So I’ve got some tough medicine for you. The truth is that everybody in this room needs to radically rethink how you communicate, especially how you write if you want anything to stick in this distracted digital world. I don’t care if you’re a student, if you’re an academic, if you’re a scientist, you’re a CEO, a manager.
I’ll tell you what the data told me that your friends won’t tell you, which is almost nobody listens to or reads most of what you write. Most of the stuff that you agonize thinking about, they pay no attention to.
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Why, if I spent my entire life writing lots of words
And how do I know this? Well, I learned it the hard way. I’ve dedicated my entire life to mass-producing words. I was a journalist by training. Started at the “Oshkosh Northwestern.” Worked my way up to covering the presidency for “The Washington Post” and the “Wall Street Journal.” And I started two media companies, all about mass-producing words. Politico and now Axios. And at my current company, the entire premise of the company is to teach journalists and then CEOs, academics, and others how to use far fewer words.
So why? Why, if I spent my entire life writing lots of words, do I want people to use fewer of them? Because the data — and you — made me. If you actually look at what you’re doing. One of the most interesting things about technology, one of the creepiest things about technology is businesses know so much about you. What you do, where you go, what you buy. And in the case of a media company, how you consume information. And the data about how you consume information is eye-popping. And to be honest, for me, really humbling.
And led to this journey about, wow, if I’m looking at this data and the data basically says: you read almost nothing. You skim. You might look at a headline. You might look at a subject line. But you’re basically not reading the stories, in my case, that we were producing. And the most humbling moment, the eye-opening, the aha moment for me: I was a journalist, I was at Politico writing columns about President Obama.
And we wrote this column, and I looked at the traffic numbers and the White House had to respond to it. And boy, was I feeling cool and smart … until I looked at the data. So back then you had to paginate pages online. And so, you know, you had to click from one page to the next to keep reading. And I looked at the data. This was a 1600-word column that everyone in Washington was talking about, that had me feeling so confident. And I realized almost nobody went past the first page.
It gets worse. On one page, there are only 450 words. And I hid a lot of the good stuff at the end. And so it turns out that people were responding, sharing, talking about a story that almost nobody read. And so it put me on sort of this journey, this discovery. I’m like, really, like, nobody reads anything? Is this true everywhere, is it just me, is there something about my writing?
Everybody was getting hit with more information than ever before
So I called my friends at the “New York Times.” I called our friends at Facebook. I started to talk to academics and try to figure out, well, what’s going on here. Because I had a choice at this point. I could give up on all of you. I could give up on humanity. I could give up on my career. Or I could do what basically Jeff Bezos would do if he’s trying to sell you a shoe or get you to buy a book. Which is, what is the data telling us? What do you want? What are you doing?
And that data was showing that one, everybody was getting hit with more information than ever before and is perpetually distracted, all because of the internet. You skim. You don’t really read. And you share stuff without even bothering to see what it actually means or what the story might say.
And if you think about it, the deeper I dug, the more it actually made sense. For people who are my age or older, like once upon a time, the iPhone didn’t exist. The Android didn’t exist. There was no Facebook. There was no Google. If you wanted to learn about something new, you had to go to an encyclopedia.
If you wanted to look up a word, you went to a dictionary. If you were waiting for news, you had to wait for the evening news or the morning newspaper. And then suddenly 2007, that period comes along, and now all of us had the opportunity to have a smartphone with astonishing capabilities to give us access to more information than at any point of humanity. Any idea we had, anything we didn’t know, we could Google it.
Any idea we had, no matter how stupid it was, we could share it. And not only could we share it, we could find other people who would applaud, who would follow us, who’d fan us. And suddenly, oh my God, like, we’ve got all this access to mass information at scale. And you could do this for free. You could do this for free. So suddenly we’re getting hit with all this information, and I don’t think our species was built to keep up with it.
They found it’s at least 250 times you’re checking your phone
I talked to a guy at the University of Maryland who’s studied students for the last decade, and he basically found that even when you choose to read something, even when you make the choice that this is important, you spend on average 26 seconds looking at it. Review.org and others have looked at how many times do you look at your screen in a day. They found it’s at least 250 times you’re checking your phone. And for those that don’t think that’s true, think about how many times you’ve either checked it or thought about checking it since I started babbling.
Our data shows that more often than not, if you share a story on social media, you never read it. Think about that: like there’s something about a headline or a photo that got you so jacked up that you’re going to share it like you’re a little lemming. And we all do it because our brains are being, like, flooded with information.
And what I thought when I did the discovery, I thought, for sure the brain must be getting rewired. And you hear that often. There’s very little scientific proof that that’s true. What happened and what we think is happening is, as a species, we’ve always been prone to distraction. We think we’re good multitaskers. Almost nobody is. We’re good at doing one thing if you’re focused on it. The University of California, Irvine, studied this. They studied our distractibility and found that if you get distracted on something, it takes you 20 minutes to truly refocus. Now think about your day. It’s just awash in distraction. Awash in words: tweeted words, texted words, Slacked words, email words. Words, words, words. And then you peck at your little computer looking for more. So no wonder nobody’s paying attention to almost anything you’re saying or doing. No wonder it’s so hard to get people to pay attention to anything.
So at Axios, as we thought about this, we said, listen, if the consumer’s saying they want more information quicker and they’re not going to spend that much time and you want to stay in journalism, what would you do? What would you do? And our solution was what we call Smart Brevity, that people want smart content, essential content. But they want it delivered efficiently, as fast as humanly possible. And we saw it in how people were getting our information, how they were getting it elsewhere. And so we built a whole company around it to teach journalists how to do it. And journalists kind of adapted right away. And suddenly we had awesome readership almost overnight, people in the White House, CEOs, tech leaders.
We get a call from the CIA
And then two interesting things happened after that. I started to get not ten or 20, literally hundreds of notes from readers saying, “Thank you, you’re trying to save me time. I can tell.” I never asked for a thank you, especially when you cover politics, you’re lucky not to get hit by a shoe, much less actually have someone thank you for it. But I was like, “Oh, that is interesting.”
And then about a year and a half in, we started to get calls from companies, from the NBA, from startups, and almost all were saying the same thing: “Hey, our executives, our people, they’re reading Smart Brevity, but they won’t read anything that we do internally. This led me on another journey to figure out why people can’t get people to read about things that are happening at their company or happening at their school or happening at their startup. And it turned out that basically people were vomiting so many words in all these places that nobody was paying attention to it. And that’s where we thought, oh, Smart Brevity could work in almost any setting.
So we get a call from the CIA, the head of the CIA. They call us, and they say, “Listen, can you guys come in and talk to our team about how spies can essentially give a much more crisper explanation of what they’re seeing on the ground? Like, what are the threats? They’re not great communicators. These messages are meandering.”
So my partner goes in, talks to the CIA, explains the tricks and tips I’m going to give you in a second. And in the audience is a guy who writes the Presidential Daily Brief, and this was under Donald Trump, and he would write it, go in, and they would brief him. And he was so enamored with this idea of communicating more effectively that he quit and now works for us, teaching other people how to communicate more effectively.
I’m not blaming Trump. It’s because of us, because of Axios. Around the same time, Jamie Dimon, one of the most famous CEOs of our generation, he writes his annual letter. It’s 32,000 words long, about his observations on banking and on the world. 32,000 words is basically a book. So he’s probably lucky if even his family members read it. So his staff calls us, and they say, “Hey, listen. It seems like you guys are good at getting people to pay attention to information. Could you do a Smart Brevity version of it?”
So we took his most important points, turned 32,000 words into a couple hundred, and voila, they got much more engagement, much more traction in people seeing what’s important, remembering what’s important.
How to be more effective and useful?
So what I want to leave you with are what are some of the basic tips. Because you probably know, you’re frazzled, you’re distracted, you can see it. When you’re trying to send a message, what are the things that you could do differently, starting today, to become a vastly more effective communicator?
Number one, stop being selfish. Stop being selfish. What do I mean by that? So much of writing is self-indulgent. We write about what we care about, and we write at the length that we want to write about. We don’t think about the whole purpose of it, which is what is the person that I’m writing this for, or talking to, what do they actually need to know? What do they actually care about? Reverse the way you think about communicating. At our company, the first two words of our manifesto are: “Audience first.” How do you serve the people that you’re trying to reach?
The Holy Father himself has blessed this concept indirectly. So Pope Francis just gave a speech recently in Slovakia, where he was talking to priests about the homilies that they’re giving. And he said, “You have to stop giving 30 and 40 minute homilies, and they should be 10 minutes. Because no one’s listening to you. You’re losing them. People don’t pay attention that long.” And he joked when he made the announcement that the loudest applause came from the nuns because, in his words, they’re the ones who have to suffer through your long-windedness.
So point two is: grab me. Whenever you’re communicating – again, I don’t care if it’s in an email, if it’s a tweet, if it’s a note, if it’s a memo to a friend, grab me. What is the most important thing, the reason you’re writing? What is that one thing, if you only had that 26 seconds I mentioned, what is the one thing you want me to remember about it?
Which is related to tip three, which is: just keep it simple. Keep it simple. Like think of that one sentence, one sentence is better than two sentences. One paragraph is better than two paragraphs. Use simple, strong words. There’s a reason you’re taught a simple sentence structure when you’re a little kid. It still works effectively today. It still works effectively. Keep it simple. If you’re going to write about a banana, you’re not going to call it an elongated yellow piece of fruit. You’re going to call it a banana. If you’re going to talk about someone lying, you’re not going to say prevaricate, you’re going to say lie. Keep it simple.
This relates as well to point four, which is: to be human. Write like a human. I see this in journalism all the time. I don’t understand what happened to our species that when you put a pen in our hand or a keyboard in front of us, we suddenly stiffen up, think we’re a Harvard professor or we’re Walt Whitman, and we try to show off in our writing. Like, if I was talking to you in the bar, I’m not going to use SAT words, I’m not going to talk in acronyms. I’m not going to use wordy clauses. I’m going to talk like I’m talking to you now. I’m going to talk like a human. So stop, stop using those big terms. You think that people think you’re smart when you use them? They don’t. They just want to throw a shoe at you.
Which leads me to point five, which is just stop. Just stop. The greatest gift that you can give yourself and others in this cluttered world is their time back and is your time back. Use as few words, as few sentences as humanly possible so that that person gets the message you want and you both get the time back that you deserve.
And I can tell you this, I’ve seen it in my own life. If you just start to think about the efficiency of communication, if you put into practice a couple of the tips that I just talked about, you will see in your own mind that you start to think more clearly, talk more clearly, write more clearly. And you’ll see ultimately that it’s selfishly good for you because you’ll be heard again.