Habits of Supercommunicators (3-2-1 by Story Rules #122)
Charles Duhigg on listening well and asking better questions
Last Saturday, I had to do a final read-through of the book’s manuscript. I did my favourite-est thing in the world: edit the book over a few pints of beer at one of my regular haunts.
The restaurant’s kitchen was a bit noisy that day, but I couldn’t be bothered. I had my words, my trusted pen, and my beloved beverage.
In those 2 hours, life was good.
So, the final manuscript has been handed over from my end. Apart from joy, I felt a pang of sadness… the book-writing part is almost over.
I hope I get to do it again. It was fun.
And now, on to the newsletter.
Welcome to the one hundred and twenty-second edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'.
A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:
3 tweets
2 articles, and
1 long-form content piece
Let's dive in.
𝕏 3 Tweets of the week
Interesting. With superb AI-driven video-editing tools, we are likely to see a significant increase in the use of videos in pitches (not video-only pitches, but pitches with video).
I still think the quality of the presenter speaking live would matter more in such a scenario.
In an era of rapid change, it’s nice to look at stuff that has remained the same across decades (if not centuries).
Btw, I still use the same brand of ball-pen that I used during my CA study days. Works like a charm.
Hahaha, this horse had better level up.
📄 2 Articles of the week
a. ‘Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide’ - by Ethan Mollick
Honestly, there was no earth-shattering insight in this post, but for AI-beginners, it’s a useful guide to choose the right AI tool from the plethora of options available.
Plus, it comes from AI power-user and Wharton professor, Ethan Mollick, who’s perhaps got the highest credibility to write such an article. You can almost consider his opinion as the last word on the topic.
Mollick states his recommendation upfront:
For most people who want to use AI seriously, you should pick one of three systems: Claude from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
He then dives into the different model options from each of these platforms… and uses a car analogy to compare them:
ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini each offer multiple AI models through their interface, and picking the right one is crucial. Think of it like choosing between a sports car and a pickup truck; both are vehicles, but you'd use them for very different tasks. Each system offers three tiers: a fast model for casual chat (Claude Sonnet, GPT-4o, Gemini Flash), a powerful model for serious work (Claude Opus, o3, Gemini Pro), and sometimes an ultra-powerful model for the hardest problems (o3-pro, which can take 20+ minutes to think).
He states his own preferred options:
I use o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro for any serious work that I do. I also have particular favorites based on individual tasks that are outside of these models (GPT-4.5 is a really interesting model for writing, for example), but for most people, stick with the models I suggested most of the time.
And ends with a reco to share your context more clearly:
Be really clear about what you want. Don’t say “Write me a marketing email,” instead go with “I'm launching a B2B SaaS product for small law firms. Write a cold outreach email that addresses their specific pain points around document management. Here's the details of the product: [paste]”
b. ‘Young People Face a Hiring Crisis. AI Is Making It Worse.’ by Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson has now left the Atlantic after 17 years and gone independent. You must subscribe to his Substack, if you haven’t done so already.
In this piece he talks about how AI has started impacting hiring at the entry level and shares a troubling stat - a rise in the unemployment rate for recent college grads in the U.S.:
The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has spiked to recession levels, while the overall jobless rate remains quite low.
A likely cause? AI. The effects are likely to be seen first in entry-level employment:
As law firms leaned on AI for more paralegal work, and consulting firms realized that five 22-year-olds with ChatGPT could do the work of 20 recent grads, and tech firms turned over their software programming to a handful of superstars working with AI co-pilots, the entry level of America’s white-collar economy would contract.
Derek reached out to folks at career offices at universities — and the news was grim:
Mary Andrade, senior director of career success at Purdue University. “I have absolutely heard that some employers are already replacing new grad skills with artificial intelligence. It’s not just in the tech fields, or coding, it’s across a lot of white-collar firms.”
But Derek came across another surprising finding:
The most dramatic takeaway from these conversations wasn’t that AI was clearly destroying jobs. It was something I wasn’t expecting to hear at all: AI is shattering the process of looking for jobs.
He shares some examples of how candidates are now applying to far more positions than people used to do before:
“We’re now seeing students sending 300 applications a year. Sometimes it’s 500 or even 1,000 applications from one student in one year,” said Jackson. “This wasn’t possible before AI, and it’s still accelerating.”
And how companies are using AI throughout the recruitment process:
...nearly 40 percent of firms are “actively integrating” or “experimenting with” AI in the hiring process. Unilever reportedly uses video-interviewing software to analyze candidates’ facial expressions, body-language, and word choice. Hilton Hotels & Resorts uses AI-powered chatbots to screen candidates, answer questions, and schedule interviews. According to one Business Insider report, Meta plans to overhaul its hiring process to include AI bots that give interviewers “question prompts” and internal AI assistants that “judge the quality of its human interviewers.”
This is leading to additional stress for grads:
… in an economy where recent-grad unemployment has surged to recession levels, the AI-ification of hiring seems to have added a layer of psychological distress on top of a foundation of economic anxiety.
Derek makes an interesting point - AI is not just an economic technology but also a social technology:
But I also think that even AI dystopians often underrate the degree to which AI is not only an economic technology, but also a social technology. It will change the way we relate to one another and, in some cases, deform the way we relate to each other.
I loved the concluding para - punchy, musical, and building up to the last line:
AI is automating homework, obliterating the meaning of much testing, disrupting the labor-market signal of college achievement and grades, distorting the job hunt by normalizing 500+ annual applications per person, turning first-round interviews into creepy surveillance experiences or straight-up conversations with robots, and, oh, after all that, maybe kinda beginning to saw off the bottom of the corporate ladder by automating some entry-level jobs during a period of economic uncertainty. This really is a hard time to be a young person.
🎧 1 long-form listen of the week
a. ‘The Jefferson Fisher Podcast: Charles Duhigg: Asking Questions That Build Instant Connection’
If you’ve been visiting bookstores recently (I have been as part of general ‘market research’ for my book!), you would have seen a new book on communication that’s displayed prominently: The Next Conversation by Jefferson Fisher.
Fisher is a Texas-based attorney and his book shares some simple yet powerful tips on handling difficult (and especially emotionally challenging) conversations.
I got intrigued and looked up his podcast. Came across this gem of a conversation with Charles Duhigg (NYT journalist and author of Supercommunicators and The Power of Habit). It’s a masterclass in listening and asking better questions. Here are some extracts that I found insightful.
Super communicators ask more questions:
…the number one behavior that they found was that these people tended to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. And what's interesting though is, and we all know people like this, some of the questions, you don't even register as questions. They'll say things like, ‘Oh, what'd you think about that?’ Or ‘What'd you say next?’ It's these little essentially invitations to share with them.
They also ask deep questions. I love these kind of questions and find them to be great conversation triggers:
…a deep question is something that asks someone about their values or their beliefs or their experiences. And that can sound kind of intimidating, right? When I'm like, oh, you should ask people about their values or their beliefs or their experiences.
Except that it's as simple as, you know, if you meet someone who's a doctor, instead of saying, you know, oh, what hospital do you work at? You could ask, oh, what made you decide to go to medical school? Right, that second question, that invites the person to tell you something real, right?
That invites them to tell you sort of what they believe in or what their experiences were as a kid, that sort of led them to where they are.
Duhigg shares a simple tip about good communication. Don't just ask about facts - ask what feelings the fact evokes in the person:
Here the big tip is instead of asking you about the facts of your life, (the) question (would) prompt you to talk about how you feel about your life.
So instead of just asking, 'where do you live?' (And getting a response) 'Oh, I live in the Heights'..., (You can ask), 'Oh, what do you like about the Heights?' Right? you can do it with almost anything. It's very, very easy.
Duhigg continues on that example to share how you can ‘ramp up the intimacy’:
If I ask you, you know, what do you like about the Heights?
And you say, well, the sense of community is amazing up there. Oh, yeah. Wait, like, tell me about it. Like, what's the community?
Well, you know, my wife passed away a year ago and my neighbors have been there for me.
Then suddenly it's totally okay for me to say, oh, I'm so sorry. Like, tell me about your wife. What was she like?
What research shows is that we don't have a resistance to deep questions. We have a resistance to deep questions that move a little bit too quickly. But you can actually move fast if you ramp up the intimacy.
Duhigg talks about the three types of conversations. It is super important to mutually identify what kind of conversation you are having:
…our conversations are either practical conversations where we're making plans or solving problems together, or they're emotional conversations where I'm telling you what I'm feeling and I don't want you to solve my feelings, I want you to empathize, or they're social conversations about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society and the identities that are important to us. And they said all three of those kinds of conversations are all equally legitimate, and all three of them will probably happen during a discussion if it goes on long enough. But the key is if you and the person you're talking to aren't having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, you will not feel connected to each other.
It's not enough to just listen - you need to give proof to the other person that you're listening using a technique called looping to understand
… it's really, really powerful to prove that we're listening. And actually the proving part is a habit. So there's a technique for it known as looping for understanding.
They teach basically in every law school now. And it has these three parts. The part one is to ask a question, preferably a deep question, right?
Step two is when the person has answered that question, try and repeat back in your own words what you heard them say. And you've actually already done this a couple of times in this conversation, right, what I hear you saying is. And I'm gonna prove to you, not only, because the goal here is not mimicry, I'm gonna prove to you that not only am I paying attention, I'm actually processing what you're thinking, right? Or what you're saying. I can put it into different words and maybe even give you a little insight on it that you didn't have when you said it. And most of us do step one and step two intuitively.
Step three is the one I always forget, and this is where the habit comes in, is once I repeat back what I heard you say, ask if I got it right. Did I hear you correctly? Because when we do that, what we're actually doing is we're asking for the other person permission to acknowledge that we were listening.
I loved this framing of: ‘Do you want to be helped, hugged or heard?’:
… start the conversation by asking them, do you want to be helped? Do you want to be hugged? Or do you want to be heard?
Which is the practical, this emotional and the social conversation. Because to exactly your point, if a kid says, no, no, I just need you to like, I just need you to know what's going on, then you can say, oh, that sounds really hard. Like that's all that you need.
That's all from this week's edition.
Ravi
Cover Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash
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