I think and therefore I am
Philosopher René Descartes is credited for the delightful headline. The brilliance of it is that this assertion is short, sweet, and to the point. That is the ultimate challenge for any writer, blogger, business leader, and anyone else who would like to spur some deep thought in others. Problem is that anytime that a concept of yours takes a paragraph to explain, it may not make sense to anyone else.
What a hard lesson this is to learn for someone like me who likes to be verbose in speaking as well as writing. I did pretty well in a recent radio interview on Kristin Tews’ Personal Best show, but in preparation as well as in the final interview it was really tough conveying the key essence of my points (click here for the interview starting at minute 40 of the podcast, it’s the one dated 10/13/2013).
Key lesson learned is that even though you may have oodles of stuff to talk about in breadth and depth, keep it to one key topic. Why just one? Chances are you will lose folks a few sentences into your spiel: Problem is simply that the only one who has deeply pondered the topic you are talking about is you. That means you are fighting folks not knowing your lingo and definitely the concepts if there are too many at a time.
I invite you to a challenge. How brief and short can you make your favorite topic? Here are some folks who manage this pretty well:
Ralf