“Unlocking”, “Unleashing” And The Dead Language Drizzle
Find Your Own Voice! We’ll Listen.
The Dead Language Drizzle
How much “unlocking” can we do? Isn’t everything just about “unlocked” by now?
Why does creativity have to be “unleashed”?
Are you really “passionate about leveraging The Cloud”?
Are the “three tips” in your post really “powerful”?
Is your new experience “fully immersive”?
Language is emotional. Language can move us. The phrases above, and many others like them, move nothing, say nothing. Our response to them is not energy, but a kind of dulled recognition: another struggling marketing pitch, another piece of slightly desperate striving. They drizzle past us, like an endless, sticky mist. They have no dancing to them, no juice, no jazz. They leave us very slightly more dead inside than we were.
Creativity is one of the great energies of being human. Is it really chained, like a dog, just waiting to leap forward when your app gets downloaded? What will it do when it’s “unleashed”? Run after the nearest moving car? Pee on a lamppost? What do you mean here? What’s the excitement you want to see in your customers, your readers?
Passion is a desire to move, to be overwhelmed with life and sensation. Do you really feel that way about your new cloud storage system? And do we have to “leverage” it? Can’t we just “use” it? What’s more accurate than “passion” for you? What excites you, genuinely, about people using the product? Try writing that down first and see where it takes you.
Find Your Voice. We’ll Listen.
I get it. I’ve been in those meetings. I’ve contributed my share of nonsensical “exploding the seams of the universe” statements.
It’s hard to pin down exactly what’s really driving our enthusiasm, what our passion really is, and what we think will make customers enthusiastic. It’s hard, and takes time and skill to develop your expression, your voice. But it’s not impossible, and it is definitely possible to refuse to use dead, dry language, and to really do the work until something closer to a genuine, energetic expression shows up.
We are soaked in language these days. I’d say drowning in it, but so much of it is feather-light, substantial as dust and tastes faintly only of conference rooms and air-conditioning. It’s not enough to drown in, just enough to leave us itchy and thirsty for something different, genuine, real.
Give us a voice that stops us, makes us drink — a song that washes away the grainy taste in our throats, something that tastes of being human. Give us something real of you, your real passion, your real energy.
I know, I know, you’re in a conference room, it’s a product not a lover, there are deadlines, budgets, limitations, office life. But try. Don’t settle. Find your voice.
We’ll hear it. We will.
(Interested in coaching? Get in touch!)
