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In the Sunday Blog post “Voiceboxers: Delivering the Knockout Punch in 2 Minutes or Less”, I provided some tips on how to get your message across quickly and effectively. While I attached the importance of this to short attention spans and people’s need for speed, brevity has a benefit to you, the speaker, as well. That benefit is crafting the most effective message.
Leonardo Da Vinci once said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. Albert Einstein once said, “the core of beauty is simplicity”. And Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” Did all these guys actually say these things? Who knows. But the takeaway is that stripping away the excess results in something greater.
Pascal’s alleged quote hits on an interesting point. When we write, more words can often mean less thought, which means the least effective collection of words. Most authors will contend that they spend as much time cutting and editing as they do writing. Inevitably, the edited version usually ends up far shorter than the rough draft because brevity forces the writer to cut out what the reader doesn’t need. This allows them to focus on what remains.
The same concept applies to speech. Of course, cutting out the fluff in real-time as we speak is far more difficult than cutting the written word. It’s why people ramble, go on tangents, or spend too long discussing one point. All of a sudden, a 10-minute meeting takes 2 hours. Yeah, that happened.
This is where so much of what we’ve discussed comes into play. Whether that be mindfulness, active listening, tips in the Voiceboxer post, or concepts we’ll discuss in the future, all of these play a role in sharpening our ability to speak efficiently. And of course, practice, practice, practice. Doing so will allow us to craft messages that are sophisticated and beautiful.
Tuesday Deep Dive is a series where we discuss in more detail a specific point made in the previous Sunday Blog.