How to brilliantly articulate your opinions

Summary

In his insightful video, Joseph Tsar delves into the art of articulating opinions clearly and effectively. He starts by discussing the importance of individuality in opinion formation and the common pitfalls many face, such as regurgitating others' thoughts or lacking clarity. Tsar emphasizes the significance of understanding one's value system and how it influences speech, encouraging viewers to identify and lead with their core values to speak genuinely. He further explains the necessity of practice, output, and humility in achieving precise communication. Throughout, he shares practical steps and thought-provoking insights into creating satisfying and honest conversation, urging viewers to embrace simplicity, honesty, and a continuous journey towards clarity and experience.

Highlights

• Engage curiosity, honesty, and humility in your speech for powerful communication. 🎤
• Uncover and articulate your unique opinions effectively. 🧩
• Use your values as a prism for authentic expression. 🌈
• Regular output, through writing and speaking, sharpens clarity. ✍️
• Simplicity and honesty enhance the quality of your dialogue. 📢
• Navigate complexities with clear and concise language. 🧙‍♂️
• Intellectual humility is key; it's okay to admit when you're unsure. 🤔

Key Takeaways

• Embrace curiosity, honesty, and humility for unstoppable speech. 🚀
• Clarify your opinions by exploring and structuring them thoughtfully. 🧠
• Lead with genuine values for authentic and fulfilling conversations. 💬
• Practice regularly by articulating your thoughts through writing and speaking. ✍️
• Simplicity and honesty are powerful tools for effective communication. 🌟
• Acknowledge the limits of language and strive for clarity amidst complexity. 🔍
• Be open to saying 'I don't know' to maintain intellectual humility. 🤓

Overview

In this engaging video, Joseph Tsar offers a masterclass in the art of articulating opinions. He explores the journey from having a vague idea to expressing it with clarity and conviction. Tsar reveals crucial steps in understanding one's values and aligning them with authentic communication—a skill many struggle with today.

Joseph shares his personal strategies for developing and refining thoughts. He emphasizes the importance of output—whether speaking, writing, or any form of expression—as a tool for clarity. This not only clarifies your own understanding but also helps in engaging discussions with others more effectively.

Moreover, Tsar highlights the value of simplicity and intellectual humility in communication. He dismantles the myth that bigger vocabularies and complex statements are indicators of intelligence. Instead, he points to the true essence of effective communication—honesty, conciseness, and the bravery to admit when we don't know something, thus encouraging a more genuine and impactful dialogue.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The chapter titled 'Introduction' emphasizes the overflow of information people tend to consume and the common desire to appear intelligent when discussing it. However, it suggests that striving to sound overly smart can be detrimental. Instead, the focus should be on being curious, honest, and humble when speaking, which the author believes will make one 'unstoppable'. The chapter introduces a 'seven-step journey' that will presumably support this approach, setting the stage for the content that will follow in subsequent sections.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Seven-step Journey to Articulating Opinions This chapter discusses a seven-step approach to developing and expressing opinions. It begins with finding and refining personal opinions to make them articulate and structured. Three resources are provided to improve speaking skills. The chapter also aims to give an overview of the objectives behind sharing opinions, focusing on three main points: sharing what is deeply thought or buried.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Finding and Refining Opinions The chapter 'Finding and Refining Opinions' explores the essential qualities for developing personal and well-articulated opinions. It emphasizes three main attributes: originality, the importance of choosing the right words, and clarity in expression. The chapter critiques society's general lack of these qualities in communication, highlighting the tendency for opinions to be convoluted or derivative.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Understanding Minds and Mouths The chapter titled 'Understanding Minds and Mouths' explores the common issue of ineffective communication. It highlights how people's words can often be poorly articulated, plagiarized, borrowed from others, or unclear, leading to speech that doesn't satisfy or fully express their thoughts. This results in a 'communication itch' that leaves one feeling incomplete after speaking. The chapter suggests that this discomfort can be alleviated by understanding some basic principles.
• 03:00 - 05:00: The Concept of Value Prism The chapter explores the collaboration between our minds and mouths in the process of communication, emphasizing the concept of personal knowledge as a collection of small circles. Each circle represents all that one knows about a particular subject, with areas outside the circle representing unknown information. The main takeaway is how knowledge expands and how understanding one's own knowledge helps in better communication.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Importance of Output and Clarity The chapter discusses the evolving 'circle of knowledge' one accumulates with experience and how it shapes opinions. It states that people's views are often influenced by an amalgamation of half-remembered anecdotes, shocking statistics, and media soundbites. The conversation taps into how individuals frequently lean on vaguely recalled articles or studies and social media snippets when discussing topics, highlighting a potential gap in clarity and output quality in forming and expressing opinions.
• 07:00 - 10:00: Challenges of Capturing Thoughts in Words The chapter discusses the difficulty people face in finding the right words to express their thoughts. Instead of choosing words that accurately represent their intentions, many people opt for the most accessible words, often influenced by what they have recently heard. The chapter critiques social media culture for contributing to this issue, as it tends to encourage reliance on quotations and repetition rather than original expression. It highlights a human cognitive bias towards sticking with familiar and easily accessed language, which can impede genuine communication.
• 10:00 - 13:00: The Value of Simplicity and Experience The chapter explores the concept of 'recency and repetition,' highlighting how these factors influence our beliefs and thoughts. It suggests that often, the ideas we are most familiar with, either because we've heard them the most or because they are recent, can overshadow our true beliefs and perspectives. These internal truths, if unearthed and expressed, have the potential to provide deep satisfaction. The chapter poses a philosophical question: how can one truly know what they know? This reflects on the importance of introspection and articulation to connect with one's genuine insights and unique perspectives.
• 13:00 - 15:00: Essence Writing for Clarity Essence Writing for Clarity explores methods to enhance understanding and reach the core of thoughts or opinions. By using the metaphor of 'Bedrock,' the chapter implies that there is a foundational truth beneath surface distractions or barriers, emphasizing the value of clarity in expression. The focus is on uncovering this 'gold' of truth beneath layers of complex or obstructive language.
• 15:00 - 17:00: The Importance of Intellectual Humility The chapter explores the concept of intellectual humility, emphasizing its significance in the realm of thinking and communication. It suggests that true intellectual engagement requires navigating through complex layers of questioning and understanding. The process is challenging, which often deters people from engaging deeply. The chapter implies that accessing deeper truths in our thinking and discussions necessitates persistent effort and a willingness to question and delve into various layers of thought.

How to brilliantly articulate your opinions Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 so we have a lot of information in our heads and trying to sound smart about that information is quite frankly a disease if you dare to speak greatly dare to be dull with your speech and I want to show you in today's video how if you can be curious honest and humble in your speaking you will be unstoppable I want to share with you the seven-step journey
• 00:30 - 01:00 that has allowed me to fundamentally find the opinions in my mind on certain topics take those opinions and refine them into something that is articulate and structured and I want to give you in this video three resources that will help you bulletproof you're speaking in this way so the first thing that I want to address is give you a 30,000 foot overview of what we are trying to achieve when we share our opinion on a topic there are three things the first is we want to share what is buried
• 01:00 - 01:30 inside our mind not some artificial opinion from others what is uniquely ours the second thing is we want to choose the right words to capture our idea and the third is that we desire Clarity our opinion needs to make sense it should not be unnecessarily Tangled or complex now here's the problem most of society lacks these three qualities in their speaking the opinions that most
• 01:30 - 02:00 people share are poorly worded they're plagiarized they're adopted from others or they're just plain unclear and this often leads to speech that sounds unsatisfying what do we mean by unsatisfying well it does not fulfill us when we say it we feel as if we didn't fully articulate what we're holding in our minds there's a communication itch that's just not being scratched and you can alleviate that discomfort by understanding a few few simple things
• 02:00 - 02:30 about how our minds and mouths collaborate when we communicate so the first thing I want to address is understanding how to find what is inside your mind so imagine your knowledge on a topic as a small circle you've got thousands of these circles in your mind then the younger you are the smaller the circles are inside each circle is everything you know about a particular subject outside the circle is everything you don't know as you acquire
• 02:30 - 03:00 more experience as you mature that line expands to include more information what's usually in any one of our circles in a given moment is a makeshift opinion composed of half-remembered anecdotes shocking statistics and sound bites from social media think about what most people say in conversation yeah I read recently a study about that person oh I saw that person is not good from the economy and they're quoting some article or social media Source this is
• 03:00 - 03:30 most people and there's nothing particularly wrong with that however most people never find the right words to express what they think they simply choose the words most accessible to them which is usually the last thing that they heard and this is one of my internal beefs that I have with social media culture is that it often results in people being made up mostly of quotations and this speaks to one of the fundamental biases that we have as humans is our mind has a bias for
• 03:30 - 04:00 recency and repetition we repeat what we hear the most or what we heard most recently and this often causes us to ignore our deep truths it causes us to ignore the perspectives that are unique to us the things that would satisfy us if we were able to excavate those and articulate them in conversation so this invites the question the question becomes how can we know what we know in
• 04:00 - 04:30 other words is it possible to accelerate our understanding on something so that we can figure out the Bedrock of our thought or our opinion and if we use that word Bedrock that concept it implies that there is something above it there is something preventing access to what we can assume is the that rich content of our opinion which is true I mean the gold we are
• 04:30 - 05:00 after is not within easy reach for a good reason most people do not engage in thinking and attempting to articulate that thinking with speaking because it is a hard process there are layers of questioning and thinking and really understanding that needs to happen for us to be able to engage those deeper parts of what we really think and really engage those deeper parts of these circles because these
• 05:00 - 05:30 circles really are more in the shape of cones when viewed from the side most of us simply comment off the top we skim the most recent information that has been added to this pile and what we really want to do is excavate That Base that Bedrock that incorporates everything that has been set upon it that's what would give us a satisfying answer right it's a rhetorical question because I want to suggest why that is not the right way to think about it in
• 05:30 - 06:00 just a moment however there is something to be said about if we have not spent time articulating our thoughts or writing about them or speaking about them in conversation this cone is going to be a complete mystery to us in fact we don't even know what its shape is however the funny thing is about articulating our opinion is that even though we don't know what's beneath those those superficial layers those cheap anecdotes and sta statistics that
• 06:00 - 06:30 we just like to list off like it's some kind of verbal script we do know what our opinion is if we were given options if options were presented to us for example if I ask you you to describe your best friend you might start with some obvious description by saying oh he or she is nice and you might then start combing through
• 06:30 - 07:00 different qualities General adjectives describing other people you know they're nice they're friendly they're outgoing now you also know that if I were to put all those options out on the table in front of you different qualities of people you would be able to clearly confirm or deny if those apply to your friend oh my friend he's definitely nice he's kind but he's not loyal and the same is true with our opinions or beliefs what do you believe about politics well if I were to ask you that question you probably would
• 07:00 - 07:30 struggle to give me a straight answer though if I were to present all of these options to you on the table in front of you you would be able to figure out what your political opinion is or isn't and you can come to those conclusions by seeing everything on the table in front of you the quantity of information and slowly by saying yes no yes no things are beginning to take shape so it's almost as if when we think about this the problem of finding our opinion feels
• 07:30 - 08:00 like it's one of not knowing what all of our options are and that's kind of frustrating because we feel convinced that only by seeing everything before us can we fully develop and articulate our opinion now the inherent limitation in this thinking of course is that we only have access to what our mind allows us to remember in the moment which is usually whatever comes to mind within about 10 seconds if even we have that long
• 08:00 - 08:30 to think about one thought so this process it can feel like pulling teeth because we understand that we don't have this ability to see everything before us on what we want to articulate on a topic but this is a good process it's good because we're we're getting closer to figuring out what we think because we're interpreting these yes and no conclusions through some kind of a filter because remember everything that
• 08:30 - 09:00 we say yes or no to is because it is being held against some standard what is that standard what do I mean by that well that standard is what is called your value prism and this is the first major concept that I want to introduce you to because whether you realize it or not every single one of us is refracting the world through a set of internal values what are those values well they can be things like gratitude Compassion or respect here's the full list if you're interested where do those values
• 09:00 - 09:30 come from well they come from your upbringing your parents your culture your religion it's what makes those options on the table feel right to you now it doesn't mean that your values are right but that's a conversation for another time what is important to understand is that when something does not align with your values when your opinion does not align with your values it feels insincere it feels unsatisfying and it often feels artificial it can sound right the words
• 09:30 - 10:00 can be beautifully arranged into an eloquent sentence but it doesn't feel right and the problem is the vast majority of people in society particularly the younger generations and those that I've had in my network and have the honor of speaking to they don't lead with any values most people don't even know what their values are and I've realize that this has led to a lot of neurotic thinking in Society where
• 10:00 - 10:30 I've noticed people going from one well-worded opinion to another from one inspirational quote that they're pulling from an Instagram motivational page to another because it sounds appealing it's once again deliciously worded but it's not them when they say it it's not them and they can feel it and other people can feel it and here lies one of the biggest misconceptions about approaching your opinion on on a topic is we think that
• 10:30 - 11:00 satisfaction often comes from quantity and when I say Quantity I mean that idea we discussed earlier of oh if only I could see everything before us I'd be able to share everything that I believe on this topic and only then would I be satisfied or the second thing we think would satisfy us is a false quality and what I mean by a false quality is this idea of articulating someone else's beautiful words that seem
• 11:00 - 11:30 to capture what we think and only if we can say it in the best way will it satisfy us it's a false quality what we want is a true quality and what a true quality is is something that stems from our values that is filtered through our value prism it's not an answer of quantity it's an answer of quality and so the action item here the action item you need to pick some values you need to find out what you stand for and here's a
• 11:30 - 12:00 list that I'll link below this video in case you're interested here's what my value prism looks like now I'm not here to assign you any particular bouquet of values however I would offer up to you a few that I think Society is rapidly losing that would be excellent starting points the first one is honesty I'm convinced that most people say what they think others want to hear not what they themselves belief the challenge with
• 12:00 - 12:30 this is when you withhold information when you withhold something in your mind what you've done is you've created a a second thread here's what you want to say or here's what you're saying and then here's what you believe and the problem with that is that it takes you out of the present moment and it brings you unhappiness and and unsatisfaction in your speech so valuing honesty and using that as a filter in your value prism is a strong suggestion and one that will bring you a lot of satisfaction the second value is
• 12:30 - 13:00 Simplicity I think there's a lot of people today in society who just like to have a degree in in yapping they like to talk a lot I'm guilty of this as well and they make things sound unnecessarily long in complex I'm always reminded by that famous quote an idiot admires complexity a genius admires Simplicity we'll talk about how you can be more simple in your speaking later in this video the third quality where value is experience I think we
• 13:00 - 13:30 have a lot of people in society once again among the generations gen Z My Generation where there are many people who are simply adopting conclusions from this brain pack of society from social media only because they are worded well and we regurgitate these sound bites not because they are meaningful to us but because they sound right now of course they don't mean much because that person didn't step through any of the
• 13:30 - 14:00 experience that led to that sound bite that led to that conclusion and so saying those sound bites in conversation are largely going to feel empty and void of meaning because they fundamentally didn't stem from your experience and I think speaking from experience is so undervalued in society today and none of this is helped by the fact that I think people are getting less and less experience they are doing less and less things because they have more more and more reasons to keep them tethered
• 14:00 - 14:30 and entertained where they are so I'll put a book end to that thought and take a step back and say that these three values or these values from these lists are things that we should be verbally working into the way that we speak how do we do this well we can simply say things like I value Simplicity and that is a reminder to us that we are going to try to speak simply you can be a little bit more delicate with how you word it you could say well
• 14:30 - 15:00 speaking from experience on this and that introduces you to that value of experience what do I honestly think about this that introduces honesty and it encourages you to begin activating that value in the way that you speak there are some other ways that you can word this that I'll link below these actually stem from interviews of 1% communicators that I've studied and written down the way that they
• 15:00 - 15:30 articulate these values this isn't some crackhead idea that I'm coming up with spontaneously this is something that I've noticed undergirds the most powerful and persuasive forms of communication what this does is it gives us an angle for our speaking that immediately begins aligning with what we value and that produces a satisfying answer I've noticed that there is a direct relationship with how satisfied you feel with your words and how you are
• 15:30 - 16:00 with yourself and that begins by defining your value prism the value prism is that Launchpad that gives you the initial momentum that you need to find and articulate your opinion well if you thought that was hard now comes the most challenging part this is also a fun part because I like language and Linguistics and this is this was a large Epiphany moment for me understanding this that is the challenge of capturing our mind's contents with words here's the problem with that thinking there are no right
• 16:00 - 16:30 words what we often mean by the right words are words that uniquely qualify our opinion as our own or describe it at a precise granular level now people often think this is where big words come into play expanding our vocabulary expanding our vocabulary does help in fact it was lewood Van wienstein who has a quote he says the limits of our language are are the limits of our world there is
• 16:30 - 17:00 something to be said about more words giving you a better ability to perceive and articulate the world around you in a greater capacity however we have to remember that we are never going to be able to capture with language everything that exists in our mind or every experience that we have on a particular thought why well because speech actually is an incredibly low bandwidth mechanism for communicating the rich colorful
• 17:00 - 17:30 multi-dimensional language of the Mind what Steven Pinker called mental Le which is a combination of emotions experience and many other nuances that words just won't capture it's like trying to describe a multicolor painting with just black and white you end up saying a lot of things like well it's a really light shade of white or that's very deep gray like there's a disconnect
• 17:30 - 18:00 of course it's not going to accurately depict what is the real pallet of colors and that makes sense because most of us feel at some point that we are unsatisfied by what we say and here's how one person on Reddit brilliantly described it the brain moves at the speed of thought mouth moves at floppy meat speed floppy meat can't keep up with zapping brain Flappy meat sounds like dummy to sapping
• 18:00 - 18:30 brain when a thought stays in our mind before we attempt to put it into words our mind can very quickly create the illusion of deep understanding we become diluted into thinking that we have the thought completely wrinkle-free it's ironed out it's fully formed and then when we attempt to put it into words or when we attempt to speak from the base of the cone most most of us realize that gosh we have a huge whopping nothing
• 18:30 - 19:00 Burger this is why most people 75% of people think they have an above average intelligence and this often leads us to overestimate our level of understanding of things when we're forced to articulate it we realize that there is very little substance to most of our thoughts and this is because the mechanism of speech just isn't fast enough to capture those complex thoughts that we have on a topic and to expect that we want to put a
• 19:00 - 19:30 brand new thought that contains emotions experiences associations memories all of that arrange that into a brilliantly articulated sentence on the first try is absolutely absurb now we can capture more of the mind's contents the more that we output the more that we engage in conversation in writing in recording videos we'll talk about this later in the this video however we need to
• 19:30 - 20:00 recognize that this process of translating our 4D thoughts into what really we can think of as 1D words is going to require some compromise and accepting that accepting that there is going to be some loss is one a burden that we just have to bear but two is remarkably refreshing because it's necessary for us to embrace imperfection are speaking and thinking that we have to
• 20:00 - 20:30 say everything in the right words perfectly often leads to a lot of intellectual paralysis where we say nothing at all and many people don't say anything not because they don't have anything to say but because they think it's only worth saying if they can say it well and this leads us to the third major concept and that is understanding that you will be more satisfied with what you say the more you say it in other words
• 20:30 - 21:00 output speaking writing engaging in conversation forces Clarity and output can be once again conversation it can be talking to yourself aloud better yet some form of writing Clarity is achieved in the output the creation side of things and this is one of these negative trend lines that I've seen developing in society where it is not through consumption rarely is it achieved through input let me let me put this another way it is highly unlikely that you will
• 21:00 - 21:30 achieve clear thinking and by virtue clear speaking by watching social media excessively including this video which by the way none of this information is going to preserve itself in your mind in perfect Crystal Clarity unless you've made an effort to talk about it to write about it or to create your life or conversations around it in some small way and that's why one of these Rising trend lines in in social media or Internet culture is this aggressive level of consumption of others opinions
• 21:30 - 22:00 we look to the comments to gain a perspective before we even formulate our own we let our phones run like a tap all day long when we eat now you might say but Joseph doesn't everyone do this yes they do and I would poee to you the counter question do you want the thinking patterns of everyone else my objective in creating this video is to suggest what I think can lead to crisper sharper thinking which by the way most people don't have and in order to have
• 22:00 - 22:30 that well there's something to be said about going against the habits of the masses so one of the most obvious things that I think most people can practice more is getting their mind's inner contents outside things are going to remain loose foggy and undefined in your mind until you are forced to output and any of you who are thinking that the ideas that I'm sharing in this video have any amount of clarity is only because I I've done thinking on this in advance I'm not piecing all of
• 22:30 - 23:00 these ideas together in real time as if I've got the perfect map to some newly charted territory and what I've realized in training clients around the world and teaching people to speak like they think is that the most elite communicators have learned that output volume of output is what closes the gap between foggy thinking and clear speech you ever wonder why the speakers
• 23:00 - 23:30 the podcasters the leaders that you listen to are able to achieve such surgical Precision is because they have engaged in output on those topics a hundred times before Clarity clear opinions is the outcome of consistent thought I had to remember what how I phrased that before one of the easiest and most efficient ways that you can do this and something that I practice is Essence writing oh writing I'm not a writer well listen tolken neither am I but here's an exercise that
• 23:30 - 24:00 I've been able to develop for myself that can allow you to achieve Clarity on a topic without having to write a fantasy novel every night so the idea is you open up a document and every single night you write for five minutes you write your topics out usually one topic you write your thoughts out and you do this in sections you're going to do this in fact in three stages the first is you're going to write it out in 200 words you're going to write it out in 100 Words and and then you're going to write it out in 50 words you can use a
• 24:00 - 24:30 word counter to track the word count there's a Google template that I've created for myself that you're welcome to use below this video and here's a sample of what I was writing yesterday so you can see this in its three different stages why is writing important because there are all kinds of gaps in your thinking and in your speaking where you're making leaps where you don't realize and when you're forced to write it down and connect the sentences you have to complete those gaps and make a structure structured logical Chain of
• 24:30 - 25:00 Thought the benefit of all of this is that the more you output the more you begin making connections and finding links between these different circles these different cones the more connections you make the stronger your model of the world becomes and that's what this is is a model of how you have come to understand things now it doesn't mean that you have it all correct that you've populated these circles in some
• 25:00 - 25:30 objectively right way what it does mean is that you understand the information that you know and that you can articulate it clearly and simply and this is what most people don't understand that the most valuable currency in society today is Clarity and a Clarity is is a Clarity Clarity is often achieved with simple words and simple sentences it's one of the reasons why our culture has become so obsessed with quotations over the last decade because quotations do what
• 25:30 - 26:00 they capture a complex intricate often chaotic idea into a simple powerful sentence and it's like what Reddit often does with the tldr everyone wants the tldr at the end of the day and my challenge to you actually is next time that you hear someone say something remarkably clear I want you to think to yourself about how that person has spent hundreds of hours thinking through that
• 26:00 - 26:30 idea in fact the clearer something is the more valuable they often consider it to be to share with us and this is why Clarity is often a currency why I like to say that because it is a measure of how someone it is a measure of someone else's thought time the the final component that I think Society is desperately lacking is intellectual humility humility is the most important component in all of this because it says even though I have all this together even though I've got a model of the world and
• 26:30 - 27:00 I can access the different layers of what's inside my information cones I don't know at all there's still more outside the circles and I think few very few people can say that even though it's true with all of us I think the most powerful person in the room is the one who gives themselves the freedom to say I don't know and I think most people would rather
• 27:00 - 27:30 squeeze water from Stone than say those words why is that well I think the modern moral dictates to us that we should have all of these complex and complete answers partly because we see those coming from a lot of people that we consume people who are full-time speakers and thinkers and have teams writers behind them giving them the best answers for everything and we live in this Society where unfortunately people are rewarded for
• 27:30 - 28:00 what they know and penalized for what they don't this is kind of the Habit that is ingrained in Us in school and it's incredibly hard to unlearn you memorize and repeat when you don't know there's consequence and in order for us to be comfortable discussing a topic and sharing our opinion we need to have the option to say I don't know and I tell you speaking from experience that brings a tremendous amount of comfort knowing that after all
• 28:00 - 28:30 this attempt to figure it out if there's something there if there's something there if there's not sometimes saying that is the most articulate answer and to help you with this here's a document that I've created that lists how every Elite Communicator has displayed this intellectual humility in their interviews press junkets and conversation I suggest picking one of these lines reworking it to yourself and using it knowing that you have this option to say I don't know and that you can word it
• 28:30 - 29:00 well brings a tremendous amount of comfort and confidence in your pursuit of articulating your opinion hope that helps