You’ve been there, I’ve been there, and Carmine Gallo has been there.
Carmine is typing now:
On May 30, 2010, Bezos, a supersmart billionaire, gave a commencement speech to supersmart Ivy League graduates, speaking to them in words fit for a seventh grader.
Bezos delivered a profound message in simple language, making the speech an instant hit.
National Public Radio called it “one of the best commencement speeches, ever.”
Bezos told the 2010 Princeton class, “What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices.
Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice.
Gifts are easy—they’re given after all.
Choices can be hard. In the end, we are our choices.”
Six years after his speech at Princeton, Bezos revisited the theme of taking pride in your choices, not your gifts.
“This is something that’s super-important for young people to understand, and for parents to preach to young people.
It’s really easy for a talented young person to take pride in their gifts: ‘I’m really athletic,’ or ‘I’m really smart,’ or ‘I’m really good at math.’
That’s fine.
You should celebrate your gifts.
You should be happy.
But you can’t be proud of them.
What you can be proud of is your choices.”
Did you work hard?
That’s a choice.
Did you study hard?
That’s a choice.
Did you practice?
That’s a choice.
“The people who excel combine gifts and hard work, and the hard work part is a choice,” Bezos said.
Bezos’s commencement speech consisted of 1,353 words, 88 sentences, and registered a “readability score” of grade 7.
Readability is a measure of writing quality.
The score tells you how hard it is for the average reader to understand a piece of text.
In this case, the score concludes that Bezos’s Princeton commencement speech is likely to be understood by a reader who has at least a seventh-grade education (age twelve).
The readability score was originally created in the 1940s by Dr. Rudolf Flesch, a scholar and evangelist for simple, uncomplicated prose.
“Reading ease” is measured on a scale of 1 to 100.
The higher the score, the easier it is for readers to understand your writing.
Newspapers and publishers who adopted the system after its introduction in the late 1940s saw their readership rise by 60 percent.
J. Peter Kincaid, a scientist and educator, worked with Flesch in the 1970s to make the formula even easier to interpret.
Together, they converted readability scores into grade levels.
The Flesch-Kincaid test examines the number of words in a sentence, the number of syllables per word, and the number of sentences written in the active versus passive voice.
If you’re writing for a broad audience of adults, what grade level should you strive to achieve?
The answer might surprise you: eighth grade.
Content written at the eighth-grade level can be read and understood by 80 percent of Americans.
For context, academic papers, incomprehensible to the vast majority of readers, are written for grades sixteen to eighteen.
The Harry Potter series of books are readable for students in grades six through eight.
Amazon employees are instructed to aim for a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 8 or lower.
And Bezos’s speech to Princeton graduates?
Seventh grade.
The world’s richest man inspired the country’s smartest college graduates with words a twelve-year-old could understand.
Here’s the key.
A seventh-grade readability score does not mean that Bezos sounds like a seventh grader, because the score does not reflect the complexity or sophistication of a person’s speech.
It simply tells us how much mental energy the listener or reader expends to absorb and understand the information.
The easier it is to follow a speech or presentation, the more likely it is that your audience will remember your message and take action on it.
When you express complex ideas simply, you’re not “dumbing down” the content; you’re outsmarting the competition.
Hell yeah, confusing words put people to sleep.
Look at your homepage, Linkedin post, marketing copy or one of your presentation scripts.
How many words are fancy, Latin-based?
How many sentences are long and rambling?
Use Grammarly to keep your readability and reading level in check.
People are drawn to clarity.
That’s why Amazon teaches its employees to aim for a “readability” level of 50 or higher and a grade level of 8.
The calories that you burn clarifying your message are calories your customers do not have to burn in order to understand that message.
P.S. Like what you’re reading here? Well, you have three choices really.
1. Get more stories straight to your inbox. Subscribe in the page footer below.
3. When you are ready to level up, hire me.
Comentarios