Hook, Line, Sinker

The hook is an essential part of the arsenal for anyone out to tell a good story—whether you’re a sales representative pitching to potential clients, an author with an unpublished manuscript, or an entrepreneur trying to present exactly what it is that her company does. The hook captures the audience by grabbing their interest, and ensures that interest and curiosity drive the audience to hear your story and your message. As entrepreneurs presenting to investors that hear a multitude of pitches daily, a good hook can make you stand out.

Now the big question is: How do you capture your audience? Your hook can take a variety of forms—be they emphatic statement, probing question, or enlightening statistic. But every good hook will have a method to make your audience sit up and take note. That is the goal of a hook and that is why it is important. A good hook will tease, it will make the audience think, and it will make the audience listen.

But how do you write a great hook? It’s essential to think about the audience. Understand what it is that they are interested in and what about your business could be useful to them. If your hook can connect with what your investors are looking for, you will have them rapt throughout the rest of your presentation.

So, whether you ask a question, tell an anecdote, or shock with numbers, it’s important to make sure that your potential investors are paying attention to the story you’ve got to tell. There are a few different types of hooks that generally work well.

The Statement

It’s often most compelling to simply state the problem that’s facing your industry or your area of expertise and give a short, impactful explanation of how your product will solve this. For example, say you are addressing the pain-point of trying to collaborate with a remote team. In today’s technological age, collaborating in the same office setting can be difficult already, without adding the pressure of remote team members. So state that. But then make sure to describe not only your solution, but also, more importantly: why your solution is different and better.

The Surprising Statistic

If you have statistics that demonstrate a quantifiable potential for your product or company to reduce bad numbers and/or increase good numbers, it’s a great tactic to introduce these statistics right away. For example, say you are trying to raise money for a technological tool that helps businesses organize their employees, management and resources better and you’ve calculated the potential of a 60% reduction in wasted time and money. That’s a high number and your investors are guaranteed to pay attention.

The Question

Ask your audience a question to engage them from the get-go. This can be a question that is personally applicable, e.g. what if there were a way to electronically track the keys we always seem to misplace? Or it can be a piece of trivia, e.g. how many hospital deaths occur each year due to preventable causes? Either of these questions (and the answers they set up) can excite or dismay the audience and cause them to want more answers.

The Anecdote

This one can be a little tricky since you don’t want your hook to be too long. But if you can make the problem and your solution into a simple, identifiable anecdote, it will instantly connect with investors. Client success stories can be great anecdotes because they are specific. If you have a client that was able to increase traffic and business to their website due to the tools you’ve given them, for example, that anecdote can prove your potential for success.

The Metaphor

Again, this one is tricky because it can be difficult to come up with something that the audience understands and that also accurately portrays what your company is trying to do. However, when done well, a metaphor can instantly paint a picture of why your company and your product are important. Say that you are in an industry that tends to have a high input for a specific process but a low output due to slow technology. This phenomenon could be termed a ‘bottleneck’. If you’ve got a revolutionary tool that will speed up the process, you’d effectively eliminate or at least reduce that bottleneck.

Remember that starting strong could be the difference between engaging investors and having them zone out during the rest of your pitch. Make sure to capture investor attention with a really great hook. Give your investors a roadmap of why your product is important and how being on board will be useful for them. You can do it all with a simple, well-thought-out hook!

Different Shades of Anarchy

In my exploration of the Internet today, I was led to a great epiphany about anarchy, society, and politics in general. It all began with some research into Noam Chomsky, who is now well known for his political dissidence, but who I first came across when we had studied his review of B.F. Skinner in my intro Psych class in high school.

While delving into Chomsky's background, I was incredibly struck by his political views and the theories behind them. What really caught me, was that he described himself as a libertarian socialist, a view that Chomsky states as being extended from classical liberalism. I was instantly intrigued, since I was not familiar with either of the political ideologies. Exploring further, I found that the two schools of thought are at once similar and different. They are both seemingly rooted in anarchy, or at least some form of limited government. However, libertarian socialism seems to disagree fundamentally with classical liberalism in regards to the issue of private property. Socialism, of course, seeks to abolish it whereas liberalism seeks to protect it.

I found this dichotomy to be a perfect indication of the gray area of life in that the same mechanism (that of limited government) could be used to accomplish either of two diametrically opposed causes. It further outlines the two sides of the same coin of anarchy: the anarcho-capitalists and the anarcho-socialists. It made me think back to a class I took my freshman year of college about the 1960s and the anarchic hippie era. We were learning about New Journalism at the time and studying Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that told the story of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, and their journey across the country. The material was highly engaging and an interesting perspective on the times, but what really stuck out to me was a comment my Teaching Assistant made during our discussion of the topic. He told us that, in fact, Ken Kesey and his followers had voted for Barry Goldwater--an out and out radical conservative--in the 1964 Presidential election. Goldwater's views were a fore-shadowing of the views claimed by today's republican party. His platform was a call for the abolishment of state led programs and a fiscal conservatism that used the least amount of government intervention possible. AND he was a conservative supported by the southern white constituency (formerly the southern democrats that had been in favor of slavery and segregation), which was most certainly afraid of the hippie revolution.

So then I thought to myself: what were a bunch of hippies doing voting for a man who would have liked to drive them out of the country? And that was when I realized that what brought them together was what both of them desired most: some form of anarchy, or at least a move in that direction. It's funny, really, how divided two ideologies can be while still being parts of the same mixed bag. Anyone in the GOP would be mortified to think that their call for limited government would be echoed with the same fervor by a hippie like Ken Kesey. What people fail to realize, especially in the realm of politics, is that what we all want is not always as different as we think.

Neurological Experiment Write-Up (Excerpt)

The Effect of Chronic Morphine Use on the Connections of the D2-enriched Medium Spiny Neurons of the Striatum.

Abstract

To date, there have been no observations of the effect of chronic opiates such as morphine on the functional connectivity of the Medium Spiny Neurons (MSNs), which are critical mediators of the response of the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway to drugs of abuse. We propose that chronic morphine administration will alter the connectivity of these striatal neurons. Using a pseudorabies virus that is retrogradely transported and changes color from red to green when encountering cre-recombinase, we have traced the connections of the indirect D2-enriched MSNs in mice expressing cre-recombinase in D2 neurons. We propose, and will test, that prolonged morphine, followed by a period of withdrawal, will change the connections of the indirect, D2-enriched pathway. This could help further elucidate the mechanistic changes that occur during chronic drug use and withdrawal.

Introduction

Chronic opioid exposure alters neuronal connectivity in rodents through modifications in dendritic spine formation (Robinson and Kolb, 1999; Robinson et al., 2002). Similar drug-induced changes in connectivity have been found in specific brain regions of heroin addicts (Ma, N., et al., 2010; Ma, N., et al., 2010) and in direct but not indirect medium spiny neurons (MSNs) following experimenter-delivered cocaine (Kim, J., et al., 2011). However, there have been no such studies regarding the effect of chronic opiates, such as morphine, on the functional connectivity of these MSNs. We hypothesized that chronic morphine administration would alter the connectivity of these specific striatal neurons. Connectivity changes in the brain can help explain the lasting effects of chronic drug use and addiction. Once brain chemistry is altered, and an individual is no longer functioning ‘normally’, the changes show a behavioral reinforcement of drug-taking habits. This has major implications for addiction and chronic drug use.

The addiction profile consists of several distinct stages, including acquisition, habituation, and withdrawal. The direct and indirect dopamine striatal pathways seem to have an effect on different stages of addiction (Lobo and Nestler, 2011). In order to understand more comprehensively how the mesolimbic system adapts to chronic drug exposure, we aim to study both pathways. For this study, we focused on the indirect D2- enriched MSNs. D2-neurons function as part of the indirect pathway, which has been shown to be involved in the withdrawal stage of addiction with regards to chronic drug use (Lobo and Nestler, 2011). We used a pseudorabies 263 virus (PRV 263), on animals treated with either chronic doses of morphine, or saline, to trace the connections of these MSNs. The pseudorabies virus contains the brainbow cassette which changes color from red to green when expressed in Cre-containing cells (Lichtman, et al., 2007). This virus is retrogradely transported and, as it is replication competent, will trace multi-order connections (Card, et al., 2011). PRV 263 allows us to directly label the pathway through the help of multi-fluorescence capabilities. The virus is used with transgenic mice, engineered to have the D2 gene linked to cre- recombinase.
Our data showed a significant difference between morphine-treated and control animals in two specific areas: the dentate gyrus and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). On a very basic level, the changes associated with this difference happen in the brain through drug-induced neuronal plasticity. By doing studies such as this one and distinguishing exactly which areas, and in exactly what ways these changes are occurring, we may be better equipped to treat addiction and chronic drug use further down the line.