– guess there were 3 key things made me want to teach the art and science of “Conveying your vision”
1. Seeing friends at other companies with cool products who didn’t get customers, investors or a great team because they couldn’t convey their vision effectively
2. Seeing person after person with their heart in the right place and their mouth in the wrong place, describing facts and logic they believed in deeply with the conviction that this would be enough to make people listen.
Well, 90% of the people I knew fell into this trap – particularly environmentalists mates of mine who got angry at the very people they wanted to change. I heard company founders and scientists lose people with detail, accountants lose people with figures, artists lose people in thought-clouds and almost everyone lose their audience by forgetting how little they start off knowing about what you know, and how little they start off caring about what you love.
3. I took a lot of blind-alleys that others don’t need to in the process of learning – so wanted to present to others the shortest path : like Churchill said it “Life is too short to learn from our own mistakes; better that we learn from the mistakes of others”.
I noticed that most people found their passion, and a lot of them gained mastery of it – but it was people’s ability to learn how to convey this passion to anyone else that really limited the richness of what people had the capacity to experience. Having done all the hard work, the last 10 yards let them down – it was like stumbling in a 1500 meter race yards from the end after getting into first place … and then crawling over the line in last place.
Tags: influence and persuasion
Beyond the Ceiling 