Most of us are terrible at arguing.
Not because we lack intelligence, but because we mistake noise for progress. We interrupt. We sharpen our points. We wait for our turn to speak instead of listening for where the other person actually is. Afterwards, we replay the exchange and think of better lines we should have used, as if the failure were rhetorical rather than structural.
To argue well, you don’t need a philosopher. You need a translator.
Paul Richards learned this early. He left school without qualifications and moved to Spain as a teenager with his mother. He needed work, so he went into sales. He needed to survive, so he learned Spanish. Later came German, then French, then Thai. Now he’s studying Mandarin. Languages weren’t a hobby for Richards; they were shelter. If he wanted to eat, he had to understand what people meant, not just what they said.
Over time, he noticed something. Language wasn’t mainly about vocabulary. It was about logic. Every person spoke in a private grammar shaped by fear, desire, pride, and history. Arguments failed not because people disagreed, but because they were speaking different languages and insisting the other one was wrong.
Richards now sells property on the coast of Phuket. His work isn’t really about houses. It’s about listening closely enough to hear what someone is afraid of losing. The view, the yield, the status — these are surface details. Underneath lies the real conversation: security, belonging, legacy, peace. Misread that, and no amount of persuasion will save the deal.
The first skill he learned wasn’t how to speak, but when not to. Not every disagreement deserves engagement. Some arguments are better postponed, not because they’re trivial, but because the ground isn’t ready. In sales, you don’t push a locked door; you wait until you’re invited in. The same is true at the kitchen table. Silence isn’t always surrender. Sometimes it’s strategy.
But when the issue matters — when staying quiet would cost something real — the work begins before the argument itself. You don’t start with your position. You start by agreeing on the conditions. Are we trying to solve something, or to win? Are we dealing in facts, or values? Can we speak one at a time? Without this, the conversation collapses into performance.
People rarely change their minds while they feel unheard. You can see it in the body: tension, withdrawal, defence. At that point, logic no longer lands. Persuasion begins with attention.
He once showed a villa to a couple in Phuket: an Australian man focused on investment metrics, and his Thai partner, who spoke of beauty and calm. They were stuck. The man saw spreadsheets; the woman saw a life. Richards stopped talking about the property and pointed instead to a frangipani tree in the garden. To the man, he noted its low maintenance and lasting curb appeal. To the woman, he explained it was lantom, a flower used in temple garlands, a symbol of devotion. He didn’t sell a villa. He translated. For the man, belonging became a sound investment. For the woman, the investment became the foundation for a serene life. The tension dissolved, not through argument, but through shared meaning.
Only then does translation begin.
When Richards presents a house, he doesn’t lead with square footage. He starts with a sentence that ends in because. Not because it sounds clever, but because it forces clarity. “This works for you because it gives your family the stability you said you never had.” If that sentence is wrong, the conversation ends — and that’s useful. An argument without a clear because isn’t an argument. It’s a monologue.
What surprises most people is where power actually sits. Not with the speaker, but with the listener. You can make a flawless case and still lose if it collides with something the other person values more. Duty can lose to exhaustion. Logic can lose to fear. Fairness can lose to survival. None of this is irrational. It’s human.
Before continuing, Richards asks himself one question: who does this matter to? If the answer is only “me”, the argument is already lost.
That doesn’t mean abandoning your position. It means looking for overlap — a place where movement is possible. An objection isn’t a wall; it’s information. “I need to think about it” often means you’ve missed the part that matters most. Progress comes less from pressing a point than from finding a way forward together.
Richards doesn’t see arguments as failures of harmony. He sees them as the machinery of it — the way two private worlds test whether they can coexist. That machinery breaks when disagreement is treated as combat rather than translation.
A psychoanalyst once wrote that the labour of love is to see reality clearly. Richards would add that the labour of argument is to learn the other person’s mother tongue — the language they retreat to when they feel threatened. Master that, and most arguments don’t need to be won.
They resolve themselves.
In the end, the best arguments don’t end in victory. They end in movement: two people starting in different places, discovering — slowly, imperfectly — how to stand in the same room and see the same view.
