Blah Blah Blah Read online

  A foggy message is a signal that there is likely no real idea within it.

  In other cases, especially with newcomers to the world of politics and business, the result is the painful process of watching gradually dawning ignorance. The speaker may start out smooth and convincing, her words confident and articulate. But as she continues, we realize that we’re still waiting for the beef. At some point, our brains say it even before we do: “She has no idea what she’s talking about.” Literally: There’s no idea there.

  When a message appears to mislead, be on the lookout for a truly rotten idea.

  The last column is the worst. When the Blah-Blahmeter tells us we’re being misdirected by someone’s words—when the words just seem so far off or so far out that they can’t possibly be taken at face value—we can be pretty sure that those words are intentionally masking a truly nasty idea, one so vile that even its originator can’t quite stomach saying it aloud in public. What is a rotten idea? Just like the word implies for fruit or meat, a rotten idea is one whose time (if there ever was one) has come and long gone. If somebody is still trying to get us to take a bite, we better beware.

  The second row on the Blah-Blahmeter measures the nature of the idea itself, whether simple, complicated, missing, or just plain rotten.

  Blah-Blahmeter Row 3: The Intent Is . . .

  Another fundamental premise of this book is that the only reason to convey an idea at all is that we want it to become shared. If the creator of an idea does not intend to bring the idea to the light of day, there is no reason for her to wish to talk about it. If she voluntarily shares an idea, there must be some intention in doing so, from educating to selling to diverting. Understanding that intention is a powerful measure of whether words work or not.

  The next row down on the Blah-Blahmeter scale helps us deduce that underlying intent by correlating the speaker’s motivation back to the original quality of her message. The first column, for example, tells us that when a speaker delivers a simple message we “get” quickly, we can assume that at some level she meant to clarify.10

  A simple message we quickly “get” indicates (usually) the speaker’s desire to clarify.

  In the second column, under “blah,” we find the speaker whose desire is to illuminate her idea but who becomes boring when tripped up by her idea’s complexity. Although her intent is good, her message quickly gets bogged down and becomes tiresome for the rest of us to follow.

  Although her intent and desire are to illuminate an idea, the speaker who can’t find a simple message quickly becomes boring.

  Under the “blah squared” column, when we find ourselves getting lost in the fog of someone’s message, we can be pretty sure that the speaker’s intent was to obfuscate, either because he had no real idea to share or because he himself hadn’t yet discovered what his own idea was. In either case, the best he can do is lead us (and perhaps himself as well) B elispessume thato believe there is a valid idea buried somewhere in his words and that the real problem is that we’re too thick to see it. Foggy, befuddling delivery most likely indicates a desire on the speaker’s part to intentionally get us lost—or at least dazzle us with enough bull that we no longer care.

  When the message becomes increasingly foggy, we can be pretty sure the speaker’s intent is to obfuscate.

  In the “blah cubed” column, intent becomes malicious. When the idea to be conveyed is a truly rotten one, an idea so distasteful that even the speaker is afraid to say it aloud, the speaker’s only recourse is to intentionally divert the audience from the real message by substituting another. And that’s when our Blah-Blahmeter should really be buzzing.

  When an idea is truly rotten, the speaker’s only option is to intentionally divert and misguide the audience.

  Here’s why. True “blah cubed” blah-blah-blah isn’t like the other levels of language breakdown—and it’s different because of the speaker’s intent. With “blah,” the speaker meant well but was just boring. With “blah-blah,” the speaker was lost, but the worst we could say was that he wasn’t up-front about it.

  But at “blah cubed” we see someone become so enamored of his words that any real meaning the words once had washes away. And because the words themselves no longer contain meaning, the only option is to repeat them and twist them until they intentionally mislead. Then we’ve succumbed to the worst aspects of thoughtless words: We no longer care what our words mean; we care only that they provoke. Then we’ve all entered the land of verbal shock and awe—and that’s when our real problems begin.

  The Last Row: What We Can Do About All the Blah-Blah-Blah

  The third fundamental premise of this book is that we don’t need all the blah-blah-blah to get our message across. Regardless of what we want to say—whether simple or complex, reassuring or frightening, visionary or tactical, complimentary or critical—we can make any idea clear and compelling, both to our audience and to ourselves.

  This is where Vivid Thinking comes into play. By encouraging us to actively use both our verbal mind (everything we’ve looked at so far in this section) and our visual mind (which we’re going to explore in great detail in the next section), we’re going to see that every quadrant on the Blah-Blahmeter can be improved. Every good idea can be made clearer, every missing idea can be found, and every rotten idea can be incinerated. All we need to do is think vividly.

  One more time through the Blah-Blahmeter will show us how.

  The third row on the Blah-Blahmeter measures the speaker’s intent: Did she mean to clarify, illuminate, obfuscate, or divert? We can usually tell by the quality of her message.

  Blah-Blahmeter Row 4: Vivid Will . . .

  Vivid is simple. It’s just a way to take what we’ve been well trained to do—to use words to think, critique, discover, and share—and combine that with our innate (yet neglected) ability to do the same things with pictures. The results of this combined approach will always be more powerful than using just one or the other.

  Under each column of the Blah-Blahmeter, let’s see how Vivid makes this happen.

  The full Blah-Blahmeter: The message, the idea, the intent—and how Vivid will help clarify them all.

  Let’s start with the first column, “no blah-blah.” If we have a good idea that we’ve thought through well enough to express simply with words, it’s guaranteed that other people will get it. Could communication get any better than that?

  Yes.

  The mechanism for making good verbal communication great is to add the visual. Vivid will show us how to make an already clear verbal idea diamond sharp, something so refined that people won’t be able to not understand it. A simple picture added to a simple statement makes a good idea become great, and a clear idea become crystal.

  Adding the visual to the verbal makes a clear idea become crystal.

  What about under the “blah” column: Can adding the visual help a message not be boring? Yes again—of course it can. Using simple pictures to work through a complicated idea always illuminates hidden simplicities and alternative perspectives, aspects of our original idea that remain invisible when words are our only tool. Vivid thinking gives us a way to bring those visual insights to the surface, where others can see them—and we’ll never have to give a boring talk again.

  Adding the visual to the complicated always illuminates hidden simplicities and always sharpens the picture.

  Under the “blah-blah” column, the home of foggy messages masking barely conceived ideas, the v Bt”nt p heightisual helps, too. Nothing helps us see a vague idea more clearly than trying to draw it out. If we don’t quite know our own idea or aren’t even quite sure if we really have one, picking up a pen and making a mark on a piece of paper always gets the juices flowing.

  The same is true when we’re getting lost during someone else’s foggy explanation of his own idea. If we can’t draw it out, the likely problem is that there’s nothing there. That’s where Vivid comes in; as we’ll see in the following sections, anyone
can draw any idea, assuming that the idea actually has shape11

  —all we usually need is a little help to get started.

  Looking for the visual shape of a vague idea always helps bring the idea into focus, and always exposes a missing idea.

  We’ve come to the final row and column of the Blah-Blahmeter—the end of the line, where words serve only to cause harm. Remember how we said a true “blah cubed” message is different from all others? When a message has become this far removed from having meaning, the only option is to counter the speaker’s intent by exposing his underlying idea to the light of day. That’s what Vivid pictures can do, far more effectively than any words. Curing “blah cubed” isn’t something that we can do by ourselves. It requires the intervention of all involved—speaker, listener, and bystander—to take action and find the picture that debunks the idea, exposes the intent, and blows up the words.

  When the words hide a malicious message, our only choice is to find the picture that blows the cover apart.

  Putting Our Blah-Blahmeter to Use

  For the rest of this book, we’re going to use the Blah-Blahmeter to understand where, when, and how to use Vivid Thinking to best integrate our verbal and visual minds. The simplest way is to think of words and pictures like this:

  If our message is clear, we’ll use Vivid Thinking to make it shine.

  If we have a clear message, Vivid will make it shine.

  If our message is boring, we’ll use Vivid to improve our delivery.

  If we’re boring, Vivid will improve our delivery.

  If our message is foggy, we’ll use Vivid to explore our idea.

  If we’re foggy, Vivid will help us explore our idea.

  If our message is diverting, we’ll use Vivid to expose our intent.

  If we’re misleading, Vivid will help us understand our intent.

  That’s the Blah-Blahmeter: a tool we use to identify incoming blah-blah-blah and deduce the speaker’s likely intent. But what if the speaker is us? That’s where learning to think more vividly is going to help us make sure our ideas don’t register any blah at all.

  PART 2

  If I Draw, Am I Dumb?

  An Introduction to Vivid Thinking

  CHAPTER 3

  Two Minds Are Better Than One

  Blah-Blah-Blah Doesn’t Mean Dumb

  Most of the five quotes in the previous chapters were hard to understand. But that does not make the people who said them stupid. The president of the United States, the general in charge of the Afghan war, the captain of an airliner with forty thousand hours of flying in his logbook, a sophisticated marketer at the Coca-Cola Company, even a devious manipulator of money—all of these people are intelligent, well-read, and perfectly capable of making themselves understood.

  But if they’re so smart, what went wrong with their words?

  Their problem isn’t their words—their problem is that they used only words.

  Einstein Was Stupid

  Albert Einstein, universally regarded as one of the most brilliant people ever, didn’t much like words. As an old scientist, reflecting on a lifetime of insight and discovery, he was quite clear about it: “Th Bimplordst sit these thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I rarely think in words at all.”

  Even as a toddler, Einstein wasn’t much of a talker. Whereas most babies begin talking anywhere from nine months to two years old, young Albert didn’t say a word until he was two and a half. His parents were so worried that they called in a doctor to see what was wrong. Finally, on the day his baby sister was born—a day that his mother promised would bring Albert a new “toy”—Albert pointed to the infant and asked in a perfectly formed sentence, “Where are the wheels?”

  The problem wasn’t that he couldn’t speak; Albert just wanted to speak in complete thoughts.

  Until he was eight, Albert composed his thoughts mentally, silently trying out the sounds while moving his lips, before finally verbalizing them in complete sentences. The Einsteins’ maid had a word for that: She called Albert “stupid.”

  A Tale of Two Minds

  How would we today describe a person who at age six couldn’t freely speak a complete sentence but could, while playing with a toy compass, discern the hidden forces of nature?12 Which is it: Was Albert Einstein brilliant or stupid?

  If we consider that each of us has two different ways of looking at the world—a “piece by piece” way and an “all at once” way—perhaps we can say that he was both.

  As are we all.

  Since the time of Oog and Aag and throughout the eons of human development, our ability to think13 has evolved along two different paths. One path specialized in seeing the world as lots of little pieces, while the other path specialized in looking at the world as a whole.

  Throughout the eons, we’ve pushed along two different “thinking” paths: One sees the world as lots of little pieces, the other sees the world as a whole.

  The first path was useful because, by seeing the world as a collection of individual parts, we could choose which individual things to focus on. To a hunter like Oog, focus meant he could put all his attention on his prey, blocking out other distractions.

  The bad news was that focusing forward on his prey meant Oog couldn’t see the lion creeping up behind him. That’s where the second path was useful. His all-at-once view relied on his peripheral vision (and movable eyes) to let him see the whole world, noting patterns and changes that were bigger than any one part.

  The first path lets us focus. The second path lets us see big patterns.

  Double Vision

  This ability to simultaneously see the world both piece by piece and all at once was a lifesaver. Thanks in large part to this double vision, Oog and Aag could think in new and remarkable ways, seeing things that other creatures could not, thinking about things in ways that other creatures could not—and surviving when other creatures did not.

  Somewhere along this evolutionary chain, seeing both ways became so critical—but so mentally demanding—that the two hemispheres of our “thinking” brain, the cerebrum, split the tasks.14 As neuroscientist John Medina describes it in his wonderful book Brain Rules, “the brain can be divided roughly into two hemispheres of unequal function.” While both hemispheres shared most functions, each also specialized (in a variety of ways), supporting either the piece-by-piece view or the all-at-once view.

  Over the past thirty years, an enormous amount of scientific and popular energy has been generated in pointing out the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the human brain—much to the excitement of the public and the chagrin of the scientific community. This notion of our having two brains—one verbal and linear, one visual and spatial—is so compelling that it has taken on the status of popular myth far beyond what the science actually knows or says.15

  It’s nowhere near as clear-cut as right brain versus left brain, but our brain does see two different pictures of the world at the same time.

  Excitement aside, here is something we do know: Our single brain does have the ability to look at one scene, at one place, at one time, and yet still descriptively think about what it sees in two profoundly different ways.16 One way sees the pieces while one way sees how the pieces fit together. Although the two pictures describe the same world, they do not look the same.

  Words from the Pieces, Pictures from the Whole

  As the eons passed, our two ways of seeing the world each became both more specialized and more complementary. As the two paths each got better in their respective roles, they also needed to rely increasingly on each other to fill in the evolving gaps. The big connections that the piece-by-piece path missed were picked up by the all-at-once path. The important details that the all-at-once path dismissed were detected by the piece-by-piece path.

  Our all-at-once path takes in the whole scene . . .

  Over time, each path developed its own method for noting, recording, and passing along what it detected. The piece-by-piece path
, being very good at looking at one thing at a time, developed a way to quickly assign each thing an abstract mental shorthand term that didn’t require constant looking to recall what the thing was. That term became the object’s name. (There’s the sun, there’s a hill, there’s a tree, there’s a rabbit.)

  . . . and in order to account for many pieces without needing to always be looking at them, our piece-by-piece path assigns each piece a name.

  By assigning names to the things it saw, the piece-by-piece path didn’t have to keep everything in sight to know what was there; as long as nothing moved or changed, keeping track of the names alone proved an efficient way to keep track of the world—and make decisions about it. (The sun illuminates the hill behind the tree above the rabbit. Now I see my lunch!)