250: How To Win Any Argument And Influence Others With Victor Cheng

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The way to win an argument is to open by making the other person’s case for them, better than they made it themselves. Victor Cheng learned this influencing executives 40 years his senior when he was 22, and it works because it removes the power struggle underneath most disagreements before you say a word about your own position.

Victor is a former McKinsey consultant and Stanford graduate who advises CEOs, small businesses, and Inc. 500 companies. He runs CaseInterview.com, which teaches people how to pass consulting case interviews, and he estimates 80% to 90% of new hires at McKinsey, Bain, and BCG across roughly 100 countries learned from his material.

Below is his argument technique, how to build executive presence when you have no authority, why EQ overtakes IQ as you advance, and how a site he forgot about for three years became a business.

Key takeaways

• Open an argument by restating the other person’s position so well they nod along. Then ask permission to share a different point of view.
• Never use right or wrong. Right implies someone must lose, which turns an argument into a power contest.
• Executive presence starts with knowing your material, then investing in relationships with everyone who will be in the room.
• IQ matters most in your first job as an individual contributor. EQ matters more as you lead people doing the work.
• EQ starts with self-awareness. Victor has clients set an hourly phone alarm asking how they feel.
• Every purchase has a stated logical reason and an unstated emotional one. High EQ people sell to the second.
• CaseInterview.com sat forgotten on a server for three years before his web host shut down the account for excess traffic.
• Victor’s phone script for reaching any CEO is “I’m returning his phone call,” which requires making them call you first.

How to win an argument by making the other side’s case

Victor never begins a response with what he thinks. He begins with what the other person thinks and feels strongly about, argued as passionately, articulately, and clearly as he can manage.

The line is something like: it sounds like what you’re saying is this, for these reasons, and this is why you feel strongly about it. Did I hear you correctly?

This works even when you completely disagree. You are not claiming to agree, you are demonstrating that you listened.

It is disarming because people in an argument expect a fight. Restating their position better than they stated it leaves them nothing to defend, so they go quiet and start paying attention.

Then you make the turn. Something clicked for me in what you said, I think you’re mostly right, and there is one piece I’m not sure about where I have a slightly different view.

Why you should ask permission before disagreeing

With anyone more senior, Victor asks permission explicitly: would you be open to hearing a different point of view? That question does two things at once.

It concedes that the other person is the only one who decides whether he speaks. You ask permission when the other person has more power, so asking is a direct acknowledgment of the hierarchy.

It also avoids the words right and wrong entirely. Right or wrong implies someone must win, and Victor deliberately uses “different” instead.

The reason this matters is that arguments run on two levels: the actual logic, and an emotional layer that usually contains a power dynamic. Between spouses it is who holds power in the marriage. Between corporate peers it is who is next in line.

Corporate politics gets its bad reputation because people use business issues as cover for jockeying over power. Removing the power contest lets the ideas actually be heard.

Nobody likes being told they are wrong. That applies to CEOs, to spouses, and to children equally.

How to build executive presence with no authority

Gravitas, or executive presence, is what determines whether your ideas get taken seriously regardless of your seniority. In most companies the most senior person gets heard even with a bad idea, and the most knowledgeable person in the room gets ignored.

The entry requirement is competence. If you are not genuinely strong in your stated area of expertise, you do not deserve executive presence.

The second element is relationships built before the meeting. The person with presence in a decision meeting has already invested in the people who will be in the room.

Victor’s advice to a friend newly promoted to her first CFO role was to build a relationship with every functional area, learn each one’s key issues and concerns, and understand their perspective well enough to argue their department’s needs more eloquently than they can.

Do that, then put it in your financial plan, and they will listen. They already have evidence that you listened to them first.

The rule that produces presence is taking others seriously before expecting to be taken seriously.

How this translates to building online relationships

Online, the equivalent is doing your homework before you ask for anything. Read the material, then ask an intelligent question that is not already answered on the blog or the YouTube channel.

Victor receives tens of thousands of email requests and the ones he dislike most treat him as a human Google. He has written roughly 700 articles and 1.5 million words on his topic, and people ask him where to start without checking any of it.

The requests he answers are the opposite: I read your book, went through the articles and videos, and there is one thing I still cannot figure out. Often the answer is that he genuinely never covered it, and he is glad to help because the person met him more than halfway.

Read their LinkedIn, their last blog post, their recent social posts. Do the basics.

Why EQ matters more than IQ as you advance

IQ matters most in your first job because you are an individual contributor doing the work yourself. EQ takes over as you become a manager, director, VP, founder, or CEO, because at that point you personally do very little of the work.

A new engineer has to be good at engineering. A VP of engineering has to be good at managing people who are good at engineering, which is a completely different skill.

Victor is direct about the cultural angle. As an Asian American he grew up in a culture that, in his opinion, overemphasized IQ to a fault, and both career success and happiness eventually transition to depending on EQ.

In business specifically, EQ dominates because you need clients and customers. Most of EQ is the ability to understand the world from their point of view.

That skill drives sales, marketing message selection, product design, and personal brand building. Putting yourself in someone else’s position is the foundational move for all of it.

How to develop emotional intelligence

EQ starts with emotional self-awareness, because you can only recognize a feeling in someone else if you recognize it in yourself. To spot that someone is irritated with you, you need to remember what your own irritation felt like and what you did while feeling it.

Victor’s example is the word “fine.” The word literally means okay, and the intonation frequently means the opposite, and you can only hear that gap if you have felt the same conflict yourself.

The exercise he gives clients is setting an hourly alarm on their phone that asks a single question: how are you feeling right now? Checking in with yourself is what builds the capacity to read others.

Empathy follows from that. You recognize someone is having a rough day because you have had rough days and the signs are similar.

Victor’s observation from traveling widely is that surface experiences vary enormously across cultures and the underlying human emotional experience is remarkably consistent. Loss feels like loss regardless of the language.

The stated reason and the real reason people buy

Every decision, personal or professional, has a stated intellectual reason and an unstated emotional one. The stated reason for a new car is that the old one broke. The unstated reason for the Ferrari might be feeling middle-aged and wanting to look good.

Nobody says the second one out loud because it is embarrassing. That is exactly why it goes unaddressed.

In sales, a buyer may decline because they are afraid of being fired if your product fails. What they will say is that your price is too high, because that is a reasonable objection.

Someone with high EQ picks up the fear and finds a face-saving way to address it without naming it. That subtlety is what closes seven-figure deals, where the driving factor is emotional and never stated aloud.

This matches my own experience evaluating enterprise software. The decision often came down to which salesperson we trusted to take care of us afterward.

How Victor Cheng built a personal brand by accident

Victor left a tech executive role because his first child was on the way and he was traveling 26 weeks a year. He was on a trajectory toward running a tech company and could not see how that fit the kind of father he wanted to be.

His goal on leaving was getting clients, not building a brand. The brand became the necessary vehicle once he imposed one constraint on himself: no more airplanes.

He is very good at selling in person, and selling in person to the Fortune 500 requires flying. Removing flights left direct mail, telephone, and the internet, and on those channels nobody hires someone they have never heard of.

So being known became the requirement for getting clients.

The phone script that gets you a meeting with any CEO

Victor’s script works every time and consists of one line. The assistant asks what this is regarding, and he says he is returning their call.

The trick is that it has to be true. His entire approach is engineering situations where the person calls him first.

That is what content does. Write something that resonates, give people a way to reach out, and the callback becomes legitimate.

His first experience of this was on a Usenet-era discussion forum around 1998, answering a business question at length. A random person reached out saying they liked what he wrote and wanted to pick his brain.

The caller turned out to be one of the newest billionaires on the Forbes list, who had just started a software company and had been reading the forum.

How to get your content in front of people you cannot reach

Victor’s method for the genuinely hard-to-reach is old-fashioned: write an article, or get one published in a magazine, and FedEx it to them. FedEx always gets opened.

It works far better when someone they know passes it along with a recommendation. Victor regularly tells friends which three books are the best on a topic, which is one route material takes to reach the right person.

You cannot target precisely, and you can make sure you exist in the ecosystem your targets operate in and write about the issues they care about.

How to find what content to create

Identify your target audience, then identify their top three headaches. Create content that solves them.

Victor’s favorite market research exercise is going to a trade show or conference where prospective customers gather and listening for complaining. Most people move away from complainers, and he moves toward them.

Wealthy people with money who complain a lot are an excellent customer base. Capture what they complain about and ask which of those problems you could solve with a product, a service, or expertise.

Find someone with a headache who will pay to make it stop, then be the Tylenol for that headache.

How CaseInterview.com became a business by accident

Victor gave a one-day lecture at Harvard on the consulting case interview, recorded it, put the videos on YouTube, and posted them on a one-page site called CaseInterview.com. Then he forgot about it for three years.

His web host contacted him saying they were shutting down his account because the server kept crashing from traffic. His actual corporate site was nowhere near that load.

The log files pointed at the forgotten project, which was pulling tens of thousands of visitors per billing period. Eight to ten years later, over a million people a year read his work there.

Why it grew through word of mouth

Roughly 10 people found the site in the first month, used the material, and got job offers. For consulting hires straight out of undergrad, those offers run $90,000 to $200,000 for someone who is 21.

A year later their friends at Harvard and Stanford asked how they passed the case interview. The answer was a name, a URL, and six hours of free tutorials on the homepage.

Twice as many people got offers the following year because twice as many knew about it. Each subsequent class asked the class ahead of them what the good resources were, and the growth compounded.

Victor’s freemium model

Roughly 90% of Victor’s content is free, including about 700 articles and eight to ten hours of video and PDFs. That material has been free for eight to ten years and it is what people actually use to get hired.

The paid tier is depth rather than substance withheld. The free tutorial is six to eight hours on how to pass the case interview. The premium version is 24 hours of recorded actual interviews with his play-by-play analysis of what each candidate did well, what they did badly, and how a better answer would have sounded.

He also runs one-on-one coaching with a team of former interviewers from top firms, delivering close to 10,000 individual Skype practice interviews since 2011 across more than 60 countries.

Why giving content away for free works

Free is the single best marketing strategy when your product is genuinely exceptional, and it fails when the product is not. Victor’s examples run from Mrs. Fields cookie samples to enterprise software given free to college students who later cost their employers a million dollars.

The reason it works is risk removal. If Victor tells you his product is exceptional, you have no reason to believe him, because everyone says that.

Free samples take the risk off the buyer entirely and let the product make the claim.

He is applying the same playbook to a new site, FirstTimeCEO.com, aimed at CEOs of companies over a million in sales growing at least 50% a year. He pulled strong pieces from his archive, published them, and is converting them into video and slideshow formats.

How to get known when you are starting from nothing

Participate meaningfully on other people’s platforms. Comment on blogs in your field, and comment in a way that genuinely adds something: examples, resources, real contribution.

Bloggers read their comments and notice people who write something interesting, especially repeatedly. In digital spaces, being helpful to one person happens in front of ten thousand others.

Guest content on other people’s sites is among the strongest strategies for getting your own work recognized, because you can link back to it. Victor is explicit that appearing on this podcast is the same mechanism in action.

You can find Victor at CaseInterview.com and FirstTimeCEO.com.

Frequently asked questions

How do you win an argument without making someone defensive?

Open by restating their position more clearly and persuasively than they stated it, then confirm you heard them correctly. That removes the fight they expected and makes them receptive before you introduce your own view.

Why should you avoid saying someone is wrong?

Right and wrong imply that someone has to lose, which turns the disagreement into a power contest rather than a discussion of ideas. Victor Cheng uses the word “different” instead and asks permission to share another perspective.

What is executive presence and how do you build it?

Executive presence, or gravitas, is what makes your ideas get taken seriously regardless of your rank. It requires genuine competence in your field plus relationships with the people who will be in the room, built before the meeting happens.

Is EQ more important than IQ in business?

IQ matters most as an individual contributor, and EQ becomes more important as you lead others who do the work. Business specifically depends on understanding customers’ perspectives, which is an EQ skill.

How do you improve your emotional intelligence?

Start with self-awareness, because recognizing a feeling in someone else requires having recognized it in yourself. Victor has clients set an hourly phone alarm asking how they are feeling.

What is the real reason people buy?

Every decision has a stated logical reason and an unstated emotional one, and people rarely voice the second. A buyer may cite price when the real obstacle is fear of the consequences if your product fails.

How do you get a meeting with a CEO?

Victor’s script is telling the assistant he is returning their call, which works every time and requires the CEO to have contacted him first. Content marketing is what makes that call happen.

Does giving content away for free actually work?

It works extremely well when your product is genuinely exceptional, because it removes the buyer’s risk and lets the product prove its own quality. It works poorly when the product is not good, since the free sample demonstrates that too.