Honest Work.
Taking longer to produce less.
We’ve all been audience to presenters who put too much text on their slides.
We all know that too much noise drowns out a clear signal. We know that we would never make slides that complicated. Right?
It’s so obvious when you’re sitting in the audience.
The reason we see perfectly intelligent people using sub-par communication techniques is selfishness. A boatload of text means that we really thought about everything. Miles of footnotes show we’re smart, prepared, thorough, we did our homework. Good job, me!
It can be tough to abbreviate. You spent 3 days researching something — shouldn’t your findings be exhaustive?
We want to expose the complexity as though to say: “This issue is complicated, and I figured it out. Look at what my product can do — there’s a button for everything! My essay covers every angle! Check out my 375 vacation photos from Vancouver!”
Martin Luther said, “If I had my time to go over again, I would make my sermons much shorter.” Seriously!
It can be tough personally to scale back our own work. Sometimes it’s an ego issue, sometimes it’s a time constraint, sometimes it’s both. It’s always an issue of the creator not doing enough hours of honest work.
Honest work is a process that’s focused on the product, not the producer. Honest work looks like: 1) Know your audience, 2) know your fundamental goals as a producer for where you want to take the audience, and 3) take them there. Remove the deep down demon that wants to self-congratulate.
Honest work is not about you. It’s about the work.
If people think you’re impressive during the speech, but a week later don’t remember what you said, you didn’t do honest work. If people think your product is “cool” but they never use it, you didn’t do honest work.
The reason that simplicity is rare, sought after, and timelessly adored, is because it takes a special degree of confidence and hard work to fully remove the ego.
Simplicity is more work for the producer. It’s more valuable for the audience. It’s more of a leap of faith by the producer that they really boiled down the good stuff.
photo credit: {www.bdm.xxx}
