Not much difference between communicating to self and communicating to others

Thomas Basbøll writes:

[Advertising executive] Russell Davies wrote a blog post called “The Tyranny of the Big Idea”. His five-point procedure begins:

Start doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often. Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and do it differently.

And ends with: “And something else and something else.”

This inspires several thoughts, which I’ll take advantage of the blog format to present with no attempt to be cohesively organized.

1. My first concern is the extent to which productivity-enhancing advice such as Davies’s (and Basbøll’s) is zero or even negative-sum, just helping people in the rat race. But, upon reflection, I’d rate the recommendations as positive-sum. If people learn to write better and be more productive, that’s not (necessarily) just positional.

2. Blogging fits with the “Do it quickly and do it often” advice.

3. I wonder what Basbøll thinks about the “Don’t repeat much” advice. His blog is interesting but for awhile he seems to have been going with the same big idea (structure your writing as paragraphs, write them one at a time).

4. Davies’s advice to try different things contradicts the usual recommendation to “market the brand of you.” I can try different things because I already have a brand of me (and part of that brand is that I try different things), but that can’t work for everybody.

5. I’m also reminded of the message I often give in the context of statistical graphics, that there is not much difference between communicating to self and communicating to others. This fits with Basbøll’s attitude, I think. Clear writing is not just about marketing an already-formed idea; it’s also about exploring and explaining it to yourself.

4 thoughts on “Not much difference between communicating to self and communicating to others

  1. Can you explain more of the domains in which this applies?

    1) Academic marketing.

    2) Consumer marketing? (like Nike)

    3) Industrial marketing (like selling computers to engineers and scientists or like non-consumer GE products)

    Having spent a decade+ involved off and on in 3:
    a) Doing random changes thinking they are Big Ideas … never worked.
    b) What tended to work was opportunistic efforts within a coherent framework that didn’t change very often.

  2. 1. I take it this is a version of the worry that if people are encouraged to submit work often, journals will be swamped with unfinished papers to review. (My response here.) I like to think, as you suggest here, that if people wrote more efficiently and effectively, the quality of the writing in any given field would improve. But I suppose that’s like hoping Davies’s advice will make advertising more interesting, rather than just making advertisers more aggressive. It’s a serious concern. And it’s what I’m worried about when I compare myself to a Tony-Robbins-like guru.

    2. Yes, good blogging discipline can be good for your style.

    3. It’s true that my blog is devoted to one or two ideas, but I like to think they are not presented “on repeat”. Rather, they are variations on common (indeed, universal) themes. Here Woody Allen is my model. All his movies are arguably making the same point, and he’s shameless about re-using insights from one film in another. But he produces a movie every year, regular as clockwork. He’s doing something. That’s the sense in which he’s exemplary.

    4. The problem with “the brand of you” approach is that when really intelligent people (like early-career scholars) receive it, they get bogged down in the existential question. “Who am I?” They should take a practical, lighter, approach to it: “Let’s see what I can do?” (Indeed: “Let’s see what I can do today?”)

    5. Academic knowledge is knowledge you can share with others (your peers). That means you are always wondering how your ideas will look in writing—how they will look to others. The kinds of ideas you have as a scholar are the kinds of ideas that look the same to you and to your peers.

  3. I suggest that value is often a function of effort along a logistic curve, whether in developing an idea or writing a paper:

    1) One has to do enough work to have something useful enough to send to other people.
    2) Then there is a knew in the curve where feedback really helps and there is rapid improvement.
    3) At some point, the 2nd knee shows up, and one can spend much effort for marginal improvement.
    The 2nd knee is usually a good place to stop.

  4. I think his (Russell Davies) idea about “Manage the brand through conversation and impressionistic media – videos, stories, images, heroes. Not through mandates, best practise or benchmarking” can be very useful

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