"Self Effacing Language" or “Humility at Work: Lessons from Buffett and Hollywood”

On this episode of How to Talk to Humans, host Larry Wilson explores the often-overlooked power of being self-effacing—and why it’s a true sign of strength. Through the story of Warren Buffett, Larry shows how humility played a key role in long-term success. He also shares a memorable behind-the-scenes story involving writer William Goldman and director Rob Reiner during the making of Stephen King’s Misery, revealing how self-effacement can resolve conflict and strengthen collaboration. Thoughtful, entertaining, and filled with practical lessons you can use right away.

Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method

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Transcript

Larry Wilson 0:00

Hi, this is Larry Wilson, and this is How to Talk to Humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far? I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies and exponentials, this is not the show for you. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned for 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world. And their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. Hi, thanks for joining me again for another episode of this podcast. I wanted to talk today about self-effacing behavior. And we've talked about it here before, but as always, I'm responding sometimes when those of you who listen to this have written to me, emailed to me, and asked for clarification on certain points. I'm always happy to oblige. And I can understand that specifically with uh self-effacement, it's a little slippery, it's a little tricky to pin this one down because it's kind of subtle. I can tell you what it doesn't mean. It is not self-abasement. It is not meant to put yourself down. It is not meant to criticize yourself or embarrass yourself or humiliate yourself. To be self-effacing simply means to be candid about the things that are not your strongest suit. And sometimes it's very simple, some of it's something very simple. You know, I can personally think of so many different examples with myself, but I'll I'll give you a simple one immediately here. I can't sing. I have a terrible ear. I wish I could, but I can't. I don't make a big deal about it. But if someone wanted me to go to karaoke with them or something, I might still go. I just probably wouldn't get up and try to sing. And if someone asked me, I'd tell them very candidly, I'd say, oh, you haven't heard something like that since the orphanage burnt down. You know, you don't want to hear that sound, that horrible sound I would make trying to sing. But I'll give you perhaps more concrete examples of very famous, successful, well-to-do people who can be very self-effacing. And the reason I think it's a critical skill to have is because it has a powerful effect on people when you're speaking or writing to them. It's particularly powerful when you're speaking in real time to people because they realize this is genuine. This is not some sort of artificially created gimmick or something like that. Even though, for example, I'll tell you, uh I'm going to share a story with you that uh Warren Buffett told at one of his yearly investor meetings. Now, I've never met Buffett. I wish I had. I'm a big fan of his. I'm a big fan of him, really, because his communication skills are so spot on. He's he's really something. And uh one of the markers of that is that if you ever listen to him speak, he can explain almost anything, even very complicated ideas about investing and finance so that anyone can understand them. That's not by accident, that's not luck, that's clearly skill that he's developed using very similar techniques to what I'm teaching in Wilson Method. A really great example of this is his self-effacing behavior describing his flagship company, the first company he bought, Berkshire Halfway. And I never know if these stories, when you hear them, are true. I only know what people have shared with me and what Buffett has said publicly. I'm assuming it must be true. I don't know how many years ago it is, I would guess 60 or 70 years ago, Buffett was just starting to get involved in uh investing, and uh for some reason or other he had gotten in very heavily invested in this company, Berkshire Hathaway. It was a mill, it produced uh clothing and I guess and cotton and things like that. And through uh investment strategies that are too complicated for me to be able to follow, because he was a large shareholder, at some point he uh he thought, well, he could really turn this company around. It wasn't doing well, it was floundering. But he had some idea, and this is, I guess, why he he bought so many shares of the company. So many shares that at some point the owner, I guess, wanted to buy back the outstanding shares. It was something, a very uh complex stock exchange arrangement that he had in mind. But he went to the largest shareholder who was Warren Buffett and said, I just want to find out if I offer you a buyout for eleven dollars and uh eleven and three eighths a share, would you accept that? And Buffett said, Yeah, if you do that, like right now, very shortly right now, yes, I would do that. I would accept 11 and 38s. Oh, sorry, sorry, I've I've already bungled the story. He said, the guy said, would you accept a if I gave you eleven and a half, would you accept that? And Buffett says, yes, I would. If you did it in a timely manner right now, I would accept eleven and a half. And the guy says, okay. And so he goes back and puts together this whole offer, and he Buffett receives a thing in the mail that says the tender offer he's received is for 11 and 3 eighths. So he describes, Warren Buffett describes being incensed by this, saying, all I could think is this guy's trying to cheat me out of one-eighth. And oh, he was just incensed. And so he writes the guy back and says, No, I will not accept this offer. This is not what we agreed on. No deal. And he's so enraged that he winds up mounting a whole hostile takeover and buys the whole company away from this guy. So he takes control of Berkshire Hathaway. Now, this sounds pretty heroic at this part. Little guy won't let himself be pushed around. But as Buffett is telling the story, what becomes clear is he says, this is like the dumbest decision I ever made. He said, I bought this company, it was a bad company. It was losing money. I thought I could turn it around. But everything I did wasn't working, wasn't turning around. This guy offered to buy me out, and because he tried to take advantage of me, I said, no way, no deal. He said, so I wound up buying him out. So now I own this terrible company. And he said, his good friend, who was with him for many years until his recent death, Charlie Munger, counseled him and said, Yeah, you should unload this. We should get rid of this. It's just bleeding money. But Buffett said he was determined. You know this feeling. We've all had this feeling at some time or another. I'm not going to let them outwit me. I'm not going to be snookered on this. And so he said for the next however many years, they tried every conceivable strategy to turn this company around. And we're not able to continue to lose money. And hearing Buffett tell this story, it's pretty funny because he's so candid and open about a bad decision he made that just kept getting worse. And at some point in there, whether it was Buffett by himself or with Charlie Mook, at some point in there he realized: oh, there's no point in trying to fix this bad company. I should focus on good companies. And so because they had the name and because it was under the rubric of Berkshire Hathaway, it remained Berkshire Hathaway. But Berkshire Hathaway was not where all his success came from. That he then slowly started to accumulate companies that he felt were fundamentally good companies. And it when you hear him talk about it, being so open and candid, you know how a lot of people only paint themselves as the hero in their stories? Every decision they make is brilliant, or at least if it doesn't seem brilliant at first, it's revealed to secretly be brilliant. It might be kind of interesting, but it's not nearly as compelling as when someone shares their foibles, as when someone shares the mistakes they've made and foolish decisions they made, and emotional choices they made that anyone could see were not good choices. So, as Buffett describes this, it really makes you like him. It really makes you trust him. Because you think this guy has nothing to hide. He doesn't have anything to prove to anyone. So there's something almost charming about when he comes out and just says, yeah, that was a terrible decision. And for years was costing us money. Just terrible, awful decision. And he still, there is, you know, it's still a great story because there is a moral to be learned from the story. And he says, What we learn from this is don't ever try to buy a bad company and fix it. He said, from that point on, we made a conscious decision. We're only going to buy good companies and hold on to them. And that's what he did, and that's why he's the most successful investor in history. I also think of the screenwriter William Goldman. He not only wrote, I think he received an Academy Award for All the President's Men, and he wrote, of course, The Princess Bride, Butchcasting and Sundance Kid, Marathon Man. It goes on and on. I mean, written huge, huge successful films, but also he was also secretly behind the scenes. Goldman was a famous script doctor uh in Hollywood, where people had problems with films, and Goldman would be brought in and paid handsomely, but anonymously, to fix problems with scripts or improve them or rewrite them and stuff. He's funny. He's a very funny guy. And he was hired by Rob Reiner to write the screenplay for Stephen King's book, Misery. And I don't know if you've seen the film. I don't know if you're, I don't want to give too much away in case you haven't seen it. It's an interesting film. It's not perfect. A lot of King's stuff is so much better as a book because he's painting images with words. And what that forces us to do is be a co-creator. It means in your mind, you're picturing these things, and no writer, no filmmaker, no painter, no photographer, no one can match the power of your imagination. This is why we always want to engage the people we're communicating with. Because if you say, imagine this, or picture this, or what if, if you get them to actually think about it, what they're thinking in their mind is better than anything you could describe. But anyway, William Goldman is hired, and I'm trying to tell the story without giving too much away in the story. There's a horrible event in what would be the third act of this film, and it's uh terrifying and horrible. It involves one of the characters getting their foot chopped off with an ax. Goldman writing this is based on Stephen King's book. Goldman writing the screenplay tells Rob Reiner, you know, you've got to keep this exactly as written, that this person's foot gets chopped off. And this starts a big argument where Reiner speaking with other people and executives says, I think in the book, I mean it's going to be horrible however you do it, but in the book, somehow it's not as horrible as if we see on screen someone's foot being chopped off. And they argue back and forth. And Goldman says, you know, I can see his point of view and I can understand, but I still, no, no, I insist. And Reiner then comes and tells him and says, I'm going to change it. I'm going to have the person's ankle crushed with a big sledgehammer, but not the foot cut off. And Goldman is incensed, just says, No, don't you understand? And he argues his point. This is so important to the blah, blah. And they go back and forth. And then Reiner says, Well, he'll reconsider. And Goldman is implacable. He cannot be moved off this position, saying, No, you've got to keep it exact. They've got to have it where the foot is cut off with an axe. And it goes back and forth. And finally, Reiner contrives to have William Goldman occupied with something that'll keep him away from the set the day they're shooting this. And they shoot it the way Reiner wants, not with the foot being chopped off, but with the ankle being smashed with a big sledgehammer. And when Goldman comes back, he's so angry about it. And then he sees the film. And seeing the film, he realizes that Reiner was right and he was wrong. And in his book, in Goldman's book Adventures in the Screen Trade, he talks about this and he says, and even seeing that I was wrong, if I was asked to make this decision again, knowing that I was wrong, I would still choose the wrong decision. Well, that's so wonderfully self-effacing. He's saying, I was wrong, I couldn't see it, and then evidence was presented that showed me and convinced me I was wrong. And if I was asked to make the decision, knowing what I know now, I'd still make the wrong decision. It's so wonderful because it shows him so human, it shows him the frailty of people's emotions and their human desire to want to be right and want to be the one in charge. And Goldman reveals this in such a candid, open way that again, just like the example I gave of Warren Buffett, it makes Goldman so winning. It makes him so likable, it makes us feel like I understand how you feel. I could feel just like that. That's just like me. I'd make that same kind of mistake. The fact that he doesn't try to gloss it over or repaper it as something more noble, that he just seems to acknowledge it as this is my failing, and I can't change it, I can't be different, and I know I'm completely wrong. Even though I know I'm wrong, still can't change it. That's a fantastic example of being self effacing. I have More to share with you. But not until next week. I hope to see you then on another episode of How to Talk to Humans. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. In fact, if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Humans.