Framing
Not your typical glass half-full vs empty kinda post
There are very few unanimously applicable, powerful tools in life and I believe Framing is one of them.
And no, I’m not talking about just the negative to positive framing that self-help content talks about. That’s useful as well, but I’m talking about a more general skillset to frame things differently.
E.g. A lot of nerds detest sales. This comes from various things, could be fear, a general belief that sales is inversely correlated with substance or just a general unwillingness. However, I’ve realised this approach to sales can change with one single frame change - curiosity.
I believe people are infinitely complex, and hence I’m very curious to figure them out now. So I approach sales as a set of two questions:
Can I figure out what this person wants?
Can I provide value to this person?
This is so much fun because of a lot of subliminal things that are happening with this framing:
Instead of treating sales as just a necessity, I make it a question, whose answer will be discovered as I go along. The frame changes from the pressure of achievement to the pleasure of curiosity.
Both these questions are often not just a single encounter questions but those that get unravelled over time. This subconsciously orients myself towards the long-term.
At a very base level, this becomes a game. And I become a kid who plays this game to discover how good I am. There’s something immensely powerful about treating situations as games - may be because we spent our childhood spent playing games, we treat something framed as a game with a lot more positivity.
This is just an example of sales, but I believe you can do this with anything in life.
And the best thing about this is that you can choose the framing that works for you. E.g. The earlier situation was framed on curiosity, you could have framed it on helpfulness as well.
Among other types of framing, there’s inversion, which I believe is just framing applied binary. Charlie Munger is quite famous for this. E.g. Instead of asking what you want while running a company, you can ask what to avoid, and the answer is quite simple - death. Inversion is very popular in solving mathematical problems, but it can be applied to almost any situation / conversation.
It may probably take a long time to discover what kind of framing works for you, but then again, that itself is an infinite game that you can play.
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