Blah Blah Blah Read online

  What word? That one. What picture? This one. The first step toward getting our brain back in balance is to get both our creatures comfortably in place. Then avoiding blah-blah-blah becomes easy.

  That’s better.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Grammar of Vivid Thinking

  Grammar? Am I Out of My Mind?

  Grammar. Everybody hates it.

  It is a scientific fact that there is no faster way to get us to stop paying attention than to tell us we are going to study grammar. Brains freeze, eyes fade, ears shut, books close; it’s the end of the lesson before it begins. There is something so dry and crusty about the word that only a real dummy would name a chapter of a business book “The Grammar of” anything.

  So it’s good we spent the past two chapters establishing that we’re half-dumb. With our fear of that label behind us, we can take the time to explore the grammar of Vivid Thinking.

  Visual Mind, Verbal Mind: One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

  Quick review: Vivid Thinking stands for visual verbal interdependent thinking, which means getting our visual and verbal minds to work together again.

  Actively combining our visual and verbal minds through Vivid Thinking means two things. First, “vivid” means that when it comes to thinking, two minds are better than one. Second, being “vivid” means that actively combining our visual mind with our verbal mind is the best possible way to avoid blah-blah-blah.

  The second half (the verbal half) of the visual-and-verbal equation is well understood. We spent twelve long years in school learning the basics of verbal grammar. The fact that I am able to write this book and that you’re able to read it proves that it wasn’t a waste of time. The fact that it took so many years to learn verbal grammar also proves that it is complicated, nuanced, multilayered, arcane, and borderline unteachable.

  But it doesn’t need to be.

  Verbal Grammar in Four Bullet Points and Two Pictures

  In the end, all English grammar25 boils down to a very few things. Since verbal grammar is our fox’s domain, let’s let him introduce it.

  FOX GOES FIRST

  Fox?

  Every thought that can be uttered in English, every sentence ever composed, and every paragraph on every page of every book ever written depends on the following short list of grammatical tools:

  1 Every sentence demands at minimum only two elements: a subject and a predicate. Something does something. (It could be that somebody does something, or that somebody does something to somebody else, or that something happens that triggers something else, but those are all just variations on the essential subject-predicate theme.)

  2 There are only eight “parts of speech”: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.

  3 A separate and unique grammatical category called “tense” indicates when something happens.

  4 The eight parts modify one another in various ways and, when combined with tense, account for all verbally describable aspects of anything: what happened, how much it happened, where it happened, when it happened, how it happened, why it happened, and what to do about it.

  See how concisely I said all that? And now do you see why I am so intelligent?

  Yes. Thank you, fox.

  HUMMINGBIRD GOES NEXT

  Concisely stated as that is, there still are a lot of bullets in our fox’s list. Since our hummingbird excels at finding the connections between pieces, let’s let her have a try.

  Hummingbird:

  Pictorially, we can account for all those grammatical tools—and the ways they fit together—in a single picture like this:

  There. I think I got everything.

  Nice job, hummingbird. Thank you, too.

  That’s it: The verbal grammar lesson is over. The visual grammar lesson is about to begin.

  Verbal Grammar—Visual Grammar: It’s a Two-Way Street

  Here’s why we needed a review of verbal grammar: Recall that our visual hummingbird has been taught no grammar, whereas our verbal fox has been doused with more than he can remember. Rather than run from what our fox already knows, we can use much of his verbal grammar as a starting point for creating a grammar to support our hummingbird’s pictures.

  This does not mean that a vivid description of an idea is simply the verbal description written in hieroglyphics. Such a description would not be “vivid” at all; it would just be a direct translation of sound symbols into some other kind of symbols—it might be an interesting academic exercise, but it wouldn’t really get our hummingbird active.26

  What it does mean is that for those of us who don’t believe pictures can convey complex ideas well and don’t believe we can draw, we can rely on the verbal grammar we do know as a starting point for our pictorial thinking. Once we see how simple it is to directly convert word thoughts into picture thoughts, it won’t be long before we’re comfortable going back and forth between the two—and that’s when Vivid Thinking kicks in.

  Rule No. 1, One More Time

  Vivid Thinking Rule No. 1 told us that if we want to learn to actively engage our visual mind while we think, teach, and sell, the way to start is simple: When we say a word, we should draw a picture. That was easy for the first few pictures we drew, but then we bogged down. And consider this: The essence of the rule isn’t just to get us to draw lots of individual words. Oh, no: The real purpose of the rule is to get us to draw entire ideas.

  But if we struggle just drawing a picture of a basic word like progress, how on earth are we ever going to come up with a better vivid description of something as complex as an annual report, a sales pitch, a teaching curriculum, or an innovative technology?

  Here’s how: We’re going to use the Verbal Grammar elements and rules we’ve just reviewed as a launchpad for an entirely new type of grammar—one that gives our hummingbird the same structural benefits that we gave our fox through all those years of training. And we’re going to call it Vivid Grammar: the grammar of Vivid Thinking.

  And that’s where Vivid Thinking Rule No. 2 comes in. If we’re working on an idea and we don’t know how to draw it, we can use the six lessons on the following pages to get us started, no matter what our idea is about.

  VIVID THINKING RULE NO. 2: If We Don’t Know Which Picture to Draw, We Look to Vivid Grammar to Show Us the Way

  Introducing Vivid Grammar

  If verbal grammar is the set of rules we use to compose any spoken or written idea from a small set of word elements, then Vivid Grammar is the set of rules we’ll use to compose any corresponding visual idea from an even smaller set of pictorial elements. Using this small set of visual “parts of seeing” means that when we say a word, we will know which picture to draw.

  NOTE ON THE CONNECTION BACK TO THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN

  Vivid Grammar is an evolution of (and complement to) a core visual thinking tool I call the “6 × 6 Rule,” which I introduced in my previous book, The Back of the Napkin. The 6 × 6 Rule makes the connection between the six neurobiological “vision pathways” along which a visual signal travels in the brain and a set of six simple pictures that anyone can draw. Don’t worry, though: Reading The Back of the Napkin isn’t necessary for understanding Vivid Grammar. Vivid Grammar is a stand-alone concept whose meaning and application can be fully understood with no prior knowledge of that book.

  If you have read The Back of the Napkin, you will notice the underlying similarities between Vivid Grammar and the 6 × 6 Rule—but please keep reading anyway. In the four years since 6 × 6 first appeared in print, I have had the chance to review it face-to-face with tens of thousands of people around the world, learning more about the “six W’s” myself. Vivid Grammar is the result of my own continuing education, the ultimate expressive form of who and what, how much, where, when, how, and why.

  If you are interested in the origin of Vivid Grammar, please look at Appendix B, “Connections Back to The Back of the Napkin.”

  The Six Elemental Pictu
res

  Although our hummingbird does not see the world in the same way as our fox, all the pictures she sees are composed of just six elemental “parts of seeing” components, each of which corresponds directly to one or two of our fox’s verbal “parts of speech.” Listed in order of increasing complexity, the six elemental pictures of Vivid Grammar are: portrait, chart, map, time line, flowchart, and multivariable plot.

  In their simplest forms, the Vivid Grammar “parts of seeing” align to the verbal grammar “parts of speech” in the following way:

  THE SIX ELEMENTAL PICTURES OF VIVID GRAMMAR (and Their Relationship to Verbal Grammar)

  1 Portraits are the visual representation of nouns and pronouns.

  = NOUNS and PRONOUNS (and sometimes simple verbs and adjectives of “quality”)

  2 Charts are the visual representation of adjectives of quantity.

  = ADJECTIVES of quantity

  3 Maps are the visual representations of prepositions and conjunctions.

  = PREPOSITIONS and CONJUNCTIONS

  4 Timelines are the visual representation of tense.

  = TENSE

  5 Flowcharts are the visual representation of complex verbs.

  = COMPLEX VERBS

  6 Multivariable plots are the visual representation of complex subjects.

  = COMPLEX SUBJECTS

  For the rest of this book, we’re going to learn how to draw each of these six elemental pictures and then how to combine them to create vivid explanations of any idea we can come up with. That way we can be sure that our ideas will be so vivid that they won’t show up on the Blah-Blahmeter at all—no matter how boring or convoluted they may seem when expressed with words alone.

  Introducing the Vivid “Grammar Graph”

  The six elemental pictures of Vivid Grammar are interlinked in the following way: We start with the most basic (the “portrait,” which as we just saw serves as the noun or pronoun of our idea) and then add each upon the other within a simple framework as the six pictures become increasingly layered and meaningful.

  Let’s call this framework the “Grammar Graph.” Because it provides a visual way to link together the six elemental pictures, it is a graph we will refer back to frequently throughout the rest of this book. Here it is, the framework of the six elemental pictures, aka the Grammar Graph.

  The Vivid Grammar Graph:

  the simple framework that accounts for and links together the six elemental pictures of Vivid Grammar.

  For the rest of this chapter, we’re going to run through the Grammar Graph quickly, just to get a sense of what the six elemental pictures show, how they parallel verbal grammar, and how they relate to one another.27 Then, for the rest of the book, we’ll put each of the elements through its paces.

  1 The Nouns of Our Ideas: Portraits

  At the top of the Grammar Graph, we start with “portraits.”

  Portraits represent nouns and pronouns, the whos and whats of our ideas. At their simplest level, portraits show the “subject” of our thoughts: the person, place, or thing that we’re talking about.

  Portraits (the whos and whats) of our idea represent nouns and pronouns.

  When our fox says “face,” our hummingbird draws a . If our fox says “box,” our hummingbird draws a . If our fox says “boat,” our hummingbird draws a . Portraits are “vivid” because they let our hummingbird add visual meaning to the verbal names that our fox conjures up.

  Since portraits represent the subject of our idea—they are the essential thing that is taking action, being described, being counted, being moved, being timed, or being modified—portraits are the initial building blocks of anything we want to vividly think through or describe.

  For example, if we’re thinking about developing a new piece of software, our fox might start by picking a word to identify the person who would use the software (the “user,” says our fox), the digital device on which the software would run (a “mobile phone”), or our software itself (a “location-based application”). Summing things up, our fox might say, “The user has a mobile phone on which he runs a location-based application.” It’s a valid statement, it makes sense, and it gets our idea going. It’s not blah-blah-blah—but neither is it vivid.

  That’s because our fox wasn’t acting alone when making those words and stringing them together. The hummingbird was there all along, conjuring up images right alongside the fox’s words. The hummingbird is just as active coming up with “user,” “device,” and “software,” but she’s seeing them, not saying them. Pictures give our hummingbird the chance to “speak” as well. That’s J" wi0">,” our hwhere portraits come in.

  To our hummingbird, all of those things—the user , the device , and the software — can be represented with simple portraits. If we wanted to vividly describe our idea, we could simply start by drawing any one (or all) of them.

  Drawing a simple portrait of any noun central to our idea is the beginning of a vivid description.

  By engaging our hummingbird to draw those words as our fox says them, we make the “nouns” far richer in our own mind—and simultaneously vastly clearer to anyone who might be trying to read our mind. That’s the essence of a vivid thought: What is the best, fastest, richest, and most believable way to get an idea from my head into yours? And that’s just the beginning of what Vivid Thinking can do.

  Portraits as Adjectives of Quality

  If we add a few details to a basic portrait, they represent adjectives of quality as well. (What kind of person, what type of phone, what sort of software?) For example, if we add a few lines to a smiley face, we can visually describe many different kinds of faces.

  With the addition of a few details, portraits also serve to describe what kind of person (or thing); they serve as adjectives of quality.

  In this way, even a slightly detailed portrait is the visual equivalent of both a noun and the adjectives that describe its qualities. For example, we could say just “person” and draw . But if we wanted to say “the person in the hat,” we’d draw , and if we wanted to say “the man in glasses wearing the hat,” we’d draw . See how efficient portraits can be? One picture can replace several nouns, pronouns, and adjectives.

  Portraits as Simple Verbs

  Once we get used to using portraits to visually represent the nouns and pronouns of our ideas, we will see that they can do one more great thing: Portraits can also represent simple actions and verbs. For example, we can represent “running” with , “eating” with , and “kissing” with .

  More advanced portraits can also represent simple verbs.

  Looked at this way, the potential of Visual Grammar becomes clear. Rather than saying, in a “piece-by-piece” way, the subject of a thought is over here and the predicate is way over here, we can combine both into a single “all-at-once” picture.

  For example, we could say, “The dog ate my homework” like this:

  Or we could say “Brace for impact” like this:

  Or we could say “All men are created equal” like this:

  A Portrait of the User as a Lost Man

  With an initial portrait drawn, we can use visual grammar to expand our idea vividly in any direction. (By the way, that is the most important statement in this chapter, so let’s say it again: With an initial portrait drawn, we can use visual grammar to expand our idea vividly in any direction.) This means that whenever we want to explore, teach, or sell a complex idea, all we need to do is identify any initial “subject” in the idea and draw its corresponding portrait. From that starting point alone, we can vividly expand our idea as far as our combined fox and hummingbird minds are willing to take us.

  Let’s jump ahead in the Visual Grammar Graph for a moment to complete our user-device-software example using a “time line.” (We’ll come right back to our step-by-step walk-through in a minute.)

  In this “location-based application” software idea, we’ve identified one possible initial subject as a “user,” so let’s start with him. We
draw his portrait.

  A user.

  The reason this user is interesting to us is that he is unhappy—and therefore in need of our software. So let’s add an “adjective of quality” (a frown) and draw him as an unhappy user.

  An unhappy user.

  The reason this user is unhappy J0013hap