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Research has shown that your impression of someone is generally based on the average of the available information about them, not the sum. So telling people one great thing about yourself will leave them with a better impression of you than telling than one great thing and one pretty good one. And it gets worse if you tell them one great thing, one pretty good thing, and two mediocre things. Stop with one great thing.

The next task was to reframe the competition: "We are honored to be competing against two other great firms today. I know each of them could serve you well because they have large teams, multiple offices, legions of young, energetic researchers, and the best-paid analysts in the world, and when working a deal, these firms spare no expense to tackle the job." This was my way of saying that Goldhammer and the group from London were big, bloated corporations with too many people, many of them young and inexperienced. With this statement, I had reframed the competition as young, overstaffed, worried about their fees, and generally overweight.

Think about this for a moment: Your social value is fluid and changes with the environment you are in--or the environment you create. If you wish to elevate your social value in any given situation, you can do so by redirecting people into a domain where you are in charge. This is easier to do than you might think.

Pitches are sent from the modern--and smart--part of the brain: the neocortex. But they are received by a part of the brain that is 5 million years older (and not as bright.) This is a serious problem if you are trying to pitch anything.

The "Why Now?" Frame You're almost ready to pitch the "big idea." But first, a reminder of the obvious: Nobody wants to invest time or money into an old deal that has been sitting around. This is why you need to introduce a "Why now?" frame. It's vitally important that the target knows that your idea is new, emerging from current market opportunities and that it's not some relic left over from bygone days. The target needs to know that you are pitching a new idea that come to life from a pattern of forces that you recognized, seized, and are now taking advantage of. And the target needs to know that you have more knowledge about these things than anyone else.

He knew I could deliver a real face melter of a pitch, a compelling and dramatic story that explained everything. Why now, why us, critical path, upside, downside, and competitive advantage. All stuff that I'd done hundreds of times.

a great pitch is not about procedure. It's about getting and keeping attention. And that means you have to own the room with frame control, drive emotions with intrigue pings, and get to a hookpoint fairly quickly.

Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience show that our brain developed in three separate stages. First come the old brain, or "crocodile brain"--we'll call it the "croc brain" for short. It's responsible for the initial filtering of all incoming messages, it generates most survival fight-or-flight responses, and it produces strong, basic emotions, too. But when it comes to decision making, the croc brain's reasoning power is . . . well, primitive. It simply doesn't have a lot of capacity, and most of what it does have is devoted primarily to the things it takes to keep us alive. When I am referring to the croc brain, I am referring to this level. The midbrain, which come next, determines the meaning of things and social situations. And finally, the neocortex evolved with a problem-solving ability and is able to think about complex issues and produce answers using reason.