My responsibilities at Arsenal Venture Partners —the entire breadth of the investment process from sourcing to diligence to post-investment management—ensure that I am reading and writing in the language of PowerPoint for at least fifteen hours a week. The medium is effective for conveying a critical mass of information in a condensed format, but I have always suspected that PowerPoint is making me kind of dumb.
A quick Google search reveals my thought is not an original one. Marine Corps General James Mattis said it quite bluntly during an appearance at a 2010 military conference in North Carolina: “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” At the same conference, General H.R. McMaster echoed this sentiment, saying, “[PowerPoint is] dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control…[;] some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
I completely agree with Generals Mattis and McMaster and would like to hitch my wagon to their credibility, but I’ll stop short of comparing the complexities of war to UI and TAM.
More insidious than PowerPoint’s inability to fully capture the complexity of a conflict, thesis, or argument is its numbing and regressive effect on thinking—well, at least mine. I am certain that if an fMRI machine were to be hooked up to my brain during the course of a day filled with PowerPoint-ese and business email-ese (just as bad typically), the web network of lights signifying creative thought would shine much less brightly within a few hours.
A few years back, Ron Rosenbaum wrote a wonderfully caustic article examining the effects of crossword and Sudoku on the mind. In his estimation (and mine), crossword and Sudoku don’t sharpen the mind, as fan(atic)s claim, but instead train “the mind to think in a tragically limited and reductive fill-in-the boxes” fashion, draining “it of creativity and imagination while fostering rat-in-a-maze skills.”
PowerPoint does the same thing, but with arrows and pictures and Venn diagrams.
I am not suggesting folks stop using PowerPoint or terse emails. PowerPoint is a great Morse code type of communication that gets across the most basic and condensed—perhaps timely— information. And email precludes anything but brevity given the sheer volume we all deal with.
What I am suggesting is that those who spend a lot of time in PowerPoint and email (might as well throw excel in the mix, too) would benefit from consistent ingestion of non-business, non-blog, non-article, non-bulletized literature. Economics doesn’t count. Investment books don’t count. Michael Lewis (though great) doesn’t count. Research reports written by investment firms don’t count.
I’m talking about books that are difficult to read, that have nothing to do with turning a profit or marketing strategy, and that have no readily apparent relevance to your company or your investment thesis.
Some examples include Marquez, Packer, and Pynchon (the snobby stuff) as well as Neal Stephenson, Jo Nesbo, and McCullough (the fun stuff).
Reading these types of authors does a few things to directly counteract PowerPoint’s dissolving of your mind:
- It forces you to have a short-term memory and focus. Sometimes it takes Dickens a page to weave together a bunch of clauses into a comprehensible sentence. Carrying multiple strands of an argument in parallel without arrows and boxes to provide reference is a helpful skill to train.
- It reminds you that many important thoughts and phenomena cannot be condensed. You can’t bulletize “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known”. If you can, I’ll buy you anything you want from Greycork.
- It allows you to mimic how brilliant people think. Walking through a good philosopher’s thesis trains you how to analyze impossibly complex problems the same way watching Floyd Mayweather defend helps you learn timing.
- It makes you a better speaker. Not as much as practicing speaking, but a close second.
- It sharpens your qualitative pattern recognition. Nothing more to say on this one.
So set aside a couple hours a week to read some of the books you skipped in high school. Your brain will thank you.
And at the very least you will understand more Archer references.
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