The Elevator Pitch  

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The Challenge: Create a compelling speech about your entire professional life-lasting no more than 15-second. Be able to offer it on demand and under pressure. 

The so-called “elevator pitch” requires serious practice. Regardless of the audience, irrespective of whether you are sitting, standing, or walking down a hall or talking on the phone, you should be comfortable offering it. You never know whether your next open door will take place at family gatherings, in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, or at a coffee shop.   

You’ll want to describe the impact you have had and can continue to have on a project or work environment. Make it about who you are rather than what you do. 

Don’t try to rattle off as much information as possible, like a college debater. Be thoughtful and deliberate. Show you are calm and confident. Yet still, be passionate and genuine. 

These questions that may help you discover your elevator pitch and paint a compelling self-portrait:

What do you think your value to an employer is?

What have you been proudest of in your work life? 

What do you love to do?

What makes you unique?

A word of caution: Pre-packaged, over-practiced canned pitches can come across as lacking respect for the one you are trying to win over. They are not a means to an end but is a person. Your goal isn’t just to sell yourself but start an Elevator Conversation. It's not just me; it’s about us.

Think of it this way: Most people want to hire interesting, intelligent people who they would enjoy spending time working with day-to-day—not slogan shouters.

Stephen Goforth

The Best Advice

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Talk a little less, and listen more. Less advice is often the best advice. People don’t need lots of advice; they need a listening ear and some positive reinforcement. What they want to know is often already somewhere inside of them. They just need time to think, be and breathe, and continue to explore the undirected journeys that will eventually help them find their direction.

Marc and Angel Chernoff

Solo Performance

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A mountain of studies has shown that face-to-face brainstorming and teamwork often lead to inferior decisionmaking. That’s because social dynamics lead groups astray; they coalesce around the loudest extrovert’s most confidently asserted idea, no matter how daft it might be.

What works better? “Virtual” collaboration—with team members cogitating on solutions alone, in private, before getting together to talk them over. As Susan Cain (who wrote Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking) discovered, researchers have found that groups working in this fashion generate better ideas and solve problems more adroitly. To really get the best out of people, have them work alone first, then network later.

Sounds like the way people collaborate on the Internet, doesn’t it? With texting, chat, status updates, comment threads, and email, you hash over ideas and thoughts with a pause between each utterance, giving crucial time for reflection. Plus, you can do so in private.

(The) overall the irony here is pretty gorgeous. It suggests we’ve been thinking about the social web the wrong way. We generally assume that it has unleashed an unruly explosion of disclosure, a constant high school of blather. But what it has really done is made our culture more introverted—and productively so. Now if we could just get some doors on those cubicles.

Clive Thompson writing in Wired Magazine

We can be too clever for our own good

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Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation. Its power is not confined to sport: actors and musicians know about it too, and are apt to say that their best work happens in a kind of trance. Thinking too much can kill not just physical performance but mental inspiration. Bob Dylan, wistfully recalling his youthful ability to write songs without even trying, described the making of “Like a Rolling Stone” as a “piece of vomit, 20 pages long”. It hasn’t stopped the song being voted the best of all time.

In less dramatic ways the same principle applies to all of us. A fundamental paradox of human psychology is that thinking can be bad for us. When we follow our own thoughts too closely, we can lose our bearings, as our inner chatter drowns out common sense. A study of shopping behaviour found that the less information people were given about a brand of jam, the better the choice they made. When offered details of ingredients, they got befuddled by their options and ended up choosing a jam they didn’t like.

If a rat is faced with a puzzle in which food is placed on its left 60% of the time and on the right 40% of the time, it will quickly deduce that the left side is more rewarding, and head there every time, thus achieving a 60% success rate. Young children adopt the same strategy. When Yale undergraduates play the game, they try to figure out some underlying pattern, and end up doing worse than the rat or the child. We really can be too clever for our own good.

Ian Leslie, writing in The Economist

time to cheer

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Encourage others and cheer for them. Having an appreciation for how amazing the people around you are leads to good places – productive, fulfilling, peaceful places. So be happy for those who are making progress. Cheer for their victories. Be thankful for their blessings, openly. What goes around comes around, and sooner or later the people you’re cheering for will start cheering for you.

Marc and Angel Chernoff

Build yourself a great story

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How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made.

In the end, we are our choices.

Build yourself a great story.

Jeff Bezos, speaking to the Princeton Class of 2010 (watch the video here)

The important Tool of Silence

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Your most important tool when a fellow human being is in distress is silence. Don’t be afraid of silence; learn to hold it. Although it may feel uncomfortable to you, it won’t to them. They’re working through painful thoughts and feelings, so don’t rush them. People will start opening up if you don’t interrupt.  

Moya Sarner writing in The Guardian