel, but we always see, you know, the kind of bloopers.

Srini Rao

Yeah. You didn't actually think we were going to get out of this conversation without me making you talk about your failures, did you? But that would...

Ben Guttmann

Yeah, by all means.

Srini Rao

Well, before we do that, you mentioned that you're working at a university. This is something that I am always asking educators based on their experience. Given the state of the world, where we're headed with the advances in technology, if you were tasked with redesigning the education system from the ground up, let's just say, for example, that the White House said, you know what, Ben, you're now the director of education policy for the United States. What would you do?

Ben Guttmann

Oh boy. Well, I don't want to, you know, get ahead of my skis here and say, I, I'm an adjunct. I love doing it. I'm not kind of an education policy expert. However, I would, I would do a few different things that I would say. Number one is I think that there is, um, in the small narrow field that I teach in marketing, um, I think that there should be a little bit more kind of practical hands-on stuff that we do as part of it because

frankly, it's a little more vocational than we, than we kind of like to think. And it's better for us to say, okay, well, how do we go out? How do we make an ad, right? How do we run something, you know, on, on Meta's ad platform? How do we, um, Hey, how can you build the website? How can you go out and stand on the street corner and like do some user interviews? Like do those types of things. That's, that's on one end of it, but almost contradicting that is I think that we, there is a really good place.

And it's almost getting more important in this age of, you know, AI and everything else to look back at the humanities and the philosophy classes and the sociology classes and the history classes. I frankly probably learned more from some of the like writing classes and other things like that than I did from a good chunk of my business classes. Um, and I think that we somehow oftentimes we get too kind of caught up in them in the, the lure of, of the.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Ben Guttmann

kind of stem part of it, not saying that that's not important. But not everybody's going to be a programmer, like programming is a great thing to do, but everybody needs to write, everybody needs to read, everybody needs to be able to, to have a conversation and speak and understand the world. And I think leaning back into that is going to pay dividends.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it's funny you say that because I just finished writing this like mega article about the four key skills that allow you to thrive in the age of AI, and almost none of them had anything to do with AI so like the funny enough that the most important skills in the age of AI have absolutely nothing to do with the technology itself. And what I arrived at were basically the first principles thinking convergent and divergent thinking and systems thinking, combined with emotional intelligence, all of which are the things that make us uniquely human.

Srini Rao

us to capitalize on this age of AI, yet to your point, that is not the way that we have been taught to learn for so long.

Ben Guttmann

You know that's funny because I just wrote a little article that I think would be a really good compliment to that Where I talk about the four force multipliers in your professional life or in your career And so they're not in the same exact domain But I think that they will amplify a lot of those things and I say Number one is writing Number two is speaking number three is design number four is networking and so, you know

Kind of three of them are on one side of things. The networking is a little bit different. But the better you are at being able to communicate in all forms, again, speaking, writing, and design is a form of communication, the more effective you're going to be at whatever it is that you're trying to get to, whatever underlying truth there is. And the networking piece is just part of the reality of, you know, we don't act as kind of individual atomic units. We act as communities a lot of times. And so it's important for us to...

to be able to build that network and connect with people and to leave a good impression. So all that's really important too. But I think that the four that you mentioned are really interesting complement to the four that I just did.

Srini Rao

Hmm, absolutely. Well, I think that makes a perfect segue into the book itself. So talking about, you know, what the impetus was for writing this book and how your own work at Digital Davis influenced this, because you've worked with authors who you have actually been instrumental in putting on the bestseller list.

Ben Guttmann

I appreciate that. So you mentioned before I ran a marketing agency called digital natives group for 10 years, along with a couple of friends. And we started this in an old professor's basement, right? So yes. Kind of how does this stuff get started? I was heads down being like the student government dork when I was in college and I didn't do a lot of the internships and all those other things. But, uh, luckily I had a professor who ran a marketing agency and he came up to me after class one day said,

I know you maybe want to start your own thing. We need some help with digital. Maybe we can figure something out. And so we piled into my old 1994 Honda Accord, drove up to Westchester just north of the city here, slapped our logo on their basement wall, and started working with them. And we did a little bit of work with them, but we were kind of too knuckleheaded of kids to really work with their like 400 to 500 clients. So...

we cut our teeth with the local ice cream shop and local camera shop and bit by bit started to build a bigger portfolio and get some experience. Eventually we moved back to an office here in Queens. We hired some employees, we got a bigger office, we got more employees. And at the end of 10 years, we turn around and say we're working with all these great authors, Nobel Prize winners, we're working with brands like the NFL and I Love New York. And then eventually we...

Actually sold the business we kind of woke up and said Well, we've done this for the past 10 years. Do you want to do it for the next 10 years? um, and Everything was good. We had good profits everything else, but at that point in your career you kind of often Uh, you know, you want to explore other things so we found some uh, some acquirers. We sold the business about two years ago um, and Now since then i've been doing other kind of consulting and speaking and teaching in writing

But what happens is you can kind of take like the boy out of the marketing agency, but you can't take the marketing out of the boy. And the question that you hire a marketing agency to solve, which is, well, why does some messages work and others don't? Well, that still would rattle around in my head, uh, even long after we weren't having clients kind of knocking on our door to deal with that. And so that's what I began looking at. And that's how we ended up with the book that, uh, that I wrote called, simply put

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, let's get into it. I mean, you make an early distinction between both senders and receivers. And it's funny because, you know, like every time that I've been writing emails now, even when I'm using AI, I'm basically saying, hey, look, this needs to be focused on the receiver, not the sender. But you say that senders are those with messages. Senders can be advertisers, executives, politicians, faith leaders, parents, teachers, advocates, regulators, or anybody with something to say, which is pretty much all of us.

So why do people not even see that distinction in the way that they communicate?

Ben Guttmann

Yeah.

Ben Guttmann

was funny. So I broke down all of the buckets there just into that very simple category, their senders and their receivers, right? So you mentioned all the senders, the receivers are, you know, the buyers, the voters, the donors, the students. And I purposely did this because we often say, well, our situation is a little different. Oh, this is a little different. And I wanted to make sure that we look to kind of the foundational truths behind communication and what works and what doesn't and how we can be better at

doing more of the former, right? So there's this distinction between those two groups that is really important and really becomes kind of the breakdown for a lot of the times where we're communicating, if it's in a marketing context or otherwise, which is that when we're receivers, when we're kind of users of the world, well, we prefer things that are fluent. And so the word fluent is something that you and I...

will know from like kind of our daily life, right? You're fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin, uh, you'll be fluent in wine or, or cheese or whatever other things that you're, you're passionate about or knowledgeable about. You're fluent. It's basically when things are easy, when things are flowing, that's the original kind of Latin root of the word actually. But if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, what they're going to say is this describes the whole kind of suite of experiences where

Something is easy to take from out in the world stick in your head and make sense of right when things don't take that much effort to do You know kind of the perceiving the understanding and the processing well, we like them better We trust them more we buy them more often all the good things and when it takes less work And the inverse of this is also true, right? So when things take a lot of effort for us to understand to perceive well, we don't like them We don't buy them and we don't trust them

Not the thing that we want most of the time when we're communicating, right? So

Srini Rao

now.

Yeah, it's funny. Funny you say that because I remember asking Dan Pink about this. And I said, you know, one of the things I told him I liked so much about his books was the fact that they're easy to read. You know, and this is something I think a lot of authors miss and he told me that the thing that struck me most about what he said he said in my world, the way that I edit Every word on the page has to fight for its life to stay there. And the other thing that he said that really struck me. He said, you know, I may do two months of research. He said, but why should I torture you the reader with the details of it when you

want the takeaway. He said, I might get two sentences into a book for that two months of research.

Ben Guttmann

Oh, I love that. And I noticed that in my own experience. And this is slightly an indictment also on the current state of kind of information clutter and SEO and everything else, which is I would spend three hours trying to track down like one statistic that would eventually make its way into half a sentence, right? Because, you know, it would be quoted on this blog, and then that blog was referencing

an infographic and that was from a Facebook post and eventually get to the end of the line. It was just somebody made it up basically, right? And then you got to go all the way back and try to find another source for what you're trying to talk about. So you do all this work in order to kind of get a tiny bit of the way on the page. This is related to a quote which talk about, you know, who like all these kind of misattributed quotes, it's not Mark Twain is often attributed to Mark Twain, which is I wrote you a long letter

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Ben Guttmann

because I didn't have time to write you a short one, right? It takes work to get to the point where things are easy, where things are simple, and that's often where we struggle.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, I mean, that's what I always say is the brilliance of Seth Godin is that he manages to say so much with so few words.

Ben Guttmann

Oh, yeah. And he's great, too. And I referenced him a little bit in the book where one of one of his best pieces he ever wrote was talking about nobody ever gets talkers block, right. And so this is skipping ahead a little bit into the end of some of the tools, but we're our writing muscle is never going to be as strong as our talking muscle, because we talk all the time, we only write sometimes. And this is actually part of part of what the kind of gap is here to go back to what I was saying before with the

senders and receivers. So receivers, we want something to be simple and to be easy and to be fluent. But the problem is when we're in the sender position, we have all sorts of forces internally and externally that are kind of pushing us in the opposite direction, right? So the talker's block is one of them. Availability bias, and so we have, sorry, not availability, additive bias, where we are more likely to add than subtract when we're kind of faced with a challenge. And then,

Externally, we're faced with, you know, our boss wants something, you know, that our resumes demand something, the media cycle demands something. We're always incentivized to kind of put more. And when you look at this kind of these two forces, that's where we have this gap in the middle, where senders are pulled towards complicated, towards things that aren't fluent and receivers were predisposed towards things that are.

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, early on in the book, you say that nobody cares what you're trying to tell them and they especially don't care about what you're trying to sell them. Nobody wants to watch your commercial or visit your website. Almost every advertisement that anybody has ever seen has been against their will. The entire industry is in an uphill battle against apathy and disinterest. So the question then becomes and how the hell do you make them care?

Ben Guttmann

Oh yeah, I mean, like nobody woke up today saying, you know, what's on my to do list is I want to open up your spam email, right? I want to click through your banner ad somewhere. I want to watch your commercial. I want to tap through your Instagram ad. Nobody wants to do that. We wake up every single day and we care about so many things we care about our friends and our family and our sports teams and our upcoming vacation. But we don't care about like your ad for a new shampoo is this is not

important to us and so one of the most vital things we can do is begin to shift our framework of communicating to make sure that we care about the receiver that they are the priority that we talk about what their motivations are that what benefits them and You know the analogy I like to use is just as if you were sending a letter In the real world you as a sender are responsible for the postage You're responsible for the metaphorical and literal cost

of sending that message.

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely. Well, so right after that, you go into a lot of the cognitive science about how we filter out sort of everything. And you say the way we respond to this onslaught of annoyance is by tuning out our default is to ignore. So talk to me about sort of what is going on from a brain science perspective there, because I have probably 20 quotes. I'll take too long to read them, but give us the high level overview.

Ben Guttmann

Right. So I mentioned before about the fluency piece. And part of the reason that's important is because we are hit by just so much stuff every day, right? The average American spends 13 hours a day consuming some form of media, right? And in that time, we're hit with thousands and thousands of messages. And this is not a particularly novel insight, right? We've people complained about this all the time. It's we've talked about this for

for thousands of years we complained about, oh, books are making us busy, and now the radio shows are making us busy in the newspapers. But when you look at how it is now, it is a little bit different. It rhymes, but it's not the same thing. We're hit with more emails and text messages and push notifications than before. People downloading meditation apps and ad blockers at record rates. And this is all in response to, well, we weren't built for this. We were built for a world.

where more things wanted to eat us than they do today. And we were really attuned for saying, well, what's that kind of rustling of leaves over there? What's that branch that snapped over there? And our response would be kind of to quickly, try to get that information in, and then it does determine if it matters for us. That's the most important thing is, what does it matter to us? Because everything kind of hits our brains and we quickly filter them out because there's so much stuff.

And so right now we're in this world where, you know, there's a lot of things that look like they matter to us, but they don't really. And that's where we end up struggling a lot.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Well, let's talk about this entire concept of simplicity. So you basically define simple as when a message is easily perceived, understood, and acted upon. In other words, simplicity is a function of what scientists call fluency, which you've talked about, which are both perceptual fluency, which is how easily do we notice something and processing fluency, which is how easily do we understand things. So in the interest of the fact that I have you here and, you know, being selfish, I'm going to use my own website as an example, because I really thought a lot about my own homepage after reading this book of like,

Okay, what the hell do I say about this? Like, how do I describe the unmistakable creative? Like thinking about the hero section of my homepage, I don't know, but what would make that simple, you know, and like what would allow for perceptual and processing fluency in that kind of a situation?

Ben Guttmann

Oh, yeah. And so this is this is kind of the fundamental gap, right? So I mentioned we want fluency, we have a hard time getting there. And how do we how do we bridge that gap? Well, my background is in design. And so I looked at this as a design problem. Well, how do we how do we deal with something like your homepage, or somebody's presentation, their email or their advertisement? And how do we bring those two sides closer together? And really, it's bringing the sender closer over because the receivers

We're kind of hard built there. And there are five principles, which and they're not like a step by step plan. It's not like a rubric. But it's kind of five design principles we can look at that would help us get there. So the first one is beneficial. What does it matter to the receiver? What's in it for them? We talked about this a little bit in the last section. Focused is number two. Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once?

Number three is salient. Does your message stand out from the noise? Does it rise to your attention? Is it noticeable? Number four is empathetic. Are you speaking in a language that the audience understands? Are you meeting them where they are in terms of their language, of course, but also their emotions, their motivations? And then lastly, it's minimal. Have you cut out everything that isn't important and kept only what is? What you mentioned with Dan Pink a moment ago is a great example of that.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So, you know what's funny to me, like I told you, like when I read your book, I literally had MEMS AI basically create a mental model for me to just apply these. This is something that I noticed pretty consistently with social science books, like the talk about concepts like what you just talked about, like with Made to Stick or Jonah Berger's Contagious. Like we read them, we understand them, but putting these things into action is so much harder than understanding them. You know, like you can tell me all of this and I guarantee you everybody's just heard this, like, okay, that sounds great. How the fuck do I do that?

Ben Guttmann

Oh, yeah, when you told me you were doing that AI thing, I was blown away. And I've been referencing your story about it over and over in the past few weeks as I've been going around.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So, you know, how do we bridge the gap between sort of the theoretical concept and the practical application of this?

Ben Guttmann

Well, I think that, you know, it's a little bit of both, right? You have to understand kind of where the, um, you know, where the theory is based and so that kind of how you can apply it to different, um, to different circumstances. But also I, I tried in when I was writing this book to keep that in mind so that the first of that second half, which is all about these different, uh, design principles, I broke it out and said, well, here's the first half of it, which is about why this is important.

And the second half, which is how do we put this into action? And so it's important that you don't just say, well, here's all the great stuff out there and then go have at it. But also, okay, well, how can you as the reader, uh, learn from this principle? How can you, what are the tools you can use? What are the little tricks? And there's a number of them. Um, it's important to understand kind of the foundational principles because they're going to apply more broadly, but it's also important that you make it tangible in a way that somebody can understand it and see immediate value from.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I mean, this is why I think the role of AI is really powerful is that it can help us take things like this. And, you know, like I said, I literally told Mems AI, I was like, build a, you know, title generator based on Ben's book for me.

And I think that those are the subtle nuances we miss about AI. I've made this contrast between sort of two paradigms of artificial intelligence in this upcoming post that I'm going to publish, which is what we call the better Google paradigm, which is where most people are at, which is they're just using AI as a tool for task completion and doing things more efficiently. Whereas the second one is what I call the new era of creation paradigm, which is where AI becomes more of a partner than a tool.

Enabling us to think through concepts like this and say okay. Like how do I take these ideas and you know actually apply them?

Ben Guttmann

Oh yeah, I think that that's a good point. I mean, what a lot of people, this is something that comes up a lot when you're dealing with clients in a marketing context, is they will see a new thing, and that can be AI, it could be QR codes, it could be NFTs, it could be influencers, it could be Instagram when it first came out, and they'll see it as a magic pill, and they say, I'll just use this one thing, and that's our marketing strategy. Well, first of all, that's a tactic and not a strategy.

But secondly is there is no kind of one magic pill that you press a button and you're gonna get results out of it. You have to understand it in context of everything else. And as you're saying, AI as it is right now is not something where it's going to replace your agency or your CMO or something else, but it will make you better at everything else that you do. In my class, this is actually,

when I speak to any professor somewhere, this has been a big discussion about how do you use AI right now in school? Well, I think it depends on what the context is. If I was teaching eighth grade English, I would say don't use it at all, because you know, it's, it's gonna end up hurting the kind of learning goals there, which is to have that student be a better writer, or better reader. I'm teaching senior, you know, senior marketing majors about how to become a better marketer.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Ben Guttmann

I'm all about it. I'm say hey go use it. You know, it is a viable tool And if that is chat gpt or mid journey or something else if you use these things um, you're gonna be Replicating what a real marketer is doing and that's kind of the goal, right? So Um, I i'm generally optimistic on it Overall and the use cases you're talking about I think are some of the best ones

Srini Rao

Yeah.

I'll tell you where the biggest shift happened for me, and I discovered this by accident just a few weeks ago. I was like, wait a minute, everybody asks AI questions. I was like, you know what? I was running into a problem where I was trying to articulate something. I said, you know what? I'm like, let's do this. Why don't you ask me the questions instead? So from that point forward, like now when I have AI do an outline, I don't actually have it write topics from bullets. I just make it ask me questions. And then what I realized was that if you use that and you write answers to those questions in your own words,

or on ramp into flow, it maintains the originality of your voice, and you're basically using it to enhance something that you've written in your own words, so it doesn't sound like something that was written by a robot. It was mind boggling how effective that was.

Ben Guttmann

Oh, I love that. That's really great. And that reminds me of, and I can't take credit for this sentence. I heard it somewhere. Um, but the best way to think about AI right now is not that you have like a super genius at your disposal, but that you have unlimited stupid people at your disposal and you know, using it to ask the questions instead of give the answers is a perfect example of, well, okay. I,

I can use this to kind of like be the enlightened idiot a little bit where they can ask me questions and they can, they can, you know, or they, or it, whatever it is, can, can ask questions and can, can test my knowledge or something and expose me to new ideas that will kind of break me out of the rut that I might be in.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, before we go further into this concept of simplicity, let's talk about complexity because you say complicated is when something is complex, but it could be simple. We complicate as a verb. Complicated is when things are too long, too cumbersome and too confusing. Complicated causes friction because complicated is unfinished. Complicated things work, but they take work. You really don't want your message to take work. The example that you were alluding to of mine was I think after I had read your book, I'd

Srini Rao

I built a task planner using mem that automatically generates tasks for you. And I remember the first email I sent, the subject line was like building a high impact task planning model, which was my own jargon that I had come up with for my own needs.

And I think it was a day after I went back and I was like, wait a minute, this makes absolutely no fucking sense. Like this is so confusing. It basically violates every rule of Ben's book. And I was like, what does this thing actually do? Like, I was like, oh, it automatically generates your task list. And you saw that you, and you saw the graphic I sent you, I sent you a screenshot, double the click through rate.

Ben Guttmann

wow, right? That's incredible. And you know, that that's, that's the kind of result that, you know, you, I love it. I like I, you know, print that output on a flag, I'll go around, wave it, you know, as a as proof positive for this. But you mentioned, like, it's very easy for us to get complicated, because it doesn't take the work of getting simple. You know, I've written this on the first page of the book, which is to say,

Srini Rao

No.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Ben Guttmann

It sounds like I didn't take my own advice, right? Like I understand the irony here It's a 208 page book about how to say things simply But if that's enough for you to say hey, this is you know, say things simply and they get it Well, then by all means don't buy it. Don't read it But if you're interested in the why of that and the how to get there which is the hard part Then that's where you know, that's where the lessons in this in this work come in and to your point. I mean

It's hard work. AI can make it a lot easier. But it's it the default path. The easy path for us is to complicate because it doesn't require the editing. It doesn't require the thinking that something simple does.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, let's actually get into the deeper ideas here because where I came to that conclusion was based on what you said here. You said ultimately we only ever do things because we want some somehow want the result of that thing and all our choices we seek benefits not features exist in the five senses benefits or how those features bring value to our lives when we frame our messaging around the benefits we tell people why they should give a damn.

And I realized by saying automatically generate a task list, I was like, okay, this is something that people do every single day. They understand it. And I was like, basically this is going to be a task list that is based on your goals, not just a random sort of dumping ground where you just dump everything that comes to you. Um, so talk to me about how we go about identifying, you know, sort of the, the two layers of the functional and emotional benefits.

Ben Guttmann

Yeah, so this is the first principle and this is about being beneficial. And this is something that if you've ever worked in sales or marketing, it's kind of like the one Oh one piece. It's the thing that's beaten into your head in the first day of doing sales is people don't buy features. They buy benefits. Uh, there's a quote by a 20th century Harvard professor named Theodore Levitt, which I love. And I speak and go back to my class. I tell my students, if you forget everything else from this course, from this entire degree,

If you remember this sentence, you're going to be head of most other people in marketing and business. And it goes, people don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole. People don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole. They don't want the thing. They want what the thing does for them. Right? We don't want the feature. We want the benefit. And it's very easy for us to live in the world of features because you mentioned the five senses, right? We can, you know, if that's a drill,

Well, I can see the big battery. I can feel the silicone grip, and I can hear the motor whir. And all these things are very visceral to see and hear and smell and taste the features. But that's not what we really want. We don't want the bigger battery. We want the drill to last longer so that we can finish the project sooner. I'll use an example besides the drill. I'll talk about mint toothpaste.

If you want to kind of begin to figure out how we get from Mint toothpaste to actually why we buy mint toothpaste Well, you can look at you know, this simple question appropriately that will help us kind of interrogate it and it just goes so what? So you see the feature you say well so what and you're gonna get to that first level of benefit which I'll call the functional Benefit you ask it again. Say so what you get to the emotional benefit

Ask it again, you're going to get to this foundational need that you know, it was gonna be familiar from your psychology textbooks. And then from there, you can kind of build back up. So mint toothpaste to go back to that. Well, this toothpaste has mint flavor. Well, so what? Well, I don't really want the mint flavor. What I really want is to have fresh breath. And that's the functional benefit, right? That that's still pretty tangible. But that's the result of the feature. Well, actually, do I really even want fresh breath? Well, let's ask it again. We'll say so what?

Ben Guttmann

Well, what I really want is to have a better date tonight. I wanna leave a better impression with the person I'm seeing for drinks later. Well, all of a sudden you got from mint flavor to having a better date, but if you ask it one more time, if you say, so what, well now you can link this all the way back to those kind of Maslow's needs there. And we say, well, having a better date would be, maybe it's a love and belonging need, maybe it's a physiological need.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I knew that's where you're going.

Srini Rao

Hmm?

Ben Guttmann

And from there, we're able to understand, well, why, what is actually driving us to buy that mint toothpaste? And then we can reverse engineer that a little bit to kind of change our marketing to change our messaging, so that we can kind of prioritize the more foundational stuff. And eventually you get to the features you talk about the benefits first, the emotional benefit functional benefit, and then eventually you can get to the feature.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

It's funny you use that as an example. I you know, you'll have to just fact-check me on this I don't know how true this is rumor has it that toothpaste actually makes no difference in the effectiveness of your brushing your teeth You could brush them with you could brush your teeth without toothpaste Like again, I don't know how true that is But because I know there are places in the world where people don't actually have toothpaste You know where they brush their teeth, but it's funny that you use that as an example

Ben Guttmann

Hehehe

Ben Guttmann

Right, you can just use baking soda, right? You don't you don't need to have you don't need to have the crest, you know, 3d white with fresh mint, whatever, whatever it's called.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Well, let's get into what you call the drill build method, which you go into sort of the hook and then you combine it with the emotional benefit. Can you walk me through that?

Ben Guttmann

Yeah, so that's a little bit of what I just kind of was alluding to with the, you know, you say the so what, so what, so what, and that's drilling down, right? That's getting from the feature to the functional benefit to the emotional benefit to the need. And then you look across and look at now we reach this foundational, this foundational motivation for our decisions. Well, let's, let's start to build our message back up appropriately. Well, you say, Okay, well, the need, if that is the

You know physiological need or beloved belonging to that might begin to you know, put us in the right headspace and think of our direction here the emotional benefit might be what we want to lead with as The headline of our email or the top the hero section of our website or the first slide in our deck or whatever It is that that's the hook. That's the first thing that gets somebody's attention is the emote is the second level benefit and Then the functional benefit which is the you know, the fresh breath in our example

That becomes the secondary sentence, the second headline, the piece that you got their attention on the hook, and then you're beginning to convert them in the second piece of it. And then eventually, you get to the features. Eventually, you get to saying, OK, well, you have this many, this much fluoride or whatever it is that's part of it. So when you look at maybe a famous example of this from marketing is if you go back 20 years ago and you look at how Apple.

introduced the product that changed this entire company, the iPod. Well, they didn't go around and say, well, we have four gigabytes of hard drive space, and we have this many pixels on the screen and the battery lasts this long. They went out and they said, it's 1000 songs in your pocket. Right? 1000 songs. That's actually what I want. That's the benefit. The feature is the hard drive space and the colorways and whatever else it is. And eventually you get to that, right? It's on the website.

the fine print on the packaging. But that's not the reason why I'm buying it. And so many people will stay kind of living in the feature world, when really, if they wanted to convert and wanted to make a difference in their communication, you want to live in the world of benefits.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Absolutely. Well, let's talk about this in terms of sort of combining both design and language because you say communicating with one core idea that you've gone deep on is always better than five half-assed concepts that you've taped together. And here's the dirty secret about that one idea. It doesn't even have to be that good. A mediocre concept that has been competently executed beats a muddled mix of otherwise brilliant ideas with no follow through unifying connection. Focus itself makes your work better. And then you go on to give the example of Dr. Seuss. Can you tell us about that?

and then I'll share my own story from that with you.

Ben Guttmann

Well, that's a this one is the dr. Frankenstein one, right? So the uh, the dr. Seuss is the salient bit But i'll tell you i'll tell you the this before we move on to that though So if you read mary shelley's frankenstein and you look at how the monster is described Uh, it's every individual piece was selected to be beautiful. It's got big, you know muscles and lustrous black hair and pearly white eyes But then she writes that it's a horrid contrast

It's this gruesome composite between all these individual beautiful pieces. This happens in marketing all the time. This happens in, in software development. This happens in, uh, political leadership and when you're legislating is that we kind of put just everything in and we say, well, this is great and this is great. And this is great. So all of them together are going to be even greater, but this is a scenario more often than not, where it's lesser than the sum of its parts. If you were to focus on one idea,

and comp and commit to it, you're going to be much more effective in your communication. It goes back to the fact that we are largely we can only prioritize one thing at once. We can only really see we can only see one thing and process one thing and hear one thing at a time. And if we're trying to message three or four things at the same time, we're ultimately just fracturing that attention.

in a way which makes all of our stuff is not like you're when you're juggling a ball right you know you're not dropping one you're dropping everything at that

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think the Dr. Seuss bit struck me as well, because just by imposing constraints on his work, Seuss was able to create a unique work that became two of the most successful titles of his long career and in turn inspired generations of young minds. He was able to create something different and impossible to ignore by playing a different game than everybody else. And you say, simple message of the salient, which means they send out salient things, stick out, stand above, jump, or otherwise contrast with their surroundings and thus rise to our attention. We notice and often choose what's different.

You know, I think the reason that ended up striking me so much as I told you I ended up creating this custom children's book for my nephew and I remember reading that and I don't know what it is. But like early on babies apparently just love high contrast books and these books are really interesting because there are very few words on the page they use these huge illustrations and I you know when I

created the book, I remembered that, because when I said, the style of Dr. Seuss, Chad GBT kind of kicked back and said, I can't do that. And I was like, okay, fine, let's do high contrast. So talk to me about like sort of why high contrast things are so salient and sort of what that looks like with practical application. Let's say just, for example, we're going to the hero section of our website, you know, in terms of how we use fonts and colors and all of that to bring it all together.

Ben Guttmann

Oh, yeah. So when I go back to talking about those cognitive scientists that work on the idea of fluency, there's a really wide range of research that supports this. And some of it is in relation to this idea of contrast. So we will, if we're when these researchers test it, we will always be predisposed towards selecting images that are higher contrast, as more beautiful as more

you know, kind of as higher quality as something we just like better as a more competent artist, all the different things they test when, the, when they show things that are higher contrast versus lower contrast, we prefer the higher contrast piece. And this applies in a number of other spaces as well, but effectively comes down to we, we only notice what's different, right? There's figure and ground, right? If, if, if everything is the same color is the same, you know, intensity,

Well, we don't really notice it. But as soon as something is louder or something else is quieter or something is brighter and something else is darker, then we start to notice those contrasts. We notice things kind of at the margin, right? And what you're alluding to with the Dr. Seuss book is this idea of how do we achieve that contrast and that salience? Well, I argue that one of the most effective tools of doing that is by embracing constraints.

And so by using constraints that force us to do something that never, you know, played by different rules than everybody else is playing by, well, we're going to end up with results that everybody else isn't going to have. And these constraints can come in the form of time, it can come in the form of space, it can come in the form of the tools, of options, and they can be upper bounds and lower bounds. But these constraints can end up pushing us out of that rut, right? So what is a rut? A rut is when a wheel.

Is turning over and over again on a street and it starts to carve a path Right. And so how do we kind of get out of it? Well, it's by saying well, we're gonna have a different type of wheel, right? We're gonna have a different type of axle We're gonna go on a different path. We're gonna go somewhere else and by being able to kind of Jolt ourselves not just sign a nudge but a full jolt into a different area Well, we're able to carve that new path and to create interesting creative work And dr. Seuss and some of his work was challenged by his publisher by his editor

Ben Guttmann

To create books using a limited palette of words Doctor and not doctors the cat in the hat They the challenge was a list of 250 words and he can't he comes back nine months later with a book that has 236 different words in it and It becomes one of the his biggest bestsellers today and then his publisher double down gave him a bet and said well I bet you $50 that you can't do one with just 50 words. Well, okay bad bet right he comes back he does

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Ben Guttmann

the green eggs and ham comes in at exactly 50 words becomes his biggest best seller today. And this apply this has come up again and again in you know, in video game development and music and a bunch of other places, whereby embracing a constraint which sounds kind of paradoxical. It forces us to do different interesting and then ultimately salient things.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the role of bias here because one of the other things you say is, here's a hard pill to swallow. You're not the receiver. Your life is not the same as theirs. And what you want is not the same as what they want. You have knowledge, experience, and values that they don't and vice versa. These examples highlight what psychologists called the false consensus effect. In short, we assume that other people share the same opinions and attributes as us, and that we're basically representative of what is popular, right, and normal, except usually we're wrong.

And I'll tell you what this made me think of. One of our former podcast guests, Michelle Florendo, was in an audience building course that I was offering. And one of my mentors said, I don't think you know your audience. And I was like, what the fuck are you talking about, man? I've like surveyed these people and I'll tell you what became crystal clear to me. She showed up with a baby in tow, or two kids in tow to one of our calls.

And in that moment, and especially now that I've seen the amount of work that an infant requires firsthand for my sister, I was like, I'm giving her productivity strategies based on the life of a single guy. I was like, this basically completely ignores the context of her life. And that's why I always joke, I was like, you want a real Tim Ferriss experiment? Let's have people drop their kids off at his house and, you know, have Tim Ferriss babysit for a week and see what happens to his productivity.

Ben Guttmann

That's great.

Srini Rao

Um, that would be hilarious for one. Um, but I think it would actually start to poke holes in a lot of what he talks about because again, like we kind of take these sort of ideas, particularly when it comes to prescriptive advice, we're notorious for what you're calling the false consistent concisive effect. I mean, I recognize it in my own way of, you know, writing about this.

Ben Guttmann

Oh, yeah. And that. So the false consensus, false consensus effect is has been studied for a long time. And basically, it boils down to, as an example, like I like mint chip ice cream, and I think that I'm a pretty normal guy, and that I represent, you know, kind of the average Joe. So therefore, most people probably like mint chip ice cream. And that's how I'll judge the population as a whole. But if you actually look and you ask the population, you ask everybody, well, what's your favorite ice cream flavor?

Most people are going to say chocolate or vanilla and some might say mintship, but it's going to be a much lower, it's probably going to be a much lower percentage than I would think because my experience is color. What my perception is, is going to be of it. And our experiences are so kind of pushing that direction because this idea of homophily, which is that we tend to be in groups with people who are like us.

we tend to work with people who are like us and, you know, live with people who are like us and be friends with people who like us and go to school. Um, and this is often kind of a downstream effect of geography or education levels, other stuff. But if, if I'm just hanging out with people who are like me all the time and everybody like me likes mint chip ice cream, well, I'll look around and I'll say, well, I don't know a single person who likes strawberry ice cream. So therefore nobody likes strawberry ice cream. And we see this a lot. This is an ice cream. We see this in business. We see some politics. This happens.

everywhere where we're making predictions.

Srini Rao

Well, so the question is then in the way that you craft your messaging, how do you overcome that given that it's so sort of inherent to all of us?

Ben Guttmann

Well, the absolute kind of most like no dub piece of this entire process is used to talk to your audience. Right. And you said, this is also going to be the number one thing that people are going to ignore as part of this, this book is because people don't like to get out there and do that. You know, I mentioned earlier when I was talking about going on the street corner and, you know, having conversations,

I've done

Ben Guttmann

And we instinctively say, oh, we want to shy away from the negative feedback. We don't want that. We want people to like our stuff. But if we don't get out there and we don't test it, then we have no idea if what we're doing is actually resonating. And you can go out and you can go hire a marketing research firm for $1,000 to go do this. And that's great. These companies exist for a reason. I have friends that run them. But you can also just do a small sample size.

You know if you're building a new app for accountants then you know what hey go call up five accountants and And ask them, you know some relevant questions about their experience and you're gonna get a lot more Value out of that than you are if you're gonna talk to 500, you know house painters, right? Like like they're gonna tell you a lot of things that are gonna be useful for one segment of the market, but it's much more important for you to have

relevant conversations with your audience, even if that's not that many.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, let's talk about this one final piece, which is what you call sort of the layer kick pattern in scannable designs. Because I knew this from having read Mary Ann's Wolf book about the F pattern. So I'll tell you, when I saw this, now every time I use AI to sort of draft an email newsletter, I'm like, basically take the F pattern into account and bold everything so that it's set up to be scanned in the way that people read on screens. Which is kind of amazing.

do that. It's like, okay, just take this idea from Ben's book and, you know, apply it to the newsletter.

Ben Guttmann

Oh, yeah. So what you're mentioning is kind of the last piece of the puzzle here, which is how does your message look visually, because even if it's words, we're still looking at words most of the time, right? If it's in an email or a document or whatever. And so what happens you mentioned this F pattern this layer cake pattern, when user experience researchers have studied, how do people view content and read words?

on a screen, well, we read them in largely a very different way, which we read things in a book. In a book, we start on the top left corner, maybe top right of an ear language, and we work our way down and to the right. And we read every single word, ideally, and then we get there. But that is so far removed from how we end up viewing a web page or an email, which is that kind of layer cake letter F pattern where we might start and read the headline and then we jump over to the next headline, read that one.

Oh, that one might be relevant. So maybe we'll read a couple of sentences below. Um, and we get drawn to things like bullet points and bold and italics and headlines, pull out quotes. Uh, and those things start to get our attention. We also will kind of do a little bit of a hunt and peck too. If you've ever been looking for like a phone number or a price, your eyes will kind of train on what looks like a phone number and we'll scan around the page until we find it. So we have to take that into consideration to make art.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Ben Guttmann

content easier and simpler to read on the web because people aren't going to look at things that look like ads, right? They aren't going to look at things. They aren't going to read your 500 words, 5,000 words that you're putting on there unless you design it in a way which is going to meet them where they are.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it's mind-boggling. So I have one final question about this, just out of morbid curiosity. We've been primarily talking about this in sort of visual and written mediums. What about in mediums like audio, like the one people are experiencing right now, or even video? So how does this apply there? How do we adapt these concepts to these kinds of mediums?

Ben Guttmann

I think that there's some parts that are going to be, you know, a little bit less applicable stuff, stuff like the layer cake pattern and that type of thing. But having a sense of organization in your video or in your, your audio certainly does make that easier to, to process. But the other pieces about, is it focused? Is it salient? Is it empathetic? And then most of all, is it beneficial? Well, that's, that's going to be universal whether you're just having a conversation with somebody in person or on the phone or on a podcast.

or in a video, those are still going to be completely relevant no matter how you're doing the communication.

Srini Rao

Yeah, which you just made me think I'm going to take your book and be like, Hey, create a podcast outline generator from, from this. Um, wow. I'm like, you said, I was eager to get you on here because I wanted to make sure you were one of our first episodes of the year. Um, but in the interest of time, I will finish with my final question, which I know you've heard me ask a thousand times. What do you think it is to make somebody or something unmistakable?

Ben Guttmann

What am I? I'm something unmistakable. I mean, I think that being authentic in a in who you are and what you're interested in is very important. It's very easy to tell when somebody is not particularly passionate about the work that they're doing when somebody is just kind of doing it because it's the hot new thing. And again, in marketing, you see lots of interesting things or one of them.

is you see people who will hop on something like, oh, it's AI. I'm an AI guy now. Oh, it's NFTs. I'm an NFT guy now. People can see through that and, and it doesn't always look very good. But when somebody is genuinely curious, but somebody is genuinely interested in other people. That is something that it doesn't matter what the hot new thing is of the day. It will always resonate.

Srini Rao

Beautiful. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, the book, your work, and everything else?

Ben Guttmann

Well, Serena, thanks so much for having me. This has been a ton of fun and it's great to catch up. If you want to get ahold of me or find out more about the book, check me out, BenGutman.com. It's not a good name for radio. There's two T's and two N's. And so if you go there, you can sign up for my email list I sign out every Tuesday, you can download a free chapter of the book, you can go buy the book, or connect to me on LinkedIn, reach out, send me an email and anything I can do to help or to hear how this work has made a difference. I'm all ears.

Srini Rao

Amazing and for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.