Advice we can all take to heart

From the ever-excellent Rob Donoghue…

Even if you are a crazy person, you need to manage your brand.

ESPECIALLY if you’re a crazy person.

Look, I know that you don’t think you’re crazy, and that this obviously doesn’t apply to you, but just think about how people respond to what you say. It’s not about whether you are crazy, it’s about whether people think you’re crazy. And if they think you’re crazy, they’re not going to listen to the incredibly important truths that you have seen which need to be shared. In this, truth is like craziness - it doesn’t matter if it’s so, it just matters what people think.

So, if you have some Powerful Truths to share, you owe it to yourself and the world to stop and think about how you present them. If you can’t present them in a way that people will listen to, then you have failed. No one will see the truth because you were too proud to learn how to communicate. You will get dismissed as “crazy” by the people who don’t understand the truth. This may not bother you personally because you understand that you are above their petty assessments, but the problem is not a personal one. If you are perceived as a “Crazy Guy,” that creates a barrier to you getting your message out.

The key is that your unique insight comes with a responsibility to learn to communicate in a way that gets people to listen. That might mean less profanity or laying a foundation for you argument before presenting a conclusion or making sure the sources you cite are held in equal esteem by your audience. This may be frustrating: most of the people you’re talking to are clearly not smart enough to understand what you’re telling them, but if you cannot communicate your idea to lesser minds, you’ve just written off most of the world.

If you don’t take that responsibility, they will never understand.

So man up. Communication skills are trivial to learn compared to the things you already grasp. It may feel like you’re hobbling yourself at first, but just remember that most people aren’t ready to handle the full weight of understanding all at once - it would be like trying to drink from a fire hose. But if you can regulate the flow, then you can bring them around to comprehension by offering them truth a sip at a time, until they discover a thirst they didn’t know was there, and start -asking- you for more.

This entry was posted on 2. February 2010 at 13:15 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.