About 20 years ago, when I first read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, I came across a clever aphorism.
“You cannot win an argument,” wrote Carnegie.
That’s stuck with me ever since, even though it goes against my argumentative nature. The fact is, I like to debate and argue and show people how I’m right and how they aren’t.
Except, like Carnegie says, you cannot really win. You cannot argue people over to your way of thinking. And even if you do get them to admit that you’re right and they’re wrong, you’ve gained nothing except their hatred.
So most of the time, when I find I’m about to let the debating crow out of its cage, I bite my tongue and I stuff the ugly black bird back where it belongs. I smile. I nod. And I think to myself, “Boy, how wrong you are. But you won’t hear it from me.”
This is an improvement over losing friends and alienating people. But it’s hardly a creative and productive way to deal with new ideas.
There’s gotta be something better, right?
Of course. It’s just that I wasn’t clever enough to think of it myself. But I came across this better way to win arguments in an interview with billionaire investor Howard Marks.
Marks was asked what early advice helped him become so successful. He said there wasn’t any investing advice that did it.
Instead, it was just an attitude, and he’s not sure where he picked it up. He illustrated it by describing how he deals with his longtime business partner:
“Each of us is open to the other’s ideas. When we have an intellectual discussion, neither of us puts a great emphasis on winning. We want to get to the right answer. We have enormous respect for each other, which I think is the key. When he says something, a position different from mine, my first reaction is not, ‘How can I diffuse that? How can I beat that? How can I prove he’s wrong?’ My first reaction is to say, ‘Hey, what can I get from that? What can I take away? Is he right? Maybe he’s right and I was wrong.'”
“Yeah, yeah,” I hear you saying. “Enough with the high-sounding billionaire lessons. Why don’t you get off your preachy pony and give me some ideas for how I could money? Like today?”
Well I never… the ingratitude!
Honestly, this intellectual humility thing was my idea for you to make money. But you are right. It might take some time to bear fruit.
If you want to make money today, then I don’t have much advice to give you. Well, none except what I wrote up a few years ago and put inside my Upwork book.
“Upwork!” you now say. “I’ve tried it! It doesn’t work. It’s a cesspool.”
You may be completely right. I certainly won’t argue with you.
But if you want to see what I have to say about success on Upwork, and what you might be able to take away from it and maybe even make money from, today, then here is my Upwork book, still available for some uncertain time on Amazon: