Blah Blah Blah Read online

  In July, we announced a strategic refocus of our Company and identified three clear priorities to ensure our future growth and success: a consumer-centric business model, a holistic brand management approach and the establishment of a multi-platform, integrated sales and marketing organization. Our commitment to consumer centricity is evident . . . To optimize brand revenue growth, we will shift responsibility for single-site, digital sales and marketing to the brand level. Publishers can now fully leverage their offerings across all platforms.

  Huh?

  According to the New York Times, one employee reacted by saying, “We all read it and have no idea what he was talking about. It’s the kind of communication where there are no verbs and every other word is some kind of buzzy techno jargon.”

  When the head of a publisher can’t make himself understood with words, we know that we’re in big trouble.

  We Know Less Than Nothing

  At the other end of the scale, blah-blah-blah sometimes means we know less than nothing. When the depth of detail forced upon us kills our ability to comprehend, we end up receiving negative knowledge—the more we hear, the less we know.

  In early 2010, in a tiny, darkened room buried somewhere deep within the Pentagon (the one with five sides, Jon), a senior member of the United States Department of Defense sat down at a small desk. The desk was bare and his hands were empty. He was there for a briefing on projects under way in the war on terror. Although he was one of only a handful of people in the whole world privy to the full scope of our government’s top-secret activities, he was not allowed to take notes.

  Project slides flashed on the screen before him. A program name appeared, then a list of staff members and authors. Then a mission statement appeared, followed by a list of goals and objectives, then a list of tasks completed and not completed, then a list of resources and their current disposition, then a written schedule, then detailed agendas, then reference documents, then a budget overview, t"0" overvihen supporting points for a request for supplemental funding, then a list of action items, then a partial list of associated programs.

  When one program finished, another began. There were hundreds of programs to review that day.

  Not long into the briefing, it dawned on this “super user” that he knew less than when he had started. “Stop!” he yelled, and walked out of the room. Then, according to the Washington Post’s two-year investigation of America’s growing top-secret world, the super user flatly stated, “I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything.” The result, he added, was that it was impossible to tell whether this mind-boggling array of programs made our country any safer or not.

  Let’s think about that for a moment: The more the super user was briefed on the programs, the less he could tell whether they made our country safe. That sounds like as solid a definition of blah-blah-blah as we’re ever going to get.

  How Did We Get Here?

  It’s weird, isn’t it? Everybody hates blah-blah-blah, yet here we are. None of us started out intending to make good ideas hard to find. Nobody decided up front that the best way to say one thing was to say everything else. Nobody began a career believing that the best way to get ahead is by making sure they’re not understood.

  With all the channels of instant communication available to us, we should understand each other better, not worse. With so much history accessible with the tap of a finger, we should find faster ways to solve problems, not quicker ways to assign blame. When we have a great idea, we should be able to share it more clearly than ever, not find it harder than ever to be heard.

  The Treasure Map

  We don’t need more words. We need more ideas. We need them fast, and we need them to be good—and to know that they’re good, we need them to be clear.

  To tell the good ideas from the bad ones, the insightful from the ignorant, the creative from the creativity killing, we need to be able to see them. Yet seeing isn’t something we can do here in the land of blah-blah-blah. This is the place to go to hide, obscure, divert, and spin. If we want to actually solve a problem, we have to get out of here.

  That’s where this book comes in. It offers an escape plan.

  The escape comes in the form of a treasure map. It’s a map we can use when we have a problem and we need to find a good idea to solve it, a map we can use when we’re overwhelmed with words and we need to know what they really mean, and a map we can use when we see a great idea—and need other people to see it too.

  What Makes a Useful Map

  To be useful, any map must show three things: where we are now (in enough detail to decide whether that’s a good place for us to sthavfor us ay), a better place to go (in enough detail to decide whether that place really does look more inviting), and a clearly marked path between the two (in enough detail to make sure we won’t get lost along the way).

  A useful map shows us three things: our present location, a path, and a destination.

  Think of this book as a map that unfolds into three sections. The first describes our present location deep in the doo-doo of blah-blah-blah. The second describes a two-lane path that leads us out. The third describes a more desirable destination—a place where we know our ideas inside and out, trust that other people’s ideas are worth our time, and are confident in our ability to see the big picture.

  Before we embark, let’s get familiar with our new map.

  This is our treasure map. Let’s get familiar with it one section at a time.

  We Are Here

  We are here, way over on the left side of our map, deep in the land of blah-blah-blah.

  On the left side of our map we see our present location, deep in the land of blah-blah-blah. As we know, it’s a noisy place, full of activity and buzz. It’s not necessarily a bad place—there is a lot going on here, and it can be thrilling to be in the middle of it all—but with all the talking and jostling, it’s not a great place to try to think things through, and it’s a nearly impossible place to get much attention.

  In order to stand out in this crowd, one of us starts talking a little louder and a little faster. That works for a moment, but to compensate, all the rest of us start talking louder and faster, too. Things ratchet up until a new blah-blah-blah equilibrium is reached, at a volume, velocity, and quantity that make it difficult to know what’s worth listening to. And that’s the real danger here: With all our clamoring words, it’s not long before we’re so busy keeping up that we not only stop listening to anyone else—we stop listening to ourselves. Pretty soon we don’t remember what our own idea was—or whether we even had one. All that matters is being heard.

  A Path Out

  There is a two-lane path leading out—and we need to use both lanes.

  We could just stay here in blah-blah-blah; it’s easy to do—and, in most ways, our trends and technology encourage us to do so. But if we really need a new idea, need it to be good, and need others to see it, we need a way out.

  The path out of blah-blah-blah is simple to find, but it’s not that easy to take. That’s because the path has two lanes, and we’ve been taught about only one of them: the word path. This path we know well. It’s the path of talking, writing, and reading, and our education has taught, trained, and tested us to rely on it.

  The second path isn’t secret; everyone knows that it’s there. It’s the picture path. As a thinking tool, pictures have been around much longer than writing. In fact, far in the past, long before anyone ever wrote a word on anything, pictures were the only path to take.

  But somewhere between then and now we discovered writing, and most of us lost interest in the picture path. And now, because it’s been so long since we have trekked it, the picture lane remains undiscovered and undeveloped—and a bit scary.1

  So we stick to the path that we know—and we talk. The trouble is that, as much as we might want to leave blah-blah-blah behind, taking the word path always leads us right back in. Sadly, the second path—the picture path—isn’t by itself much b
etter. Even people who know this ancient path well tend to get lost when they try to use only pictures to explain themselves.

  It’s only by taking the two paths together that we can get where we need to go. To solve the problems of today, we need to see and hear, read and look, write and draw. And when we do—when we remember how to think verbally and visually—that’s when we’ll understand the power of Vivid Thinking.

  Our Destination

  Our destination is a place where we can see the forest and the trees.

  On the right side of our map, we see our destination. It is a quiet little forest located far outside the land of blah-blah-blah. Here we can take a deep breath, enjoy a moment of quiet, and get a better look at what’s really on our mind.

  This isn’t just any little forest. Although hushed at first, this forest isn’t secluded; it’s full of ideas—our own and those of others. After all the commotion of blah-blah-blah, it just takes a while to adjust our eyes and ears. But after a few moments we will begin to see more ideas out here, and we’ll see exactly what they’re made of. Out here, for the first time, we can see the forest and the trees.

  te.

  A Way Back

  After our trip to the forest, we’ll need to come back, only now we’ll know how to cut through the blah-blah-blah.

  Once we’ve visited the Vivid FOREST, we’ll never look at the land of blah-blah-blah the same again. Of course, we’ll eventually have to return, because that’s where the action is, but it will be a different place for us. Because we’ll know many new things about our own ideas, we’ll share them differently. And knowing what we do, we’ll also expect something different from the people sharing their ideas with us.

  Enough Blah-Blah-Blah

  That’s it, this book in a nutshell: a section on the land of blah-blah-blah and how we got here, a section on the two-lane path out, and a section on a more vivid place to go.

  Since we’re going to start in blah-blah-blah, let’s begin by understanding how we got here. And that’s a story that begins with a picture.

  Winging It

  Way back in second grade, I drew what was to become one of the most important pictures of my life. It was a picture of a duck. I have no idea why I drew a duck, but I do remember the picture. In it, I captured the duck in midflight: nose out, tail back, legs tucked, wings stretched. He was a fast duck, and I drew him in profile so that I could add speed lines. I didn’t know a lot about ducks, so I had to wing it. In the end, my duck looked like this:

  My fast duck, ca. 1970

  A few days after I drew the duck, my teacher, Miss Brown, gave me a trophy. It said best drawing. I was surprised. I didn’t even know that my duck had entered a contest.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised: My report card from the time, while complimenting my “creativity,” also chastised me for talking too much in class. Miss Brown’s specific words in the “Pays Attention in Class” section were “In need of improvement.”

  My report card also indicated that I was behind in reading. That, too, came as no surprise. I hated reading. Of all the things we got to do in class—draw, color, measure, cut and paste, build, talk—it was when instructed to read that I shrank. I said to myself that it was because reading was boring, lonely, and pointless, but the real reason was that reading was hard.

  I was ashamed that reading was difficult for me, because I was considered among the smart kids in class. I senseoutass. I d that as much as my side conversations irritated Miss Brown, she appreciated my participation. But when we had to read, I knew I was falling behind. When reading became the main reason for school, I lost my favorite reason to go.

  This story could have ended badly. But right around that time, my dad brought home a book written by a doctor. I don’t know if my dad knew I was having trouble reading, but he did know that Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham was funny. We started reading it together in the evenings. I was drawn in by the pictures and my dad’s laughing, and after a time I also realized that the words on the page weren’t so bad after all. They had only a few letters each, and those letters repeated in consistent patterns that were fun to sound out. After a few rounds of “Sam I am. I am Sam,” the lightbulb in my head labeled “words” began to flicker, and when my dad and I moved up to the more complex The Cat in the Hat, that light began to burn bright. Thanks to Dr. Seuss, I learned to read.

  Why Johnny Can’t Read

  So did hundreds of millions of other kids. By the time he died, in 1991, Dr. Seuss had written sixty books, which as of today have sold more than a quarter billion copies. According to Publishers Weekly, twenty-three of the 150 top-selling children’s books of all time were written by Dr. Seuss. His approach to writing—half of which involved drawing—changed the way America learned to read.

  But where did Dr. Seuss, with his funny words and goofy pictures, come from—and how did these seemingly simple books come to change so profoundly the way young students thought about reading? To know that story, we have to first meet John Hersey.

  John Hersey didn’t have the same troubles reading that I did. He loved words. As a correspondent during the Second World War, he wrote about the GIs landing on Sicily, the cold of the Russian front, and the heat of the Burmese jungles. While on duty in the Pacific, he survived a plane crash in the ocean. After swimming to the surface, the first thing he could think about was finding his writing—which he did, when his notebook floated up and bonked him on the head.

  John Hersey’s love of words was infectious. In 1946, he wrote the longest article ever published by The New Yorker magazine. His 31,000-word essay “Hiroshima” told of the devastation wrought by the first atomic bomb. (That’s a lot of words for a magazine: 31,000 is more than half the length of the book you’re holding in your hands.)

  Hidden behind a lovely New Yorker cover cartoon showing a warm afternoon in Central Park, “Hiroshima” appeared in the magazine’s August 31, 1946, issue. The sunny cover was a trick; the darkness of Hersey’s article filled the entire magazine. For the first and (so far) only time, The New Yorker dedicated its contents to only one story—no cartoons, no news, no reviews; just “Hiroshima.” It was among the magazine’s most successful editions, selling out at the newsstands within hours. Later, “Hiroshima” was described by Time magazine as “the most celebrated piece of journalism to come out of World War II.”

  Clearly, John Hersey loved words, which makes it fascinating that when he later wroteem" later an article for Life magazine about reading, he ended up writing mostly about pictures.

  Pictures? Wait a second—wasn’t Hersey a word guy? This discovery is so important to this story (and to the rest of this book) that I want to repeat it: In writing an article about helping children learn to read, John Hersey focused more than anything else on the pictures that accompanied the words.

  Here’s what happened.

  By 1952, six years after his breakthrough New Yorker story, Hersey had become a successful novelist and professor of English. He had also become the father of five children, and in the interest of learning more about their education he joined a parent-teacher group called the Citizens’ School Study Council of Fairfield. The goal of the study group was to help the Connecticut school district’s principals, teachers, and parents understand why children weren’t learning to read very well—something that Hersey, as a dedicated word guy, found particularly troubling.

  As with today’s concerns about how the Internet is affecting our brains, there was great concern sixty years ago that a new technology (television at that time) and a new teaching style (individualized teaching instead of group rote learning) were undermining public literacy. According to Hersey, the study council’s goal was to answer the question “Are our young citizens learning to use our language well enough?”

  To address this challenge, members of the study group attended school classes, read technical books, consulted educational experts, and learned everything they could about the art of learning to read. After two years of inten
se effort and research, Hersey concluded the study by writing another long article, this one appearing in Life.

  “Why Do Students Bog Down on the First R?” appeared halfway through the magazine’s May 24, 1954, issue. Surrounded by advertisements for cigarettes, sunglasses, and Greyhound bus vacations to Yellowstone, the article ran for a long ten pages. In the article, Hersey and the study group covered a lot of ground. They revealed that kids preferred to watch television over reading (no surprise there), that more emphasis was put on helping the slow learners than the fast learners (a bit of a surprise), and that decisions about the “right” way to educate were always going to be difficult because there was so little in education that could be meaningfully measured (a pretty big surprise).

  But the biggest surprise of them all was also the simplest: The reason kids weren’t learning to read was because their books looked boring.

  Where There’s a Will

  Just looking at the pictures in the primers that the Fairfield students had been given, the study group could easily see why kids didn’t want to read them. “In the classroom boys and girls are confronted with books that have insipid illustrations depicting slicked-up lives of unnaturally clean boys and girls.”