Quotes Archive - The Art of Communicating

How to find out whether you’re doing it?

Conductor Benjamin Zander has a simple rule to find out:

“When their eyes are shining you know you’re doing it.” – Benjamin Zander

I have adopted that rule from the moment I first saw his great TED talk and it has served me really well ever since.

The moment that people see order from chaos, that they see the path that was there all along, yet hidden in darkness, that moment is often exactly when their eyes start shining.

When you’ve experienced that moment with your clients, your audience, your children or anyone else even once, there can only be one conclusion for any further conversation that you’re going to have:

“Who am I that their eyes are not shining?” – Benjamin Zander

Simplifying decision making

“I try to make one decision that removes 1000 decisions.” – Tim Ferris

Rather than to struggle each time you’re standing in front of the candy aisle, it’s much easier to decide that candy just isn’t for you and skip the aisle altogether. Or that you only buy this or that chocolate brand. Might be a totally different decision for you, but Ferris’ point still holds: making a thousand decision is actually exhausting, even if they are small. Whenever you can find a general rule for your actions, life gets easier in that regard.

What Tim Ferris uses as a life hack works even better for teams.

It can be super frustrating and totally exhausting when every decision escalates into a discussion about tiny details and different perspectives. Aligning your team and focusing everyone on a common mission takes this load off of your team and makes life so much easier for everyone on the team.

But it does more than that: if everyone agrees on a guiding star, decision making can become distributed. When it’s obvious how a decision is made, everyone on the team can make that decision.

What’s required is to get clarity about what actually matters for us as a team and as a company and then communicate this openly and frequently.

How much preparation you need …

Some experts seem to appear on TV all the time. Whenever something happens, these people pop up in TV shows to explain what happened.

It’s the kind of people who always seem to know what to say. Who understand quickly and answer eloquently. Who are clever, relaxed and quick-witted.

Science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of them. Yet, if you ask him how he became so quick-witted, his answer might surprise you:

You need to be 10x prepared in order to look like you didn’t have to prepare. – Neil deGrasse Tyson

So, yes, these people are smart. But probably the smartest aspect about their personality is that they prepare. That’s why they always know what to say. That’s why they are quick to answer. And that’s why they are so easy to work with for TV stations.

They don’t just wing it. So they don’t easily fail. TV stations can rely on them. Because they prepare. And, in essence, that’s why they are always on TV.

Loosing sight of why we communicate

Elon Musk [on his priorities] as a CEO:

Spend less time on finance, spend less time in conference rooms, less time on PowerPoint and more time just trying to make your product as amazing as possible.

It’s easy to mistake Excel and PowerPoint as your job. It is not (for most of us). They are just tools that don’t replace the actual work of thinking the problem through. Of digging deep. Doing the work. Refining the product. And interacting with the customers.

I’ve seen my fair share of presentations that discuss customer personas while no-one has ever actually spoken to one of these customers. I’ve seen plenty of presentations that obsess over beautifully designed slides that carry no meaningful information. I’ve seen more than enough presentations that formalised processes that no one ever needed.

The thing is that a presentation can only ever tell a story about reality. It’s never reality itself. When we confuse the two, we’re headed for trouble. And lots of wasted time.

When presentations become the work, something’s wrong. Sure, invest the time to make your communication as clear as possible. If PowerPoint helps to do so, use PowerPoint. But never loose sight of why you communicate in the first place.

Interestingly, clarity in your thinking leads to clarity in your communication. This in turn leads to shorter presentations which frees the time to have actual conversations with actual customers.

If in doubt, focus on relevance

If our story isn’t relevant, it doesn’t matter how beautiful our slides are, how elaborate our body language is, or how eloquent our wording is.

If our audience can’t relate to us, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s a story it doesn’t relate to, a beautiful design, or eloquent words.

If, on the other hand, we manage to make it highly relevant, our audience is willing to tolerate quite some frustration.

That’s why – if in doubt – I’d always work on relevance before I begin working on the show. I’d always work on substance before I begin working on the delivery.

Copywriting legend John Caples put it this way:

“If I had a year to create an ad, I’d spend 11 months working on the appeal, and a month – or even a week — on writing the ad. In other words, what you say in your copy is much more important than how you say it.”

About a happy man – Donald Knuth’s approach to email

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. – Donald Knuth

We’re now 31 years past Jan 1, 1990 and Donald Knuth still is a happy man who has no email address. Knuth is one of the most famous computer scientists (in case you don’t know him). His work includes “The Art of Computer Programming”, a beautiful but at the same time scary multivolume and never finished piece of art about the craft of computer programming.

But why would a computer scientist – of all people – get rid of email? Here’s Knuth’s answer:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

Thus, he takes roughly one day every six months to answer to mail and he spends the rest of his days digging deep (and continuing to write The Art of Computer Programming).

When have you last dug that deep? When have you last consciously shut down email (and other messaging channels) to focus on a thing that is near and dear to your heart? What could you achieve if you shut down email for just one week?

“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

While that makes for one of the greatest movie quotes, it’s certainly not the kind of business we strive for. I don’t know about you, but the businesses I work with would much rather make an offer their customer wouldn’t want to refuse.

While Don Corleone has a deep understanding of what’s worst for his audience, they strive for a deep understanding of what’s best for their audience. Don Corleone’s offer is made out of a position of power while their offer is made out of a position of relevance. While he uses force, they rely on resonance.

The crucial difference is free will. Telling a story that resonates so strongly that people will want to come along eliminates the need of force. Ultimately, if your work really does make a difference, then resonance might even be the stronger force.

Someone’s got to suffer

The journalist and language teacher Wolf Schneider famously said: “Someone’s got to suffer, the writer or the reader.”

The same is true for speakers and audiences.

Either we let our audience do the hard work of understanding. Of getting the point. Of looking for what we mean.

Or we do the hard work to make it easy for our audience to understand. To get the point. To see and feel what we mean.

The good news is that as a communicator you get to choose.

Yet, depending on your choice it means that we need to go the extra mile to think and re-think of ways to come up with better metaphors, visualizations, and stories. With easier words and ways to interact with our audience. It means that we need to invest the time to practice until our story works. But it also means that it’s so much more likely to resonate with our audience.

How do you choose?

Hero Quotes

„A hero is defined by what he or she can do, not by what he or she cannot do.“ – Damon Throop

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