In this episode, I unpack the ideas from the book “Smart Brevity“.
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Full Transcript:
People are overwhelmed with information, yet most communication is unnecessarily long, unclear, and ineffective. That’s just a little bit from Smart Brevity from a handful of guys that put this together, Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz, and Jim VandeHei. Just a great look at how to make your communications more effective in anything you do. So they start the book talking about the, they call it the fog of words, all the problems we have.
He says, most of us are terrible multitaskers, which I’ve talked about a good bit. ⁓ Not only terrible multitaskers, we can’t really even multitask. We’re having to jump from one thing to another. We can’t really do two things at once for the most part. But most of us are terrible multitaskers, and we struggle to refocus our attention once it is yanked away. It takes most people more than 20 minutes to snap back into focus after a distraction. This is something I’ve known for a while, and I’ve tried to pay attention to with our team, particularly like our developer. know mostly because I’ve been a developer myself.
I know when kind of get your brain thinking about what this is and what the subroutine is and the variables kind of get on your head and get disrupted, then poof, like it all disappears and you got it. It takes a while to just kind of get back to that place you are. It’s tough to do. ⁓ but this is true for most professions and most things you do. And it’s tough. And so they also talk about with all this bad communication, how do you get anyone to pay attention to anything that matters in this mess? They say our answer, adapt to how people consume content, not how you wish they did or how they did once upon a time, but how they actually do now. And this is again, something I’ve struggled with where
I wish people would consume content and do things a certain way, or I know they used to do things a certain way. That’s not how it is today. You gotta kinda get over it. And like they say, adapt to how people consume content. And this book’s talked a lot about how we can adapt our ways of producing content to the ways they wanna consume it. they get into it. What is smart brevity? So in short, it is short, but not shallow. So they have a sign on their wall at their studio called Axios that says, very simply, says, brevity is confidence, length is fear. And I love that because.
It being short kind of takes, takes some courage to be that short. You want to kind of say, well, there’s my point, but let me add more facts and figures and add more anecdotes and get more to it. And at times that’s okay. But generally speaking, brevity is better and length is not ⁓ something I really strive to do quite a bit. You’ve probably heard on these podcasts, these are all relatively short compared to the length of a book. It’s a tough balance between getting enough data in there and you know, being too brief, but I hope, I hope I balanced that well. And this book talks more about how to do it even better. And it’s shaped how I do things and maybe it will shape how you do things as well. So they get into what
What is smart brevity exactly? What are we talking about here? You know, short, not shallow, but they have the core four, ⁓ the T’s, lead, why it matters, and a length for depth. So you start with a muscular T’s. They say whether in a tweet, headline, or email subject line, you need six or fewer strong words to take someone’s attention away from Tinder or TikTok. So six or fewer is a very short T’s, and it’s tough to do, but that’s why they call it muscular. It takes some work. Then you have one strong first sentence or lead. They say from the book, quote,
Your opening sentence should be the most memorable. Tell me something I don’t know, would want to know, or should know. Make the sentence as direct, short, and sharp as possible. Next is some context or why it matters. They say, we’re all faking it. Mike and I learned this speaking to Fortune 500 CEOs. We all know a lot about a little. We’re too ashamed or afraid to ask, but we almost always need you to explain why your new fact, idea, or thought matter. So get in there. Why does it matter? And then give them the choice to learn more. Don’t force them to learn more, but give them a choice to go more and learn deeper, go deeper.
They say, quote, don’t force someone to read or hear more than they want. Make it their decision. If they decide yes, what follows should truly be worth their time. So that’s kind of the core of what we’re talking about here is that muscular tease that’s strong for a sentence, the why it matters, and then the go deeper. So next, they kind of talked about the road to smart brevity, how they got there. I’m not getting into that too much. It’s kind of, you know, the beauty of the book kind of walks you through that, but they talk through their style. ⁓ The next thing, chapter four, they get into audience first. You know, the audience is what matters most.
and shared a quick story from while they were visiting a pastor once, and I thought this was a great little story here. said, quote, Jim sat stewing in the pew of Christ the King Church in Alexandria, Virginia. Well, David Glade, the pastor, talked about the difficulties of being good. told a story about how his kids wondered with all the chaos and challenge of life, how a person can choose to do the right thing always. Pastor Glade wanted to shrink this big existential question into something more digestible. He offered to his kids nine words of wisdom that guided us through our departure and shaped how we live our lives today.
They said, quote, all you can do is the next right thing. All you can do is the next right thing. So whatever’s happened, you know, do the next right thing. At the end of this chapter, they give you some tips and tricks. And from here on out in the rest of the book, they give you a lot of tips and tricks. I’m not gonna read all of them for every chapter, but it’s kind of nice just to see, you know, in this case with the audience first, what does that look like in terms of tips and tricks? What can you do to make the audience first? And so there’s five tips for that one are first, focus on one person you are targeting, exactly one. Think about that one person you wanna target.
and this is something we do quite a bit, we’ll kind of make it even a fake avatar of what does Jenny look like, this audience for this business. Let’s think about what that is. Think about that one person you want to target, then plot out the one thing you want them to remember, and then write like a human for humans, write it all down, and then stop. Like don’t go too far. So think about that one person, the one thing you want to remember, get it on paper, and don’t go too far. That’s really how you can do a lot there. Then he gets more into part two of the book here, how to actually do it, how to actually do smart brevity. ⁓
So digging into that, there was a good quote from the book here, a few good quotes I really like from this chapter. This one first said, Mike thought he knew all the secrets of public speaking, but as he waited to go on stage after the executive from BJ’s, heard him start and end his speech with these three words, or these few words. If there’s only one thing you remember from this talk, that’s what the guy said and they kind led him to his point. That’s a great way to signal unmistakably what matters most and what you want people to take away. And then also in this chapter about being worthy, they say, quote,
Delete, delete, delete. What words, sentences, or paragraphs can you eliminate before sending? Every word or sentence you can shave saves the other person time. Less is more and a gift. And so from this chapter about being worthy, they offer some tips and tricks. I want us to list the points you must make, just what are the things you have to make. Will you listen point and points down to one or two if possible, and then delete, delete, delete. know, kind of keep it tight. Next they talk about grab me, about teaching, you know, compelling tease headlines that pull people in.
The tips and tricks here are, know, once you start by stopping, you know, again, don’t go too far. And once you kick those bad habits, you know, stop those bad habits, start new healthy ones and read it aloud. And so he kind of gives the chapter gets more into exactly how to grab headlines. But I think the best one I heard was reading it aloud. I’ve done that a lot with the writing I do. Writing it sounds great when I read it aloud, it sounds different. I’ve noticed that too, and I’m listening to books ⁓ as I read them. I do a lot of that now. I actually listen to the book, the audio version while I’m reading the print version.
It kind of changes things. Just hearing it aloud, I hear sentences differently. I maybe will glaze over a word that will stand out to me. And doing that yourself can help. If you’ve written something, read it aloud and see actually how it sounds and you may want to tweak things from there. The next chapter is called One Big Thing. And again, we’ve kind of hit on this already. But the main quote I pulled from this chapter, said, quote, the first sentence is your one and likely only chance to tell someone what they need to know and convince them not to move on. You have one shot at this. People have a lot to read, whether this is a
newspaper article back in the day or a social media post or an email whatever people gonna Maybe look if you’re lucky they’ll look at that first sentence and you got to get them or not and they’re gonna move on So some tips and tricks about the one big thing you can boil your boil down your most important point He says skip the anecdotes There’s a place for that later, but not initially when you’re trying to hook him in stick to the one sentence limit Don’t repeat the T’s verbatim if you’re gonna say a headline and then a T’s have them a little bit different and ask yourself if this is the only thing the person sees or hears
Is it exactly what you want to stick? Is this the one thing you say, gosh, they took that away, that’s great, but I wish they would have learned this one other thing. Then that should be your main thing. What is the one thing you really want them to take away? Start with that, boil it down, and be clear as you can. So why does this matter? I you want to tell your audience why things matter. You want emphasize the necessity to explain why the reader should care. You want context over fluff. Why it matters is the most common and effective axiom. Understanding just why this matters and kind of
building your content around why it matters is awesome. After why it matters, you can explain one sentence or maybe two why the information in your first sentence is important. So you say, here’s why it matters, and then give just a little bit more detail about why. The sentence or sentences should be direct and declarative, and then read all three parts together, your headline, your first sentence lead, and your axiom. They all should go together and form pretty quick to people to understand why this matters, why they should keep going. And then lastly, go deeper. You certainly want…
options for people to go deeper. mentioned before a link can be great, but give them reasons to go deeper, help them understand why they should go deeper. And if they don’t want to go deeper, that’s okay. You’re not forcing them to. They’ll still get the gist of your idea early on. And hopefully people then be compelled to say, all right, now I want to learn more. Let’s give them reasons to go deeper. They talk about using the right words. know, don’t use avoid, you know, sorry, advise using clear, strong and action oriented language and avoid jargon and filler. And jargon can be a dangerous thing. If you’re talking
Directly to someone in your audience, maybe some industry jargon’s okay, but generally I would avoid that. The tips and tricks related to using the right words. Shorter is always better. You should deploy strong words and purge weak words. Avoid foggy words. Use active verbs. You people to put themselves in whatever you’re saying, so active verbs are better. Use strong phrases and then check yourself and make sure you’re doing things properly with all that. The jargon and filler is a big one I see that is tough to avoid sometimes, but can make a huge difference.
He gets little bit into using emojis too. I’m not going to talk too much there. But he thinks emojis have a place. They can help convey tone or signal context quickly in digital formats. There’s ways to use emojis. You can read the book and see more there. He didn’t get into too much though. ⁓ And then they talk about smart brevity in action. He gets in a lot of very specific ways to do it. So he starts with something they call Mike’s Playbook, ⁓ how they handle that. And so his tips and tricks are you are the chef. You’re putting this together.
Brevity is confidence, we mentioned that earlier. Being selfless is selfish and beneficial. And at times you can gamify it, make your context gamified where people wanna learn more that way. And then we’ll get into very specific use cases for where you use the brevity. There’s a lot of use cases here, each with a lot of tips and tricks, so I’m not gonna go through all of them. I’ll hit all the use cases, but not necessarily every tip and trick inside of there, because we could be a very long show if I do that. But first is the art of the newsletter. The newsletters can be fantastic, and so…
He talks about coming up with a one or two word name for the newsletter so people know what to expect when they see that name come back. Don’t waste time, don’t be messy. Number your items and gut check the total length. Brevity always. And simple graphs or pictures that make your point alone are pure gold. So sometimes you can use a graph or a picture that make your point without you having to do much else. You shouldn’t have to write a whole bunch of words. You have the right graph, the right picture in there. He talks about being heard at work. I thought this was an interesting idea I may try at some point. He says, quote,
If you manage people, send weekly updates and smart, concise newsletters, encourage your direct reports to do the same. He says a Sunday or early Monday mailing works best to align people for the coming week. And the data you show should send updates in the morning to maximize open rates. So people, yeah, the data should show that when you send it in the morning, opens, maximize open rates. So if people should appreciate what you’re sending and it can be great if you send that again, if you keep it concise and informative, people read it. If it’s kind of long winded, it’s going to waste their time. That’s very different. know, everything should be.
everything should be brief. says, you know, the tips and tricks for being heard at work. says, the very first one is your messages, memos or email, write essential updates in smart brevity. Again, use this smart brevity stuff for that. He also mentioned that another tip and trick here is your presentations. says, PowerPoints are a hotbed for graffiti and eye torture. People smother their ideas or proposals, crappy art and word diarrhea, then hit repeat for a dozen or more slides. I like the idea of a few things when it comes to PowerPoints is one, you should only put on the slide
what people should be writing down. So you should have very few words. If you want to write down a few key bullet points, a few headlines, that’s cool. And you shouldn’t be reading the slides. And the slides have your transcription of what you’re saying. That’s kind of a problem. And people do that far too often. So I’ve been like others like Seth Godin and some folks that his slides have no words. They’re just a picture to remind him of a story. I think his approach is like a 60 slide deck, all of these pictures. And when he’s going to speak somewhere, he kind of goes through and hides certain ones and shows ones and kind of distills it out like the 10 stories he wants to tell. And when it comes up, that picture of a butterfly.
He’s going to tell the story about how that applies to marketing or wherever he goes with that with no words at all. Not saying you should avoid all words in your PowerPoints, but I mean, you should aim for zero words more than a hundred for sure. mean, fewer is always better. Next in chapter 15 here, they talk about smart brevity, your email. ⁓ and I don’t have a whole lot of specifics in here other than the tips and tricks. Again, I think a lot of this, you can kind of get the gist of, not going to spend, spend too much time here digging in cause it’s pretty clear from the others. But, ⁓ one that I’ve, I’ve seen before the very first tip and trick here, says,
Bad emails start with lame subject lines. You want it short, direct, and urgent. Bad subject lines can be bad. I’ve seen two examples of this recently, well, in general. had one bad subject lines when it comes to calendar events. I notice a lot where I’ll talk to someone and say, yeah, let’s chat next week. And they’ll send me a calendar invite. And the invite will say, chat with Mickey. I’m like, well, that’s helpful for his calendar, but not helpful for mine. And so I try to be careful when I’m sending a calendar invite to say things like, Brian slash Mickey chat, or Brian Mickey chat about X, or something where it’s useful to both of our calendars, not just
you know, my chat with Brian and then when he gets it, he has an event on his calendar called chat with Brian, which is not super helpful. I’ve also seen people that just simply don’t have subject lines and emails. They just shoot off the body of it. I think if anything, you should have a subject line and not a body. If you need to do a quick, quick thing that way, ideally a bit of both, but it should be helpful to see from the subject line what’s going on. He also recommends with emails, give the recipients the why it matters context, you know, again, make it, make it clear why it matters. Give them bullet points for skimming to see what’s going on.
Bold any words or figures or names you want to stand out. It’s the perfect eye trap for those skimmers. I try to be good about that. If I’m mentioning someone or something important, I’ll bold that so if people are breezing through the email, they can see that. And then as you mentioned before, intuitive visuals can help amplify or bring life to an important point. I try to keep emails shorter than those that need visuals in the email. That’s not always the best place for it, but in certain cases, I can see that help. On to the next chapter. He talks about using smart brevity with your meetings. Again, very similar kind of things, but always about why it matters.
One that I love is to set a time limit. I think most of us have that it’s interesting though I think many of us are good about stopping the time limit but always going up to it feeling like well We have 20 more minutes Let’s use 20 more minutes and I think you’re welcome to not use the rest of the meeting if you don’t need it He says open the meeting with your headline and why it matters State unambiguously what specific decisions need to be made and make sure the meeting, you know Here’s what we want to accomplish So you’ll know if you’re reaching the goal of the meeting versus just discussing something and letting it kind of float away
Be inclusive and then said when two minutes are left, if you get there, bring the discussion to an end. You make sure you have time to wrap up properly, assign priorities and get out the door. I talked about smart brevity in your speeches. I think it’s a lot of what we’ve already talked about to still and sharpen your most important one point or lesson. Hit them over the head with your point. This is something I tend to be bad about when it comes to speeches. I’ll give them my one point and say, all right, you’ve got it. You’ve got my one point, but there’s a degree that you should say it a few times to make sure it’s there along with the why it matters.
If you’re giving a good speech, should then unfurl maybe a couple of stats or stories to back up that big thought and bring it to life. You can also, as we shared the example earlier, say at the end, remember if there’s one thing to take away, help them take it away. Say, here’s the one thing I want to make sure you remember so people are clear on that at the very end. And always say thank you. He says, always end everything on a gracious, grateful note. It makes people want to cheer for you. And so that was Smart Brevity in your speeches. Then he gets into Smart Brevity in your presentations, which we talked about a little bit earlier. But again, he.
It says, write down the precise outcome you want, simplify every slide, pictures tell a vivid story, and keep it short, stupid. I love that. ⁓ He quoted this here. He said, quote, from the Harvard Business Review, says a partner McKinsey, they tell new hires to use this rule of thumb. For every 20 slides you want to put in your deck, use two. So when you’re kind of mapping out how many slides you want and you have your 40 slides, like, cool, you have 40 slides, that should be four slides. Again, you can talk more about them. You’re there to talk and present to people, not just.
show them a bunch of slides. if you can cut that down, it’s always a good thing. He then gets into smart brevity for your social media. Same kind of things, just a few tips and tricks for this. Know your audience, be image conscious, image in terms of images, and then bust out your smart brevity writing and emoji moves. So your writing tips from before and even some of emoji stuff can make a difference with social. More smart brevity for visuals. He says grab people with visuals and words that you choose. Be direct.
Create a hierarchy to guide your intended audience. Make sure they can follow through it. Be respectful of your audience. Abstraction, clutter, and confusion are the enemy. Again, keeping it simple, even when it comes to design and visuals, is always a good thing. Then he kind of gets a little higher level here, how to run a company on Smart Brevity. ⁓ He gets into his Jim’s Chips and Tricks for CEO and leaders. The mission matters a lot. Tell the story. Don’t be a fraud. Make sure you do what you do. Don’t quit. Be humble and encourage copycats. The best leaders raise up other leaders that
ultimately may leave and that’s kind of okay. We look at football coaches, we see that a lot, where the best football coaches that kind of show the coaching tree, like Nick Saban was one of the greatest coaches ever and here’s all the people that worked under him and how great they’re doing now. He encouraged copycats and wanted people to become great. The idea is you can either have your staff become great and maybe leave or have them not be great and not train them up and that seems like even worse if a bunch of people that aren’t worth having around. I’d rather risk people leaving and hope they don’t but make them good enough where they could versus.
keeping people unnecessarily down is problematic. ⁓ Next he gets into communicating inclusively. He says, quote, complexity confuses, abstraction alienates, length loses. You can unite people around a common understanding of an important idea or update by writing in short, direct sentences and by losing the clever insider-isms or fancy clauses. Again, short, direct sentences. And the tips and tricks here are basically that. The three tips are write in plain, clear language, use bullet points, and keep it simple and short.
And then he kind of gives a cheat sheet to kind of make sure you understand the core guidelines as you’re using this wherever you go. Because again, he gave a lot of specific examples. This is still the idea of using the smart brevity idea in all these areas, whether it’s a presentation or a speech or with your company or any email or whatever you’re doing. And so the four yes here are authority, brevity, humanity, and clarity. So the guiding principles. So authority, be the expert or find an expert. You’re not always going to be the expert and that’s okay. Don’t, don’t fake it. Find an expert brevity, stay short, not shallow.
Humanity write like you speak. This is something that’s helped me a lot I’ve learned I used to try to write differently and I’ve found if I write like I speak it works out Well for me it can be a little drag on a little bit sometimes I’ll sometimes you need to tighten things up But the basic idea is good and then the fourth one is clarity you just style your text for impact So he encourages them to take smart brevity’s for a spin I’ll wrap up this show with what they call in the book our final thought and I think it’s gonna be a great one for my final thought as well It says our final thought we hope these tools and tricks in this book will allow you to break through the noise
Communicate with renewed confidence and be heard again.
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