The Infinite Loops Guide To... Communication
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place” ~ George Bernard Shaw
1. Lulu Cheng Meservey | Humanity Beats Perfection
“It is better to mess up a word and say the wrong word than it is to come across as an automaton. It is better to not have the exact right words than it is to sound mechanical, because if you mess up a word, your message might be 80% received instead of 100% received. If you mess up sounding like a human being, it'll be 0% received, because the words aren't what matters. You're the thing that matters. The medium is the message, and the person delivering it and the delivery, that's the message. And so do not sacrifice sounding human for the sake of getting the words right, ever, and that goes to TV interviews, podcast interviews. That's the first principle. And if you as a startup founder are a technical genius who is not a Barack Obama-level orator who is able to put on that performative sense of being natural, then don't try. Just make it so that you don't have a script to remember and that you actually have to ad lib every time.
More from Lulu: Going Direct: What Founders can learn from K-Pop, Crypto, and the Early Christians (Ep.133)2. Ellen Fishbein | Constraints Breed Clarity
“A lot of writers these days get started with writing by tweeting. And when the tweet constraint was really, really rigid, when you could never extend a tweet that was really good, either the 280 or 140 characters, that constraint creates an exercise that forces you to get better at saying stuff within that constraint. And that was what the sonnet was for Shakespeare as well. You can see him going through the reps of learning how to handle this constraint and getting better and better at saying something worth saying within this quite challenging constraint of the sonnet form. Kind of similar to a tweet. Yeah, it was the proving ground. It was the training ground, it was the Dojo. And so whenever I'm confused, that's where I go.”
More from Ellen: Make Art, Not Noise (Ep.220)3. Ateet Ahluwalia | Stop Dodging the Question
“If I asked you a question and you answer an adjacent question, you think either I'm stupid, or you don't know the answer, or you're hiding something. It can be nothing else. And so, how they answer the question, do they answer it? Do they skirt around it? That really matters. "Hey, how many robots are you guys producing this year?" If you don't know the number, there's a problem there. If you answer a different question about your production facility, there's a problem there. And so, I think how someone answers the question or degree of hesitation there matters […] I also think that, when someone says, "Hey, we're the Uber of X or the Airbnb of Y," No, you're not. Uber is the Uber of Ubering and taking cars from here to there. You are not that. Stop telling me that, because you're trying to anchor my perception on the most survivorship-biased focused firm that you think I will like and I don't like that. I just want you to just give me the facts […] I need you to answer my plain, English questions as if I'm five to 10 years old.”
More from Ateet: The Many Bosses of a Venture Capitalist (Ep. 227)4. Vitaliy Katsenelson | Enter Scientist Mode
“You have four modes of communications. There are three Ps, and they're all externals.
You have a Politician […] they'll lie just for you to like them. Well, we do this all the time. When we go for a job interview, because we want to be liked, we want people... So we tell people what they want to hear.
Then you have a Preacher […] I think about Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field, how successful that was. I'm trying to add a positive connotation to that, though you also know the negatives, what the negatives are.
And then you have a Prosecutor, which is like when somebody in the courtroom trying to get somebody to change their mind. I would argue, we spend probably maybe too much time in the prosecutor mode.
But here's the problem. These modes, they have positive and negatives, but here's the thing, this one commonality they'll have, if you spend all your time in those modes, you're going to learn very little, because they are outward facing modes. You're just trying to change somebody's mind, or influence other people.
And then you have a Scientist mode, and this is the mode that you and I, and I'm sure you are already, but people like us should spend 80% of our time in […] And in this mode, anything enters your mind is hypothesis, which you examine from different directions, and then for careful for examination, you're like, "Okay, this is what I think." And by the way, if somebody else changes my mind, I'm fine to this.””
More from Vitaliy: Soul in the Game (Ep. 121)5. Alex Lieberman | Be Simple. Be Specific.
“When I'm talking to people who either are starting to write internet essays or build a brand online, I'm like, the number one test really to know if you have written something that people are going to enjoy is, there's two criteria. It's one, “Could a fifth grader understand this?" Because I truly believe if you cannot write something for the fifth grade reading level, you're not explaining things simply enough, which probably means you don't understand it well enough. And the second thing I would say is if you can cover your name and replace it with any other person's name, it probably means that it's not high specificity enough, and it doesn't pull from enough lived experience.”
More from Alex: On Voice, Unicorns & Intrinsic Motivation (Ep. 192)6. George Mack | Don’t Be the Genius
“I think the ultimate midwit razor or filtering process is to just always try and avoid being the genius. Because that's the mistake the midwit makes is, he thinks he's the guy on the right. And unless you've got some Tesla level of IQ, and even then I still don't think it's necessarily useful, certainly not for a midwit like myself. As a recovering midwit, going through of like, "Well, how can I dumb this down? What is the dumbest version of this, because if I can't dumb this down where it's super simple of ‘calories in calories out’, or ‘if feeling bad, good night's sleep’” ... if I can make it appeal to the idiot, therefore it may have the chance of passing to the genius as well.”
More from George: The Game of Life (Ep. 195) | Marketing, Mental Models, and Technology (Ep. 114)7. Lisa Feldman Barrett | Excavate Your Deeply Held Beliefs
“What I often tell my students is that when you are reading something or you're talking to somebody or you're listening to something, and your response in listening is, "That's exactly right. That person's brilliant. This is exactly correct." In those moments […] as well as in the moments where you listen to someone or read something and you think, "That's just crap. There's no way that's... That's just garbage." In both of those moments, you should use your affect as a cue to pay attention because something has either confirmed a deeply held belief or challenged it and your job as a scientist, and I would actually say just as a well-functioning person, is to unearth those assumptions and hold them up into the light of day and evaluate them, consider them from all sides and intentionally adhere to them or discard them."
More from Lisa: Why does the brain exist? (Ep. 82)8. Shreyas Doshi | You Don’t Know Everything, and That’s OK
“I've made this observation in the past about certainty theater. Because a lot of what's going on around us, and this is not just in the business world, this is so common in news and current events, where we are basically engaging in certainty theater. Everybody is certain about everything. In business for instance, if I am at a high stakes meeting, making a high stakes proposal, my competence in most organizations, the vast majority of organizations, is measured by the degree of certainty I express for everything that I'm proposing. But the fact is, there are so many things that we just don't know. It gets back to your point about, if you ask somebody a set of questions and they have a well packaged answer for everything, you've gotta question, what's going on there really?”
More from Shreyas: Making of a Great Leader (Ep. 118)9. Will Schoder | Assume that You Are Both Partially Wrong
“A rule that I live by is that there are very few, if any, arguments in life where someone is not a little bit right and a little bit wrong. It's very rare to be in a discussion with someone that's totally wrong and someone else is totally right, it's exceedingly rare. And so, I think, the reason why dogma is so dangerous is because you don't get to pick up on the nuances of the other person and the places where they might be right. You've already framed it as completely wrong from the start.”
More from Will: On Curation, Consumption & Compression (Ep. 190)10. Dr. Julie Gurner | Pretend to Be the Professor
“Oftentimes when [Ed: very technical] people end up as managers or leaders or CEOs, part of the challenge is that they are very fast in their head. They can think quickly, they can come to conclusions, they can calculate things quickly, but they don't take anyone along on the journey. So they'll say, "This is what this is, this is what that is." And everybody's like, "Wait. What? How did we get here?” […] And so sometimes a model I like to use is to say, “Let's pretend that you are a professor and that you are not teaching someone, but you want to bring people along for the journey of how you got to where you're going. Tell me how that would change how you speak to this group of people.” And they would say, "Oh, well, I'd start from here and I would show them how I worked through X or Y." And I said, "Well, so let's make it a little less detailed than that and let's just kind of take it in pieces and just walk them through." […] But when you're able to calibrate that and they see people light up as they follow them on the actual journey of how they get there and they get it, I think that that inspires them to do it again.”
More from Dr. Gurner: Ultra Successful (Ep. 176)
The 4Cs have never led me astray:
Clear: Avoid ambiguity, be direct, and use simple words/sentences.
Concise: Be brief.
Cogent: Ensure your writing follows a logical, relevant sequence. Each point should naturally lead to the next, building a cohesive argument backed up by data, examples, and/or testimonials.
Comprehensive: Be thorough by covering your bases and anticipating questions.
All of this seems like generally good advice, and the points about writing are probably useful for the majority of people. Nonetheless there are certain writers who refuse to simplify their writing but who nonetheless amass a large following online. Byrne Hobart, Zvi Moshowitz, and Patrick McKenzie are perfect examples of this. So the interesting question for me is why writers like the three I mention succeed in spite of the advice offered in this post.