Many ideas that seem obvious in conversation are often forgotten in the moment when you should be implementing them.
That’s why there's value in endlessly getting back to the basics and revisiting the fundamentals.
Many people know them.
Few people practice them reliably.
Now, on to this week's idea.
You've done the hard work.
Your product works beautifully.
But, something is missing.
People just don't see the big idea - and it's keeping you from being successful and making money.
Your idea has an explanation problem.
Every day amazing projects aren’t funded, potential sales are lost and great ideas fall flat because of how they’re explained.
Sometimes you’re so close to your product that you forget others don’t know what you know.
In walks "The Curse of Knowledge.”
What is the curse of knowledge?
I've learned this phrase from The Art of Explanation by Lee LeFever and Dan and Chip Heath’s great book Made to Stick.
It’s tough being an expert.
You know a lot about something and you assume other people also know that.
So, when you communicate, you talk over their heads.
That's costing you a lot of money.
"If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs,” says Derek Sivers.
It’s one of those quotes that has always stuck out to me.
Before moving on, let’s segue into literature.
There's a mantra that real writers know and wannabe writers don’t.
The secret phrase …drumroll…is:
NOBODY WANTS TO READ YOUR SHIT.
Recognizing this painful truth is the first step in the writer's transformation from amateur to professional.
When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, you develop empathy.
You acquire the skill that is indispensable to all great writers.
The ability to switch back and forth in your imagination from your point of view as a writer to the point of view of your reader.
You learn to ask yourself with every sentence and every phrase:
Is this interesting?
Is it funny?
Is it challenging?
Am I giving the reader enough?
Is she bored?
Is she following where I want to lead her?
Nobody wants to read your shit.
This is the single most valuable secret I’ve learned in my career.
And this is the one that can change your life the fastest.
Now, back to you.
Your understanding of your own offer is 10/10.
You’re dominating.
To pitch your idea, however, you need to simplify the message.
Experts tend to get to a level 6-7, yet they still struggle to make sales.
Why?
Because people buy at a level 1-2.
There's another problem.
The truth is, when you know too much about your topic, you make assumptions about your audience’s knowledge.
You take shortcuts in your explanations.
You use jargon.
You explain things in ways that work best for you, not your audience.
You tend to relay concepts to others in the manner you are most comfortable receiving information.
This is to say that if you rely on data and detail to learn, you naturally tend to provide data and detail when you explain.
These two communication habits make it more difficult for your audiences to understand and learn from you.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”-George Bernard Shaw
If you could only tie that special someone to a chair and force them to listen.
Or make them read that one thing that would finally change their stubborn mind.
They’d finally see the light…
But, that’s never going to happen.
And even if that whole “it’s illegal to kidnap and restrain people” part wasn’t an issue, the truth is, it wouldn’t work.
There are no guarantees when it comes to changing people’s minds and winning their hearts.
So what does work most often?
How do you overcome the curse of knowledge?
How do you remember what it was like not to know everything you know?
Rather than asking, “What do I want to say?” think of “What does my audience need to hear?”
To answer this, think about what your audience knows and how they go about knowing.
This reflection helps you cut out the fluff.
Be concise.
Don't just reduce friction.
Try to increase desire.
Your audience is listening with 10% of their attention. Maybe less. As Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Try to keep your opening sentence to less than 50 words.
After that, use the “Twitter test” and try to reduce each important point down to 140 characters.
You may not hit that number exactly, but it will force you into stripping your idea down to the bone and then again to the marrow, carving away until you get down to the basics.
If there's a complex concept, there can be a simple explanation.
Still think it might be too difficult to simplify your complex concept?
Take an example from the film, The Big Short (2015) in which a complex financial instrument is explained using the game Jenga.
Be creative.
Renown copywriter Eugene Schwartz, once said, “You can’t take nothing and make anything, you’re not God.”
You’re just a person so you can only create anything from something else.
That’s why a better word for “Creativity” is “Connectivity.”
“What you are doing when you are being creative,” said Schwartz, “is trying to connect 2 separate ideas that logically would not go together up until that moment.”
When you are being creative, you are making new connections.
Nothing more.
So don’t put pressure on yourself to create something “completely original.”
It’s a trap and you’ll fail.
Because there’s nothing new under the sun.
Instead, put pressure on yourself to seek out and experience various people and perspectives that are new to you, interesting to you, and compelling to you.
Then ask yourself: “How can I connect this point of view to my product in a novel and meaningful way to my audience?”
Get better at connecting the dots.
The more dots you have, the more connections you can make.
That’s being original.
That’s being creative.
Think “being comprehensive" vs “being interesting."
You might want to give all the details, explain all the things fully in one breath.
But you risk overwhelming your audience.
Optimize for being interesting instead.
If you hook their interest, you’ll earn the chance to share more later.
Watch Simon Sinek’s TED talk "How great leaders inspire action."
Burn this into your brain.
People don’t buy without a reason why.
Say it with me, “People don’t buy without a reason why."
Don’t deliver facts.
Facts are the enemy.
Information and data alone won’t get you to where you want to go.
Master the art of storytelling.
A story communicates 2 + 2, the path to 4, it doesn’t just communicate 4.
Think of basic elements that can be found in almost any popular movie, novel, or brand.
It goes like this:
A character has a problem and meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action that helps them avoid failure and ends in success.
"If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you are told that the king died and that the queen then died of grief, that is a story.”-E.M. Forster
Help your audience get from POINT A to POINT B.
Of course, who is your audience?
But, it's the second part of this sentence — from Point A to Point B — that is crucial because value is created when transformation is created.
Transformation occurs when people who are in one state want to be in another state and your guidance, content or product is the bridge that gets them there.
Who do you want them to become? (Check this riff)
People don’t care about you; they only care about themselves.
People don’t want to hear about you; they want to hear about themselves. They want to be the hero of your sales message, not you.
They want to picture themselves getting the results, not you.
They want the whole transaction to be about them, not about you.
And the way you do this is to convert your copy from talking about yourself to talking about them. (Put yourself in their shoes like Uwe Grahl here)
Think WIIFM. (Check this riff)
How will they be enriched?
How will they benefit?
How will they receive what they want?
Don’t convince people.
People convince themselves.
Eric Barker writes here:
People aren’t just going to hear your facts and suddenly have a “Road to Damascus” moment. Merely delivering info rarely changes minds. That’s for courtroom dramas. You don’t hear one statistic and suddenly flip sides and neither will they. In fact, quite the opposite: facts are like punches – they usually cause the other side to put their hands up and block whatever you send their way next.
Again: you don’t convince people. People convince themselves. Studies done as far back as the 1940s by Kurt Lewin showed that lectures about why people should change their behavior were effective a measly 3% of the time. But when people self-generated reasons for the same activity, behavior change occurred 37% of the time. People reject ideas they are given and act on ideas they feel they came up with themselves.
Show, Don’t Tell. (Check this rant)
Most of the time.
Be specific.
Most of the time.
Many sensible strategies fail to drive action because executives formulate them in sweeping, general language.
“Achieving customer delight”
“Becoming the most efficient manufacturer”
“Unlocking shareholder value”
“Patient first"
One explanation for executives’ love affair with vague strategy statements relates to the curse of knowledge.
They have had years of immersion in the logic of business, so when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the complex information in their heads.
Frontline employees, however, hear only opaque phrases.
As a result, the strategies being touted don’t stick.
Very often, the entire mission statement and value proposition can suffer from the curse of knowledge.
Have you ever encountered a company that provides a solution that you don’t understand?
And, even after it’s been explained to you, you’re still left wondering what the hell it does, how you would use it, and why you would need it?
"The mission of Wendy's is 'to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities through leadership, innovation, and partnerships.' How many of you thought of that when you bought a hamburger there?” asked Guy Kawasaki in his presentation. Then he proposed an alternative version: Healthy fast food.
Making it visually enticing.
A picture, the old adage goes, is worth 1,000 words.
Draw the right picture and you can literally transform the way people see the world.
Copernicus understood the power of a picture.
In his great work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, published shortly before his death in 1543, he takes 405 pages of words, numbers and equations to explain his heliocentric definition of the Solar System.
I wonder if the Pope read all 405 pages before he sentenced him to death for blasphemy.
Probably not.
Guess he just checked the picture Copernicus drew at the beginning of the book that captures, in a single image, his revolutionary new idea.
When you show pictures, make them memorable.
Make them inviting to look at.
Speaking of pictures, here’s one I love.
It's a reminder of six techniques you can use to help your audience understand complex ideas.
Test your explanations before you use them in public.
Once you’ve worked out and written down your explanation, make sure you test it on people before you use it in front of an audience.
Find someone who knows your subject area reasonably well and someone who has little idea of it.
Listen to their feedback, particularly the person with little expertise.
And if they say they ‘get it’, all well and good.
If they don’t, then it’s back to the drawing board for more adjustments.
The way you frame your message matters.
Be very conscious of what you say to people.
The language, terms and examples you choose will have a huge impact on what your audience remembers and understands.
One major implication of the curse of knowledge is that the right people aren’t being listened to.
If you confuse, you lose.
And a confused mind always answers “No!”
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