I'm a big believer in teaching people in the positive and not just a bunch of Don't, don't don't don't do this a series of negatives. But I do want to address the elephant in the room. In my experience. The number one factor of people not being persuasive is they all make the same mistake. The mistake is they have an opportunity to pitch to present to try to persuade someone in their organization in the workplace or a client outside. And they waste the opportunity by just doing a massive data dump.

They tell the person in the organization or the prospect, every single fact they know. They try to educate the person on every part of the process, every fact the history and they think, Oh, I'm being thorough, I'm being hard working. The person's going to be so impressed that I'm so knowledgeable and I covered everything. I didn't leave anything out. No one can accuse me of being superficial and leaving anything out. It's a very defensive, negative mentality.

And the result is typically the person you're trying to persuade isn't persuaded, because they're just lost in this sea of data. So do not make that mistake. We're going to spend some time in the next few lectures helping you figure how do you narrow it down? How do you really refine what's truly most important? As Mark Twain once said, and a lot of other successful writers have claimed to say this. I'm sorry, I wrote you a long letter.

I didn't have time to write you a short letter. It actually takes more time, thought, intelligence to narrow your messages down than to just say absolutely everything. So we've all been guilty of this. I'll tell you about that more in a while.