Month: April 2020

Tuesday, 9.31pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. – Albert Einstein

I’ve been thinking about writing some marketing copy – and when it comes to doing something or finding a way to procrastinate – I find myself usually doing the second.

Why do something when you can read about how to do it instead?

You could just sit down and write something… but would it be any good?

What is it that makes a piece of writing or an idea interesting?

A book called The lively art of writing by Lucile Vaughan Payne caught my eye as I thought about this – and it has an interesting central idea.

Here’s the thing that Payne asks you to sear into your brain.

“All writing is the sound of one voice speaking, and all writing can be heard.”

Good writing – the kind of writing that works – makes you sit up and listen.

And that’s because when you read you actually hear the words – writing is simply a magical way to capture the words someone says in letters, where they stay until you release them by speaking them to yourself.

Good writing is a conversation between the writer and the reader.

If you forget this – if you write for an audience, for a market, for a group – then what you come up with is probably something else – a bland lecture perhaps, a list of things, meaningless prose.

It’s about as satisfying, Payne writes, “as a conversation with a wall.”

If you want an example of this kind of writing just take a look at the stuff I was writing back in 2016.

Now, I’m not saying that what I’m doing now is an example of what good looks like.

But, I gave myself ten years and a million words to get the hang of how to do it and I’m three and a bit years in and at 770,986 words – 70% of which are in this blog.

And all I want to be able to do is write simply and clearly, in a way that makes it easy for you to read.

And why would anyone want to do this?

Well, I suppose it’s because words matter – they shape the way we think and see, and what we see and think shapes our words.

For example, Charles Faulkner, in a TEDx talk, shows you how people react to words viscerally, instinctively.

He pours salt into two containers, and then turns them around.

One is labelled salt, the other cyanide.

Most people, you included, would probably avoid the bottle labelled cyanide, even though you saw both being filled from the same source.

Just like right now on supermarket shelves the one beer you can be confident of still finding is Corona.

Faulkner says that knowledge isn’t enough, quoting Einstein.

You have to be able to imagine, because that’s what pulls you forward, what creates something new.

Knowledge is all about what you know already – and it can be really quite dull.

Imagination, on the other hand, is vibrant and exciting, and it’s fuelled with words and story.

So, if you need to write some marketing copy for your service why not try asking yourself this.

How would you tell your best friend about what you do?

Did they get it?

And if they did – begin with those words and the chances are that you’re off to a good start.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.01pm

Sheffield, U.K.

You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain. – Bo Dahlbom

Today I came across a talk by Daniel Dennett for the first time, in which he introduced the quote that starts this post.

The quote resonated with me because much of my work over the last couple of years has been around trying to make sense of things – finding some kind of clarity in the messy real world that we live in.

It feels like different people have approached this in different ways over the years.

At one extreme you have approaches that are rooted in meditation and thought – the kind of thing you imagine Zen Buddhists doing.

It’s a long process of study and practice – at the end of which they achieve enlightenment – which I imagine is making a sort of peace with reality.

Although I did read a quote that said something like if anyone thinks they are enlightened, they should spend a weekend with their family.

At another extreme you have people of certain forms of science who believe that if it cannot be observed and measured it does not exist.

For them it’s about research and measurement and electrical flows and visualisations – about the detail of what’s going on in the physical world.

Now, it feels like there are many extremes as you think through the options.

For example, another extreme is the self-help guru, the person who has come up with a method that has worked for them and which they believe will work for you.

You find these everywhere, because surely if someone has achieved something then doing what they’ve done will work for you.

In Dennett’s talk he says you should install a surely alarm.

Whenever you see the word “surely” in a passage what it means is that the author hopes you’ll accept the point without questioning it.

They’re not totally sure about their point – if they were, they’d simply say that.

So, with the “surely”, they’re often trying to get something they believe to be true past you, hoping you won’t notice.

But you should – and perhaps probe more deeply into what’s going on.

Another extreme is Dennett’s own field – philosophy.

Some people believe that philosophy is the way you understand things – a rigorous way to understand what is true and false.

But really, what you need to understand is that philosophy is a form of logic, much like mathematics.

And Godel proved that even with maths, there are things you need to believe – things that can’t be proven using the system of maths you’re using.

Axioms.

What this means is that pretty much everything is rooted in a belief – and the reason you carry on believing is because nothing absurd results from thinking that way.

So, what I’m saying here is that some people believe that you have to just “get” it for yourself, others that you have to break it down scientifically, others that they have a way that’s worked for them and a few others who say this is the logical way to do things.

And then there are probably a few more ways to go.

What I’m taking from this is that reality is complex and complicated.

There are so many threads of thought, things that happen and what we think about those things happening – so many different ways we could approach the world.

What often matters is finding a way that works for us.

It’s what I’ve thought of as “models” for a while – perhaps what Peter Checkland calls a “holon” – and something that might be captured by Dennett’s concept of an “intuition pump”.

This is something that “focuses the reader’s attention on the ‘important features'” – something perhaps like I do in the model above.

Although what I’ve done is draw some circles around a random bunch of squiggles.

Still, perhaps, looking at those sections of squiggles can help us make some sense of what’s going on.

And I think that’s the point.

We’ve got to a stage in human evolution where just thinking about things isn’t enough.

There are tools that can help – and I suppose we are taught quite a few of these in school.

But many of us then forget these, or don’t go on to learn more tools, and end up trying to get through life on our bare brains alone.

What I see is that approach leads to discontent and worry and stress.

I remember, early in my career, as experiences piled up and I found it harder and harder to get what was happening.

And then I went back to university, did a management degree, and was introduced to models and ways of thinking that helped me make sense of the experiences I had had.

All of a sudden the feelings fell away – having words to describe what was going on meant that I could understand it better, and so there was no more need for feelings of doubt or inadequacy or shame.

Making sense of things matters – but there is no grand “sense” that we all share.

Instead, you have to make your own personal sense of things – but having good mental tools will help.

Some of which I have tried to use as I write this blog – the point of which really is to help me make sense of the world around me.

I hope it helps you as well.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 9.06pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions. – E. T. Bell

Today I learned from Steven Pinker about a thing called the curse of knowledge.

It turns out there is an experiment you can do with a three-year old.

Show a child a box of chocolates and ask them what’s in it.

They will probably say, “Chocolate.”

Now, get them to open the box.

Inside, they’ll find pencils instead of chocolate.

Now, ask them what’s inside the box.

They’ll say, “Pencils.”

Now, bring another child into the room and ask the first child what the second child thinks is inside the box.

The answer is, “Pencils.”

What’s happened is that the first child cannot now “unknow” what’s in the box.

But also, the first child now believes that everyone else also knows what it knows.

This is something many people never grow out of.

We believe that because we know something other people must know it as well.

And that causes us to make mistakes in the messaging we create – the things we write and design to explain what we do and how we work.

You probably see this all the time at work.

If you ask someone to pull together a briefing paper or a presentation on a topic, what you will get is a comprehensive statement of what they know.

There are all these things you have to start with, and we did all this stuff, and carried out these complicated calculations and did all this really detailed things about these really specific elements and so on and on and on.

But, what does this mean for someone who doesn’t know what you know – but who is bright and capable?

How do you get a message across to people like that?

For starters, you think about what they need to know.

Are they interested in the mechanics of cocoa production or are they interested in why your chocolate is different?

Take Tony’s Chocolonely, for example.

I like chocolate, probably too much, but I’ve never given it much thought.

My default has been something in the Cadbury’s or Galaxy line.

I was introduced to Tony’s Chocolonely as a “slave free” chocolate – an ethical brand.

I tried it – it was nice, but expensive.

And then we went to Amsterdam – before the world shut down – and visited the shop where it was made, and that left an impression.

And more recently, when I bought a few bars, I read some words on the marketing that said something like “unequally divided, because the world isn’t fair” – or something on those lines.

You don’t get nice clean squares with this chocolate.

There’s a lot of messaging with this brand – and some of it is clearly getting through, for me, at least.

All these things make the chocolate stand out in a way that’s different from brands that talk about being the finest chocolate, or having master chocolateers or focusing on the colour purple.

By this time, you’re probably thinking about chocolate and I’m losing my train of thought wanting some…

To pull things back.

The hardest thing for us to do is see things from the point of view of someone else who doesn’t yet know all the things we know – or actually someone who doesn’t want to know at all.

When you write or ask someone to write a piece of marketing you should see that as a first draft.

What’s probably going to happen is that first draft puts down everything you know about what you do – it’s a list of features.

What you need to do next is remind yourself of the curse of knowledge – remind yourself that you need to know what you know to be able to understand what you’ve written.

Then you need to sit down and rewrite every sentence in your draft so it make sense to someone coming to it with little or no knowledge – but someone bright enough to get what you’re talking about.

You don’t need to talk down to people or be patronising – you just need to be clear about what this means for them.

I remember, years ago, going to a marketing class where we did just this.

We were asked to write down a few words about what we did for customers.

Two of my examples were “risk management” and “carbon offsets”.

Then we were asked to try and write down what this meant for customers – how did they benefit?

And I suppose I wrote something like “Buy what you need as cheaply as possible” and “do business in a green and sustainable way”.

The second attempt, hopefully, make more sense than the more technical words that make sense to me.

The fact is that writing is bloody hard work – you’re not just going to sit down and dash off a masterpiece of marketing copy or a story or anything like that.

The first draft really is just you telling the story to yourself.

The second, third and fourth drafts are where you start telling the story to someone else – and how you eventually get to something that is so easy to read that people just “get” it.

But it’s not easy – if it reads well it’s because someone worked for a long time writing it.

And maybe that’s the lesson.

You worked really hard to learn what you know.

Now you need to work twice as hard to get other people to see it.

And that’s marketing.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.29pm

Sheffield, U.K.

An objection is not a rejection; it is simply a request for more information. – Bo Bennett

At the moment I’m finding a lot of ideas in TEDx talks – the shows that I watch in scattered fragments of time during the day.

The beauty of the TED format is you get a lifetime of experience compressed into fifteen to twenty minutes – and that means the speaker has to create a thought diamond – a flashing stone of inspiration just for you.

One of today’s shows was by Julian Friedmann about storytelling – about what he had learned as an agent working with authors.

The thing that stood out for me was the idea of rejection.

When someone sets out to write something like a novel – a thing that is made for other people to read – there are three elements that are involved.

There is the writer – the person sat in the chair writing day after day.

There are the characters – the people the writer creates and watches and sees doing things day after day.

And then there is the audience, that takes the book and tells themselves the story.

Now, in traditional publishing, to get your book out there you have to get past the gatekeepers.

These are the agents, the editors, the publishers – the ones who can decide whether you as a writer get to make a living or not from doing what you love.

They often have, as Friedmann says, less creativity and talent than you, but they have the power to decide what happens to your work and, by extension, you.

What gives these people the right to do that – how is it that they have that kind of influence over what you do?

Well, increasingly, they don’t – if you want to publish these days, you can.

It might not be any good – but that doesn’t mean you can’t see your name in print.

The point is that if an agent or critic rejects what you’ve produced it’s because they don’t think it will sell – it won’t appeal to the audience out there.

Now, if you look for the analogy of this writing structure in business you get a very similar three part model.

There is an entrepreneur who lavishes time and money in creating a product and then brings it to the attention of a market.

And they come up against the investors and buyers who are the equivalent of critics in the business world – the people with the power to decide what happens to your product and, by extension, you.

Writers fall in love with their creations; entrepreneurs fall in love with their products.

Some fail to realise that their creations and products are just not very good – they’re not what the audience or market is willing to buy.

They react by getting angry, by chasing publishers, by trying hard sell tactics

They believe that eventually the world will realise their brilliance – they just need to push hard enough.

And that may be the case, and they may win.

But in other cases the world is telling them something they should listen to – which is that they need to go back and improve the novel, make a better product.

The feedback might actually be useful – within the rejection you experience may actually be the secret that you need to know for your eventual success.

The next time you pitch your product – the thing you have spent huge amounts of time building with care – just remember that it’s not about you.

It’s about your audience, your market.

It’s about how they take what you’ve created and look at it – what is the story they tell themselves?

How do they see this thing you’ve made from their point of view – how do they use it, why do they need it, what do they do with it?

Their experience of your thing is what matters – that’s the one thing you can’t control.

But you can control yourself and the thing you make – you can change those and then go back and see if you get a different reaction.

Rejection, in this model, is simply the world telling you that you need to do some more work – perhaps slightly smarter, more targeted, better informed work.

That’s all.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.33pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Phaedrus read in a scientific way rather than a literary way, testing each sentence as he went along, noting doubts and questions to be resolved later… – Robert Pirsig, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

I picked up Shawn Coyne’s The story grid again today to have another go at wrapping my head around his unique approach to deconstructing a story.

There was a thought I had playing in the back of my mind after listening to an interview with Roald Dahl who said that writing books for children is much harder than writing one for adults.

This is because children, if they like a book, don’t read it just once.

They’ll read it again and again – maybe five times, maybe twenty – until they sometimes know it by heart.

I remember doing this – there was a time when I could simply run through the words of the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy in my mind.

So, when I had to sit down and write about something to do with business I wondered why you would put any less effort into that kind of communication than you would do with a story for children or adults.

In other words, how could you write better for your business?

Now – hopefully that doesn’t seem like an entirely pointless question – a lot of poorly written stuff is put out by businesses.

So, if you want to do better how should you approach the task?

First, do the work

The first thing that Coyne reminds us is that thinking is not the same as doing.

He writes about what he learned at a class called “Practical Aesthetics Workshop” which was all about “de-bullshitting stuff”.

It gave him practical, tangible tools – which came down to this quote.

“If you want to get stronger, you don’t think about the proper way to lift weights. You learn the proper way and then you actually lift weights. Pretty simple.”

This is worth keeping in mind.

All the strategy discussions in the world won’t change a thing if you don’t then do the work.

In fact, you’ll probably make better decisions if you first do the work and then go back and look at what happened and think about what you could do better.

Second, create a structure

The second thing that Coyne points out is that he likes to break things down into their component parts – a practice that comes from his science background.

So, he starts to create a taxonomy – breaking down the big stuff into smaller things and creating a structure that you can go through.

And then he goes on for several pages.

I’ve written previously about why Coyne’s approach is hard for me to follow without wanting to stick pins in my eyes – partly because the whole breaking things into parts is a hard task – and because it’s made worse by having to do it in Excel.

I will have to find a way to do the same thing in text files using something like Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten approach – which is the project that I’m going to give myself over the coming months – probably using some of Terry Pratchett’s books.

But, let me come back to structure.

Structure is something that you have to impose on your work – but also something that can emerge from your work.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to come up with some marketing material.

You could just type stuff straight into the computer – following a structure someone else has given you.

Or you could work through a couple of drafts, trying different things.

Both might work – perhaps differently.

What matters, in the end, is that what you create has a logic to it, a structure that works.

If you get the structure of a message right, then it acts like an internal skeleton, organising information and putting it in front of the reader at the right time so that they “get” it.

The structure is invisible but the impact it has is not – you end up with a satisfied reader.

Third, get rid of the bullshit

The last element is something that really only comes from a way of thinking where it’s important that things work.

In science or technology, for example, something works or doesn’t work – it can be tested.

Balls roll down a plane or a bridge remains standing when put under stress.

But, you also have the same thing when it comes to the arts.

An actor does her lines and the audience likes it or doesn’t – the lines land or don’t.

Yes, it’s a little more subjective and the audience matters – but on the whole you know if something succeeds or fails.

And it usually has something to do with the way the script or the story has been built.

And the way to test this is to check every line – think of it like building a raft.

You don’t want a raft made from a mix of logs and lead – you want the whole thing to float.

And in your business messaging every sentence that doesn’t help you float should be cut.

That includes all the fluff and fancy talk and things that you feel you should say.

Like the quote that starts this post, read each sentence, testing as you go along and note doubts and concerns that need to be resolved.

Then resolve them.

Don’t say that “You’re the best” – explain why, on what basis – go into the detail that justifies why you can say something like that.

And then don’t say it at all – put down all the things that result in the reader saying it for themselves.

It’s the old thing – show, don’t tell.

And it works just as well for business as it does for the arts.

And that’s because, when it comes down to it, business is an art.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh