Ben Guttmann on the Power of Simplicity

Living a life in full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by the nonprofit I founded, the center for Global Initiatives. The center is an all volunteer organization so there are no salaries and thus all tax deductible donations can go to the work. While our key country partner is in Tanzania, our work is global and generally focused in the areas of education and healthcare. We also help others to get their nonprofits started or augment others project based initiatives. It's our goal to open source humanitarian intervention and to help make it easier for others to do more good in the world. We are proud to have been ranked a great nonprofit every year since 2011 and to have achieved a Platinum level rating by Guidestar Links. In this episode's show, Notes will take you to published articles on our outcomes, a number of helpful tools, and downloadable resources which are all free always. Please Visit us at CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org and be sure to watch our video at Patreon.com DrChrisStout to learn more. Thanks. Welcome to another episode of Living Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. We are not as smart as we think we are. We're busy and distracted in a world that is incentivized to continually make us more of both. The only things that work, the only messages that cut through the noise, are sharp, clear and direct. Think about the most powerful messages you've ever heard. Picture the most life changing piece of advice passed down from a mentor, the most stirring call to action in a stump speech, or the stickiest slogan ever splashed across a commercial. We've all been advised to not judge a book by its cover, to not count your chickens before they hatch, and that Rome wasn't built in a day. Maybe for you, what comes to mind is something political, like Patrick Henry's revolutionary Give me liberty or Give me Death, or more recently, Barack Obama's Yes We Can. In the halls of great marketing, you might remember Apple's Think Different, Nike's Just do it, or Disney's the Happiest Place on Earth. Now think for a second about the other few thousand messages you've heard in the past 24 hours? Things told to you like ads, warnings, instructions, or even things you've sought out, like articles, social media posts, or stories. How many of them do you actually remember? How many of the things that you've said do other people remember? Do they actually ever hear what you're saying? The answer is simple. Literally simple. Regardless if these messages are trying to get your dollars, your votes, or just your thoughts, the most effective messages all share one they are simple. Simple ideas stick. Simple messages win. But why do some messages work when others don't? Why do some ideas break through? Why do some slogans stick in your brain? And why do some leaders inspire change when others don't? Ben Gutman can answer all these questions and will in this episode. Ben's interested in the things and ideas that move people. Why we make the decisions we make, why we vote, who we vote for, why we buy the products we buy, and ultimately, why do we do what we do Ben co founded and built and ran the Digital Natives Group, an award winning marketing agency based in New York City. Starting out with local ice cream parlors and the local camera repair shop and growing into partnerships with the NFL. I love New York, Comcast, NBCUniversal, the Nature Conservancy and other notable brands. Through their publishing practice, they helped launch over 60 best selling books from every major imprint including titles From Nobel laureates, Fortune 500 CEOs, Hollywood screenwriters and Pulitzer Prize winners. After winning more than 60 industry awards including prestigious Webby and Shorty Nods, they sold Digital natives group in 2021. For a decade, Ben has been teaching marketing at Baruch College, the largest business school in the nation, and his work or writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, Lifehacker, Crain's New York Business and other outlets. He's spoken at colleges, conferences and meetings from Internet Week to Warsaw University, from New York TEC to New York University, and most proudly, out of all that, he has periodically organized and hosted the perennially sold out Queens Tech Night Meetup series. Welcome to the show Ben. It's great to have you on.

Thanks so much for having me, Chris. It's great to be here.

Well, first off, I want to ask, how do you and Michael Schein know each other? And for context, Michael is my only three time guest on the show and he's made this introduction for Ben and

I. Michael is wonderful. I've known Michael for I don't even know how long at this point. When I ran Digital Natives Group as You mentioned there we teamed up on a few different projects over the years. I think another Michael friend of ours, Michael Roderick, actually he might have introduced us years ago, but when Michael Schein told me he was writing his book and what the topic was, I absolutely adored it. And I followed along for the whole process. And he in turn, when I was deciding to write my book, was incredibly supportive and really great mentor and ally kind of through the process as well because he did it just a couple years before I did. And by the way, for anybody listening who hasn't heard his book, who hasn't read his book, highly recommended, the Hype Handbook.

Yeah, hear, hear. Yeah, and I'll put in our show notes too. I'll have links back to those episodes. So he and I joke sort of a la Saturday Night Live, you know, like when you, you've been a host for X number of times on the show or something, you get like a smoking jacket. And I think he and I decided since he's been my three time guest, he's going to get a bathrobe. So in the introduction I covered your professional bonafides, but could you maybe share with us what got you into marketing, what your journey was like with college, getting started post college, that trajectory?

Oh yeah, I mean, I guess my first exposure to marketing from kind of a practitioner side was my high school actually had a business department and a lot of high schools, you know, don't have anything of the sort. But I was, I was fortunate to be in a district where we had those type of resources. And my first business class was sports marketing when I was in ninth grade. And I'll tell you, you know, I probably didn't learn too much marketing in that class. We spent a lot of time playing fantasy football and like taking tours of the, of Madison Square Garden. But that was my first exposure to business as a discipline in general, marketing as a discipline in particular. And from there I really just gelled to the topic. When I was in college, I was the big student government dork. I was the president of my student government my senior year. And so I was really busy doing all that. I didn't, while I was a marketing major, I didn't do a lot of the like internships that you're supposed to do.

Right.

I didn't do a lot of the agency stuff. But thankfully I had a professor who ran his own agency up in Westchester, so just north of the city. And he basically came to me one day and said, I know you want to, you know, maybe start your own thing. We're looking for some help with digital, maybe we can figure something out. And so I grabbed a friend and the two of us met with him and his partner over the course of the summer and figured out, you know, that we'll start our shop. We'll set up shop in their basement in Westchester. I took the reverse commute out of the city in my 94 Honda Accord, which was, surprisingly, made it to the office every time about breaking down. And that was, you know, kind of the beginning of the professional journey there. You know, a lot of stuff I did, if it was in high school or in college, that touched marketing. That's just, I think, kind of a universal skill. But being kind of a professional, which is to get somebody to pay you to do it, is a whole different ball game. We did a little bit of work with that agency over the course of the next few months, but to be honest, they were working with, like, Fortune 500 clients. And we were these two kind of, you know, two or three, like, kind of knuckleheads, you know, who just graduated college. We didn't quite know what we were doing, so there wasn't a ton of fit, honestly, between the work that they were doing upstairs and what we did downstairs. Still a lot of mentorship that we got out of that process. And so we ended up actually cutting our teeth on the stuff you mentioned, like the local ice cream shop, local camera shop. You know, somebody's, you know, one of the clients, cousins, ran a real estate company. And, like, so all these things. Things, you know, start to. To roll together and you start to build your own little book of business. And so we were in that basement there for about a year before we. We kind of set out on our own and got an office down in Queens.

Wow. So that. That's really pretty quick. And then that was the genesis of the Digital Natives group. Or was that a prelude to that? Or. Where. Where does Digital Natives come in?

Yeah, so we were. Our company was called Digital Natives Group. We were kind of like. We were kind of like an ally, like a strategic partner of the agency upstairs. But we were always our own company. We were always, you know, our own brand. But yeah, when we. When. After about a year, we realized there wasn't enough, you know, kind of work coming in from upstairs, and. And there's a lot more work coming in from our connections down in the city to. And also we all lived in the city, so we decided to look around, try to find an office space. There was a neighborhood called Long Island City in Queens, which, at the time was very industrial, still is a little bit industrial, but now it's become a very booming kind of mixed use residential community. And I got connected with a landlord there who you know, must have somehow trusted, you know, again, these now 22 year old knucklehead with getting an office. And we got this weird industrial space, you know, slapped a logo on that wall and you know, filled it with IKEA furniture. So that was our, that was our first like kind of real office. And I got to tell you, I mean as a kind of a marketing tip a little bit too, if you are in the professional services business, having a real office, you know, may seem like an expense, but it was a completely an asset for us because it became something that made us very real and tangible in a way that every other person going around saying hey, we'll build a mobile app for you that was just kind of working out of Starbucks. They weren't able to do, they weren't able to, to land the same type of business because they didn't, they didn't look as real, they weren't as trustworthy by some of the bigger clients that you might be seeking out.

That's great. Well, and I can just sort of imagine what that industrial space looked like. What, what time period is this? What years?

That was in 2012, I think we signed that. So it was an interesting moment where 2010, 2012, that was where kind of social media marketing really kind of kicked into high gear. That was when mobile really became a thing. And you know, I think that our, you know, our name honestly and our age being digital natives group was something that was a real asset to us at that time.

I believe it. Yeah, it's, I mean it really kind of is harkens back to that time and the whole tri, you know, who's your tribe and that, that vibe back then I guess maybe to kind of pick your brain a little bit. I've had guests on too that are academics, but also come from a background of business and understand kind of what it's like to be applied and in the, the real world and, and a lot of authors too as we talked off mic before. But what is it like for you? What is your process vis a vis creativity that like how do you spool that up for a client or a campaign? I mean you go from ice cream parlors and, and real estate businesses to the NFL, you know, so I mean it's not like you're like in a specific niche. I mean and even then when you're talking about like Social media. I mean, that's a, a meta niche or something to say, well, this is, how do people consume this, how do, how do we get the eyeballs, et cetera. But what is that process like for you? Of, you know, you've inked a deal, you got a new client, where do you start?

Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple different pieces to that. The first one is. So there's a, there's a book, there's a type foundry of designers called House Industries. They're very famous in the space and you've probably seen their work in the wild about knowing it. They have a monograph that they released a couple years ago called the Process is the Inspiration. And that title alone, I think is, is enough of a design lesson and creativity lesson for that, for, for most people. So I adhere to that, which is, you know, the process is the inspiration. If you're a professional, you don't wait around for the creativity to strike, right? You don't wait around to be inspired by something. You seek it out and you go through a process and that's different for everybody that will help you get there. Every project we did, we did started with some sort of discovery process. And so this is something that you got better at over time. We weren't as good about it in the beginning. As we start to punch up and we do more of those things like the NFL and everything else, you get to a point where your process involves, you know, there might be on site meetings, there might be off site meetings. Maybe you're interviewing customers, maybe you're interviewing other stakeholders, maybe you're doing qualitative research. We worked with Grand Central Terminal for a number of years. And I remember standing on the concourse, you know, the, on at Grand Central, right under the, you know, right under the clock there, flagging down tourists to ask them, you know, about X, Y or Z.

Right?

And so that type of thing, it's very awkward sometimes, but it's extremely important in terms of being able to figure out, you know, the insights that you need to do your stuff. So that's one piece of it. The other thing I would say is, you know, she mentioned kind of going from client to client. There are kind of two types of business businesses in this space. If you're in the professional services, especially creative professional services space. And I like to describe them in the shorthand of there's like the bright lights of Broadway, you know, where you're saying, hey, I want to do this, like, I want to do this, like sexy, cool work for these Big brands and win awards and be featured in this magazine and that one. And you seek out the big novel projects. Maybe they're different from each other. There's another type of business, which is I want to do landing pages for orthodontists, right? And I just do landing pages for orthodontists, and I do them every single day. I have a team that's done a thousand of them. They know exactly what makes for a good landing page, and we do them over and over and over, and they're perfected. One of those businesses is necessarily better than the other one. We did much more of the former, right, where we had different projects in different industries every single day. And I, I still have a lot of that work that I do with different, different folks. The, the latter, though, is frankly, probably a better business if you're looking about just generating the most amount of profit, is to say, I have a system. I have a very specific target market, and I do the same thing over and over and over again.

I, I like that. I mean, it's almost like the, the Henry Ford version, you know, and then I, I would imagine too, with that, the iterative process of that, of having the familiarity, knowing the market, knowing both sides of the, you know, the. Who the providers are, who the consumers are, so to speak, that then when there is something, you know, when you do have that new client, you know, it's not like you're creating a product like going back to my car metaphor. It's not like you're creating a new car, a new prototype every time, you know, from the ground up, which is going to have lots of. The mirror is going to fall off, the wheels going to, tires going to go flat, you know, those kinds of things. So how do you, maybe this is a meta question. How do you create your own collaterals? How do you create your own logos? How do you choose your own colors and fonts and stuff when you, you know, are making the digital Nomad group? I mean, how does that. Obviously you, you workshop those things with each other or whatever, but, you know, how does that. I mean, it's sort of like you're doing it for yourself. And you must have some vision to say, well, we want to be scalable. So we don't want to necessarily have some unintended consequence of, you know, looking like all we're going to do is, you know, help, help bakeries. You know, we want to, we want to be, you know, available to anybody that comes knocking on our door. How. What was that like to do? It for yourself.

Yeah. So there's a kind of turn or phrase that I'm very fond of with that, which is the painter's house is never painted.

I like that. I've never heard that.

There's the alternative, which is like the shoemaker's son walks baref.

That's good.

And so I found those both to be very true. There's always another client thing to deal with. There's always somebody who, you know, if you're. If you're fortunate, you know, if you do good work in terms of business development, always somebody is willing to pay for your time as opposed to you doing it for yourself, using that time to do your own stuff. So it's very hard to, in any creative field to do that for yourself. We had to make it a kind of explicit point to go through those motions with our own stuff when it started to feel a little painful that we didn't like the stuff that we had. Right. So we put up our first website. And eventually that feels like, ah, it's not it anymore. You got to go make the next website. But it always lasts a little bit longer than you would wanted to. And you're also. The other thing that happens of anybody in a creative field is that you are your worst client. Right. So with. With. Yeah, I mean with client. With real clients, you have. You have boundaries and you have processes and this and that. It's very hard to go for the same kind of formal process for yourself that you would be doing for another client. I think it's very important to do it. I think that there's something I tell my students this and I've seen it, I've used it a lot in my own career, which is I look at the idea of these kind of three or four professional force multipliers. So a force multiplier in military parlance is like a fortress. Right. That makes you multiple times better equipped than you were before, multiple times more powerful. A helicopter is a force multiplier.

Okay.

GPS is a force. The. In a professional context, I have found that writing, if you're able to be a good writer, that is a very powerful force multiplier. A lot of people are not great writers and a lot of people are just very uncomfortable with it. I think a lot of people can be great writers. They just choose to not exercise that muscle a lot of times I think that presenting same thing. A lot of people can be a great presenter. Not as many people kind of exercise the muscle to do it if they feel like they can get up on a stage and present their work or make a speech or toast or anything like that. I think that design is the other kind of production one, which is if you're really good at design, you know, there's a bit of, you know, it's a bit of a cheat code, right? You, you can, you can have maybe not the best content, but if it's designed really attractively, it will be chosen. If it's a proposal or something like that, if your proposal looks like, wow, these guys really have the design chops because they showed it in this document. Well, I'm more likely to choose them because it seems like they're going to be better at communicating and doing creative work. Otherwise, I think that design is a little bit harder. I think that everybody has the ability to be better at design. I think that there is a certain amount of kind of innate ability when it comes to that. But I think that everybody could be a better speaker, everybody could be a better writer. And those, those make you better as a professional overall. And to go back to just the question for a second was design for ourselves was a differentiator in the beginning because we had very strong design ability in house. And that helped, I think, helps helped us separate our presentation from some of the other folks that were maybe competing in the same space.

Gotcha. So speaking of that then, so like working with your, your team, you're a co founder, like did you have a staff? Did you use freelance? You know, did you say, okay, we've got this bid for a contract on XYZ product or company or brand or whatever and they want, you know, these deliverables, blah, blah, blah, like do you go through your Rolodex and say, okay, here's, you know, here's our great, you know, copywriter and they're going to come up with a great slogan and here's our great, you know, graphic artist and they're going to come up with a, you know, great logo, blah, blah, blah or what? Step us through. Like what happens, you know, when you're trying to make that pitch and then presumably maybe that same team stays with you if you've been awarded the contract and you deliver on it.

Yeah, so this is an interesting business because it's very much dependent upon, you know, who's hot, you know, did you get the project? You lose the project. The. We had, we had a full time staff, you know, about 15 folks. They're kind of our peak. And you know, that included designers, that included developers, that included copywriters, account managers, you know, administrative Staff, strategists, ad people. And so we were able to do, I would say depending on the project, about 90% of it, 99% of it in house. Maybe sometimes you, you, you don't want to hire somebody like a photographer or videographer until you get to a certain size, because you just don't, you don't. Sure. Development is one of those things. So we would do, you know, from branding and social media all the way through, we would do websites and mobile apps and we had some development ability on staff, but it was much more that they were kind of the technical director type of job rather than the kind of, you know, full time execution type of job. Because that's also one of those things that again, it can be very expensive to hire somebody locally for that job. That's, that's just kind of the nuts and bolts economics of that, that type of industry. But also the, the stuff you need is often so varied. It's better for you to have a little bit bigger of a team or people you can kind of bring in from here, you know, from here and there from time to time to, to work on stuff. We would have like a Rolodex of videographers, photographers, et cetera. We would have kind of swing help if we got too many things, we needed some more copywriters, we would bring in extra folks on a freelance basis. But we were, we tried to build a kind of full time team as much as we could. And I think that also starts to become a differentiator at a certain point too where whereas smaller companies might understand, oh you have a couple guys and then you're just kind of freelancing outside. But as you get bigger and you deal with bigger contracts, there's more of an expectation that you have, you have that talent on staff, not that you're just kind of a middleman between the talent and the client.

Gotcha. I have a couple more quick brain, quick pick kinds of questions. So like you co founded, were did you and your co founder. Co CEO like some companies do, was someone a CEO and a CEO, did you have that kind of a structure or more of a flatter hierarchy or how did you manage the leadership aspect aspects of it?

Yeah, so we had a couple folks and you know, it changed in the first couple years. There are, our kind of structure changed a bit and there were a couple, couple partners. The, you know, overall though I would say in the beginning you're very tempted to use CEO as a title and put on your business card on LinkedIn. But then you realize like your CEO of like the time, a very small company with like no money and, you know, like, what am I? Who are you kidding? Eventually we just transitioned all of our titles to just partner. Sometimes we would add modifiers to that, like managing partner or creative director or something like that. It depended on who you were talking to, in what context, what you would actually use. Because sometimes it backfires to use a bigger title. I've known folks that run one person companies, just them and their business card just says Creative Director on it or like senior strategist. And I think that's a very savvy way to do it because if you are. Again, if you. If I meet somebody and they were what I was then, you know, a 22 year old, you know, kid not really knowing what he's doing, and he had to be a business card and it said CEO on it as well. CEO of what? You know, just of me. Yeah, exactly. But if you hand me a business card says like Creative Director or something. Okay. That actually lines up a lot more of what you're doing on a day to day basis than being a Bob Iger type of guy, right?

Yeah. It seems much more authentic. If you don't have minions underneath you, then any C suite kind of moniker seems a little disingenuous. So maybe this is my final question we can get on. I want to get into your book. So you guys sold in 2021, was it to private equity? Did you get bought up by a larger interest or what? Tell us maybe a little bit about that.

Yeah, so that was an interesting process in and of itself. We started the sale in 2021. I finished transitioning out of it in 2022. But, you know, we ran the business for 10 years. It was a lot of fun. And every year was better than the previous year. Even during COVID you know, Covid was.

Bravo. Wow. Thank you.

Yeah, Covid was like a shock to the system. But it was something that ended up actually being a good year for us in 2020 because more people shifted their budgets to digital, so. But a time comes when you've done something for 10 years, and especially at the beginning of your career, it's. It's hard to look at it and say, do I want to do it for another 10 years? Do I want to do the same thing for another 10 years? Had a ton of fun again with my partners, with my employees or clients. Everybody was great. We were profitable. There was no gun to where I had to do it. But we had a little bit of an itch to see what else can we explore. And an opportunity we were fortunate to take advantage of was we always had a little bit of interest. You know, I'll tell you this, which is when you are running an agency and you're 25 and you're 28, you're 30, whatever it is, there are going to be people who are also running agencies, but they are 55 and 60 and 65. And they look around and they say, well, you know, I only maybe have another five or 10 years. I want to do this, but I don't have anybody on my staff that I want to be that I can see being kind of the next leadership here. But I see these younger guys, they've already kind of pulled it off. Maybe there's some interest in, you know, and in kind of joining forces. That type of equation happened a few times in our, in our process over the course of 10 years. So we were familiar with, we explored them until they didn't make sense always. But we ended up selling partial. We sold in kind of two pieces. We sold part to an agency that was a little bit like that and then we sold the other part to a private equity firm that was rolling up a fewer smaller agencies to make an in house team.

Wow, that's great. Good. And you're, you're happy with your exit and things went as smooth as those kinds of things can go.

Yeah, I'm very, you know, proud of two things. Number one is that we had a home for every client and we had a job for every employee. So those were, that was very important as we go into it.

Well, for those that don't know, I've worked with private equity and VC and a number of founders and whatnot. And that is not always, you know, the, the way that you can wrap things up. So again, bravo. Well done with, with, with the exit and being able to do it and keep people whole. That's, that's the tip of the hat. Well, let's, let's now shift into discussing your, your new book again. It's called simply put, why Clear Messages when and how to design them them. But Ben, if you don't mind, before we do, I want to share what a few others have had to say about it and they're pretty notable as well. William Uri, the New York Times best selling co author of Getting to Yes, said that simple can be hard. But Ben Gutman's lucid and valuable book makes it much easier. Jonathan Fields, host of the Good Life Project and best selling author of Sparked said Simply put, is a revelation bursting with clear, actionable insights. It's required reading for anyone with something to say, solve or sell. And our best buddy Michael Schein said and put a plug in for the HYPA handbook, commented that one of my core beliefs, and this sounds so much like Michael, has always been that boiling complex messages into simple maxims is one of the best ways to benevolently brainwash anyone. The question is, how do you do it? Ben's new book finally gives us the answer in a big way. We finally have the definitive text on how to execute radical simplicity in the real world and get anything you want as a result. And finally, the Unmistakable Creative listed your book as one of their top 10 books in 2023, calling it an invaluable guide for anyone wanting to improve their communication skills. Holy smokes. Been very, very well deserved praise. And I think maybe the last bouquet here. I can toss fact check me, because I know that sometimes the Internet actually isn't factual all the time. But I believe it was named one of the three finalists for the Independent Book Publishers Association's Benjamin Franklin Award in the business and career category. Did I get that fact correct? Is that right?

You got it correct, but there's actually another piece of that, which is it actually won't.

Hey, excellent, congratulations. Good. I teed that up well for you tonight. Well, good.

That, that was a big honor. That one happened very recently and I've connected with a couple of the other nominees and, and they've, they're incredible folks, have written great books as well. So it was, it was an honor to be nominated next to them. Uh, and to receive that recognition is, is, you know, it makes me very well.

And you know, I mean also too, for maybe listeners that aren't necessarily familiar with this, that is a very crowded field and category. So, you know, being, being a finalist is no easy task. You know, boiled to three. But then, you know, being number one on the podium is again, well, well deserved it really. Oh, bravo, man, that's great. So my classic question, big surprise. What, you know, you've done all these things you teach, you've, you know, had this, you know, really kind of cool career and in an interesting time for 10 years, had a wonderful exit. What, what inspired you to write this book?

So, you know, one thing that came up over and over again in my work of clients and has come up again and again in my work of students and also just as a kind of user of the world is the same question, which is, well, why do some messages work and Others don't. This is a question that clients will pay you to figure out. What is a message that I could send and what's the ad? What's the website look like, whatever it is that's going to sell more widgets. Students will ask me that because they're trying to figure out what they want to do in their career. And just as a curious person going around, I would look and say, well, why do some of these things work and why do the other ones don't? And so after selling the business, I had a little bit more freedom to kind of explore this, because when you're in the business, you're kind of just solving it, right? And you don't always know what you're. You're solving until you're able to take a step back and look and say, okay, well, what is the commonality between all the different stuff? And so I looked at. I looked at the research, I looked at the data, I looked at the history, and I looked just anecdotally at what were some of the great case studies here, and I arrived at this appropriately simple answer, which is that the messages that work best are simple. And I say this on page one of the book, actually, and I joke that if that's enough for you, then don't read the other 200 pages.

The end.

Yeah, that's it. Like, simple ideas win. So, you know, like, go ahead. But it turns out that, well, the science behind why is surprisingly deep, and the science behind how is surprisingly hard. So that's what we end up with, with the rest of that book, is that, you know, how do we get to something that's simple? Simple is something that's easily perceived, understood, and acted upon. And what does all that stuff mean?

Well, you know, I'm. I'm a clinical psychologist, and I haven't practiced for ages. But, you know, back in the day, one of the issues was just, you know, working with families or working with couples when things were kind of rocky was just clear communication, you know. And I think your book really kind of emphasizes the importance of clear communication. And I think simply simplicity, you know, sort of, you know, is something that can make the fertile ground for that or augment it or whatever. But why is it that you believe clarity is like a critical skill that, both personally and professionally, from your opinion?

Oh, yeah. I mean, what you mentioned before, poor communication. The site is one of the leading causes of divorce. It's the number one cause of aviation accidents, of healthcare accidents. It cost companies $402 billion, estimated on a Yearly basis. It's the number one of the leading causes of employee dissatisfaction. It's one of the reasons that investors don't invest in companies. All of these things happen when we're not good at getting ideas from our head into somebody else's head. And so what this really boils down to in terms of how this works is this idea of fluency. So we know the word fluency, right? We can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin, or you'd be fluent in your favorite TV show or, you know, in wine or something where things are easy, they're fluent. It actually comes from the Latin root for the word flowing, right? And that's kind of what it feels like. But if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, well, they're going to say this describes how easy is it for you to get something out in the world, stick it in your head and make sense of it. And so the easier something is, the less obstacles in that process, the more fluent it is. And it turns out that when you look at all sorts of different phenomena, you know, if it's like stock ticker symbols, if it's images, if it's names across all sorts of different ways which we consume information, we are prejudiced towards things that are fluent. We like them better, we trust them more, we're more likely to choose them, to vote for them, purchase them. And that is obviously when we're communicating, that's what we want, right? There's a huge body of research about this. And the inverse of that's also true, right? Which is if something is hard to understand, if something is hard to see or hear or make sense of, well, we don't like it, we don't trust it, and we don't buy it. The things we want to avoid when we're, you know, if we're a marketer or for an advocate or anything else with a message, that's what we don't want to be. So the question is, then, how do we get to be more fluent?

And in that fluency, I mean, you. Part of it is like you gave these examples that are, you know, like potentially catastrophic, you know, planes going down or surgery's going bad or what have you. Those are proxies for complex circumstances, complex systems, complex, potentially complex communication kinds of things. In the book, you talk about some strategies for simplifying these complexities. Could you maybe share some of the principles or techniques that listeners could use to streamline their communication and have that clarity that's so critical?

Yeah, certainly. And actually, I'LL back up a little bit and say, why do we need these different strategies? And so when we're receiver, and if you break down the communications equation to just basically the two parts, right, the senders and the receivers, we like to complicate it a lot, right. We say, oh, I'm this, I'm that. But if you're, if you're a marketer, if you're an executive, if you're an advocate, if you're a teacher, you're a sender. And on the other side of it, if you are a, you know, buyer, if you're a donor, if you're, you're a voter, you're a receiver. And we all wear both of these hats, we go back and forth. But receivers, when we're in that role, we want something to be fluent, as we just talked about. But as a sender, we are often pulled in the other direction. We have forces inside of us like an additive bias where we're more likely to add than subtract. When we're faced with an option, we have a complexity bias, more like more complex patterns. These things pull us in one direction.

We want to mansplain things.

Yeah, exactly. And then externally, forces also pull us in that direction. Right. So there's a demand from our, you know, our boss to add more stuff to the, to the slide deck. Right. There's demand for, from the media cycle to have more stuff to announce and to share. There's all sorts of things, things that pull us down that way too. So what we have to look at is how can we, how can we bring ourselves as senders closer to where receivers really want us to be? And I've identified five principles that help us get there. Five design principles. So I'll back up, talk about design before, you know, that's, that's what my functional background is. And I don't look at this as like a rubric or a checklist, but as a, you know, here are principles that the better we're able to kind of adhere to them or to follow them, the better we're going to be about getting fluid. So the first one is beneficial. What does it matter to the receiver? Like what's in it for them? Right. What, what, you know, if you're in sales, this is kind of like features versus benefits, like, you know, kind of sales, one on one stuff. Second one is focused. Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once?

Right.

Is it one idea or is it three ideas in a trench coat? Right. The third one is salient. Does your message stand out from the noise? Does it rise to your attention? Is it zigbee or the Zach? The fourth is empathetic. Are you speaking in a language that the audience understands? Are you meeting them where they are in terms of both the words themselves, but also their emotions, their motivations? And then finally, minimal. Have you cut out everything that isn't important and left only what is? And when we're talking about minimal, we're not talking about brevity. It's a little bit different. We're minimizing the friction, not necessarily the words or the slides or the pages.

I like that. And I feel like that's such a good model. When you sort of call it out and shine a light. Light on it, it makes so much sense. But it's. It's almost like then, you know, are these filters that you would then, you know, have your staff run through or have students run through to say, okay, here's the project, here's what we're working on. And now let's, you know, let's run it through these and, you know, let's, let's spin it down a little more. It's too wordy or it's, you know, it's too confusing, or we're trying to get, you know, five features rather than one benefit. How does someone then, you know, start to apply those kinds of things in a real world scenario, whatever that might be?

Yeah, so I think, you know, a lot of it is when you look at this top level here, the five of them, it's about just checking your message against them. Are you beneficial? Are you focused? Are you selling? And there's questions that help us get there. But within each one of them, I've identified a number of different tools with some are a little bit broader and some are very direct about how we can get more beneficial. Right. How can we get more minimal? And so, you know, there's. There's lots of ways in the book and there's. There's certainly ways outside of it to be able to get us there. You know, let me dive into beneficial for, for an example. Okay, so beneficial. I lied a little bit when I said this is not in order. I put this one first because I think it is the one that is probably the most important and it's probably also the most ignored, which is, you know, what does it matter? What's in it for them? And so if you've ever worked in marketing or sales, you've probably heard, you know, people don't buy features, they buy benefits. Right? And there's a sentence that I tell my students every semester, that I tell them, if you forget everything else from this class, from this entire degree you're getting and you remember this, you're going to be ahead of most other people in this business. And it's not for me. It's from Theodore Levitt, who taught at Harvard in the 60s. He said, People don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole.

I love that. Yeah, exactly. Here's all the features, here's the type of motor in it, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You know, we often talk about the drill, but because it's there, right, we can see it and we can feel it and we can, you know, smell it or taste it or touch it, but we don't really see the hole because the hole exists in the world of the consumer, the world of the user and what, and how. And what problem they have that you're solving. There's another analogy of this, which is nobody wants a mousetrap, they want dead mice. Right?

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you too, I mean, just a quick aside, Ben, that like I did taught for a number of years myself and one of the things that I noticed was always sort of missing in the curriculum. Like I would teach psychological testing and assessment of how to do, you know, certain kinds of tests, from IQ tests to personality tests and that sort of thing. And people had no idea how to bill for it or what a. In medical psychological areas there's things called CPT codes that was all Greek to them, blah, blah, blah. I also taught ethics classes and a lot of that dealt with professional ethics and professionalism and how to handle yourself, et cetera. But it didn't necessarily talk a whole lot about the business aspects of being able to create a private practice and function ethically. That way you weren't going to do something wrong in the clinical setting with your patient. But you, but you might inadvertently step on, you know, on your own toes when you're doing billing, because no one ever taught you how to do billing and you make a boo boo, you know, not with any kind of intent, but just accidentally, and then you get in trouble. And one of the things when I would consult with people and talk about, you know, kind of starting your private practice or what I'd written for a couple of books with Wiley was exactly what you're saying. But I think that for me, the problem with the, whoever I was writing to or talking with was that they were so proud of their degree, where they got their Degree, their gpa, all their credentials. I've got this extra credential and this license and this extra credential. And so I'd look at their website and do a critique of it, and it would be just blanketed, just thick with all honest and all true, but about how great they were and about how they went to these great schools and did such a great job and won all these awards or whatever, and never a benefit to why a client, a potential client would ever want to see them to say, oh, I really help people that are struggling with depression following their divorce. And it was sort of like you kind of have to turn the ship that way, too. So, I mean, it applies not just with holes being drilled or those kind of kinds of things, but I think it's fascinating to see it across, you know, a variety of different kinds of disciplines and businesses as well, so.

Oh, that is so true. I think that a lot of people forget that what's interesting to them is not necessarily what's interesting to their audience. Right. They. They really don't care.

Yeah, I don't care where you went, just that you went.

My problem.

Right, right, right.

Some of those things are trust things, kind of signals of social proof, in a way. And so that. That's important to an extent. But people get very wrapped up over all the different kind of details and things that they've done without necessarily, you know, talking about, well, you know, so I care about the audience here. What's in it for them? Slight. Aside from that. Here, it's something I recently learned, and I've. I feel like I've. I've known it for a while, intuitively, but I recently read the research about. It was a lot of those things, like accolades they. When. When we're talking about, you know, oh, I went to this school and I went to this, and I have this award. We like to think that we are just sharing them and they add up. Like arguments add up in the brains of our. Of our receivers, but they actually don't. They get averaged. So if some, you know, I would tell this to a lot of folks whenever I do, like, a little bit of agency mentoring is they'll put on, you know, I've done work for this client, this client, this client. And it's like Apple, you know, Coca Cola. And then it's like, you know, Joe's Barbershop around the corner. And it's like, okay, well, nothing is against Joe's Barbershop, but if I'm the prospective client and I'm on your Website and I see you have Apple and Coca Cola alone. I say that's great. Those are some incredible companies, great brands. I'm going to hire this guy. But if I see the two of them and then I see Joe's Barbershop, I say, well, wait a second, you know, where maybe the other two were a fluke and maybe what they realist guy really does is Joe's Barbershop type of stuff, right?

Yeah.

And so the arguments actually get diluted. That's what they call a dilution effect. The more you give that social proof that is often very self serving, it hurts you.

Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I've seen maybe again back to academia variation on that theme of, you know, like people kind of putting that, you know, they're, they're maybe they're at the master's level now or something and whatever, they're trying to get a job, they're trying to get into a PhD program, whatever it might be. And you start to see these things on there that, you know, I did blah, blah, blah in the summer, you know, this is my summer job. And it's sort of like, you know, there's a certain point where you just quit telling people you had a paper route. You know, it's like your CV needs to have a few other things in there to fill it up. You know, the white space, not those kinds of things. So yeah, I think that's, that's an interesting point with the averaging. I've never kind of heard it, you know, conceptualized that way, but that makes perfect sense. Ben, how does it deal like in the context of we see such. And I mean, I think there's a backlash now too. Having said what I'm, or getting ready to say what I'm about to say, say. But like with influencer marketing, I mean a lot of these influencers, they might, you know, be, you know, ripped or whatever. Maybe that's their social proof or they're, you know, they have good skin and that's their social proof when you want to buy a moisturizer. But how, you know, they're not necessarily. There's probably very few PhDs that have, you know, big influencer followings or something like that. How does that deal with it? With the juxtaposition of I'm an expert, is it just the superficiality of the expertise of you look good and I want to do what you do or how does, how do you deal with that as a, as a professional, so to speak? With influencer.

Yeah, influencers are a Tough nut to crack. I have talked to people who have made incredible, hey, out of working for influencers, right? Like they, they've gone out and they've made a ton of money and build great companies and I've known people that have spent money on it and it completely ends up being a waste of time and money and effort. So it's, it's tough. If I have like a couple just kind of headline recommendations for working with influencers, you got to make sure that you're getting somebody that's the right fit for you. And that doesn't always mean the largest audience. I've worked on projects where somebody had, you know, let's just give round numbers here. Somebody had a thousand followers and somebody had a million followers. And the person with a thousand followers sold more product than the person with million followers.

Right?

Because the thousand followers might be true die hard people that are buying everything this person's, you know, talking about. And the one of a million might just be kind of like loose a little bit. Right, right.

It's. It the Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans kind of concept, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's a big one.

Well, that's. It kind of goes back to your point about dilution too. You know, there's probably a certain point of like, you know, there's a bazillion people and once I start, you know, then I start getting, you know, kind of, I don't know, skeptical, you know, with huge high numbers, unless it really is a name firebrand kind of person. If it's a, if it's an individual, not a, not a company of like. Well, are these, you know, did all the bots, you know, get filtered out here? You know, is this, you know, just still purchasing, you know, fans or whatever too? You get to a point of where it's, it sort of becomes like it, you know, works against you that these numbers seem a little bit too high for someone that only has, you know, 100 postings or something like that to have this, this many followers. So. Well, let me get back to the book. So one, one of the things too that I wanted to pick your brain about. You've said that language can have a significant impact on clarity and understanding. Are there any kind of specific linguistic techniques or strategies related to that that you would recommend for improving clarity or getting rid of the ambiguity that might come up in communications?

Yeah, certainly. So when I talk about empathy, it's a lot of times, are we speaking in the same language as our audience? Right. Are we literally using the same words? And jargon that they understand. A couple of things are pushing against us there. So number one is we have, we, we fall to this idea of the false consensus effect a lot. And so that's basically, you know, let's say I think I'm a normal guy. I like mint chip ice cream. Therefore, I think most people like mint chip ice cream. Right. But in reality, it's probably something like a few people like mint chip, but most people like chocolate and some like vanilla. So we tend to think that our own preferences and experiences are broadly representative of, of the population. When they're not, we overweight our own experience in that. When you pull this out to a group context and we look at how, you know, if you're, you know, on a committee at work or if you're, you know, working in house on, you know, developing the new press release of your product, you can very easily convince yourself that everybody knows what you're talking about. Right? Of course I can use this acronym. Everybody knows what it means, you know, KPI, Key Performance Indicator. Everybody knows what that means. Right. And you throw it out there and people are like, what is this? You know, you know, that happens of acronyms. That happens with buzzwords and jargon. And so it ends up being something that is, you know, is this wall we're putting up unintentionally between our in group and then the out group of who we want to talk to.

Right.

Is that we're not speaking in the same language as them. It just doesn't get understood. And that becomes that point of friction. Right. And every bit of that friction decreases the fluency and makes it more likely somebody just kind of tunes out and they say, I don't want to. I don't care about this anymore. I'm going to go pay attention to one of the other thousand things that is screaming for my attention.

Gotcha.

So that, that's a big piece of it. One tool to approach that challenge is to look at the ten hundred most commonly used words and use that as a basis of what you're going to do. Ten hundred seems a little weird of a phrase, right? What that means is a thousand. Right. If you look at the thousand most commonly used words in the English language, By the way, 1000 is not one of them, which is why it's the ten hundred.

Very meta.

Yeah. So if you look at, look at those words as a jumping off point, use that as a kind of a stress test for your message. If you have a press release or your email or whatever that you want to See, is this getting through? Well, there's a number of tools online you can just kind of look up, you know, thousand thousand words, run your text through that, it will flag all the different words that don't, don't meet that criteria. You don't have to replace all of them. But if all of a sudden 90% of your text is in that, you go, oh, maybe I got to reword a lot of this here. And by the way, because of how we use words in almost every language, they follow this pattern known as Zip's Law. And we don't have to get into the math behind it. Basically the most commonly used word is basically twice as most. Freak is twice as frequently used as the second most common. And it goes on kind of exponentially down from there. What that tells us is when you look at big bodies of text and they run this analysis, they see that the hundred most common words account for about 50% of English as it's used, and the thousand most common words account for about 75% of the language as it's used. So you can get very far with those thousand, and then you can kind of pick and choose the ones outside of that that you need to have to make your point.

That is great. Hey, it makes me think too. I'm going to take a little quick aside from the book, but just from what you said made me think of this. Do you have opinions or have you seen good use cases with like ChatGPT or any of the AIs that are out there with filtering, editing, reviewing, starting from scratch with, with these kinds of things of having that less friction, less confusing, you know, you leaning into Zip's law kind of thing.

So ChatGPT is famously kind of verbose.

Yeah, if you look at humorously verbose as well.

There was a study I saw saw making the Round that was basically looking at the titles of different academic papers that have been submitted over the years. And they looked at the word delve. And so chatgpt loved the word delve, right? They loved the word delve. And they said, how frequently is this used in the title? And basically kind of plots along, you know, a little bit, you know, in 2018, a little bit 2019, a little bit in 2020. And all of a sudden last year, it shoots up, right? And it's one of the most commonly used words. And I saw another bit of research, same thing when somebody was looking at peer reviews, they looked at words like innovative and other kind of very puffy adjectives. And they took these words and they Again, same, same pattern, right? A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. And then a lot in the last year. And the funny little side note on that one is the closer it was to the deadline, the more. More likely it was that you were going to see those hallmarks. So that's kind of the current state of play. That doesn't mean that these tools cannot be used to help you improve your work. I think that getting the work out of it, if you're trying to get it to write something, ChatGPT and these other large language models, they're very good at making things that look like the right answer, but they're not necessarily good at making things that are the right answer. And so you want to be cautious with it for that reason. However, I. I know somebody who used the principles from my book, basically fed the kind of learnings from the book into Chat GPT and said, hey, can you improve my, you know, this text, improve my email with these parameters? And he said that it increased his click rate by 40%.

Wow.

I'm very flattered by that. That was a very cool little.

That is very. Yeah, you need an app, Ben.

I need to get something that'll take advantage of that.

Wow, that's pretty cool.

That's very cool. ChatGPT and these other tools can be very good, helping you improve your writing. If you put your writing in there and you ask to tighten something up or to simplify some of the language, it will do that for you and do it pretty competently. It is not quite there yet where it can really produce original knowledge in any real capacity, though.

Yeah, I've heard. The best advice I've heard around these kinds of tools is to consider it like an intern, you know, like that you can task it to do something, but you certainly need. Need to shape it and craft it and make it your own before it goes out for public consumption.

Oh, absolutely.

One of the other things you talk about in your book is the concept of focus. In using the concept of focus to have a better connection with our audience, whoever that audience might be, could you maybe unpack that a little bit about what your concepts are about that.

So I talk a lot in that chapter about. About the idea of the Frankenstein message. So when this comes up a lot with student groups that I work with, because they're inherently flat, they don't have a kind of hierarchy about who's the decide or who's the creative director. So you end up with this work where I give them a. I give them like a brand and I say, here, go make a pitch for it. I'll bring some judges in and we'll, we'll evaluate your work every single time. I will get students that will at least one group a semester that it looks like they did a last minute. It looks like, you know, they necessarily.

That happens. Yeah.

Believe it or not, undergraduates are. No, but just, you know, as an aside, some of them do incredible work. By the way. I get blown away by some of the stuff they do. But, you know, every now and then somebody comes in and they give me a presentation that says, you know, for this brand, we're going to use slogan X and slogan Y and slogan Z. We're going to use these three hashtags, we're going to use influencers and drones and QR codes and you know, AI. And all of a sudden it's just everything, right? Every one of those ideas might have been great, but together they ended up worse than the sum of its parts. In the book, I talk about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and when she describes the monster in the book, every individual item on the monster was selected for its beauty. You know, it's got pearly white eyes, it's got, you know, lustrous black hair, it's got strong muscles. Every item was selected to be individually, you know, great. But put together, they end up worse than the sum of their parts. They can form a gruesome composite. And that's exactly what happens in a lot of creative environments, is that if you don't have the leadership, you don't have the process even. You don't always have a dictator. We never process. You end up with everything just getting thrown together and taped up into one, into one idea, into one kind of monstrous idea. Instead of committing to one thing out of that. That would have been better if you just focused on that piece.

I love that and I love the example of that in the book. It seems again kind of so obvious once you kind of unpack it. One of the other things, I guess a couple things. I wish I could ask the same question simultaneously, but in this context it makes me then go to your point about that. Effective leadership often requires clear communication. So in a circumstance like this where you said it is kind of like flat and non hierarchical in a undergrad class or something like that. What are ways when it. I mean, is it just superficial by virtue of the structure of. If it's an agency that someone's the final decision maker and says, hey, this is great and hey, this isn't finished baking yet, you need to go Back to the drawing board or how does it work? How could a leader incorporate some of the principles in your book for motivation, innovation, but, you know, while not stagnating any kind of creativity or brainstorming kinds of stuff, but, you know, supporting it, but also saying, you know, we're not going to have a Frankenstein.

Yeah, that's. It's hard, right? It's hard. It's easier said than done with this. Bruce Springsteen, you know, famously, the Boss said that, you know, democracy and rock bands is the ticking time bomb.

Right. I read that quote to my wife. I love that. Yeah, I thought that was so brilliant.

Like, it's tough because, you know, you, especially in a flat organization, you don't want to hurt people's feelings. And there's lots of things in organizational psychology, psychological safety, all this different stuff that is important in kind of getting there. But when you look at the. How creativity works is that it is often better for you to have people work independently and then come together and then go back and forth kind of in that environment than it is to just shove everybody in a room and squeeze them until something comes out. That's how some of the best, you know, marketing agencies in the world work, is that they have their independent kind of teams that, you know, a couple people pair up and they work together in something and they come back in the room and they. Everybody pitches their ideas and, you know, there's somebody there that's the decider. That's how you mentioned, you know, SNL before. That's how SNL work. All the writers go out and they. They come up with their ideas and they come back and they pitch them and then they work independently based off of the feedback there. That is. Is often seen as the best way to produce creative work, is not to just get 10 people, 10 creative people in a room until it happens, but to break up into, you know, smaller teams or units to generate ideas and come back and discuss them. And actually there's. There's some science around. You know, if you have, I believe, six or seven people in a room at a certain point, the number of ideas starts to go down, starts to flatline because you just don't have the bandwidth. Only one person can really speak at a time. And once you get past around six or seven people, you actually don't have any more ideas than you did when you had the smaller number of people in the room.

I love that.

Yeah, well, that happens on Zoom, right? You know, you have to go to like a Zoom birthday party, you know, during COVID it's just one person being the mc, being like, oh, so you're raising chickens now? How's that?

You know, Right, Yeah, yeah, that's, that's really a good point because it just does not translate, even though all the bodies, all the faces, all the whatevers are there. So one of the other things I wanted to ask you about is constraints, like the benefit of embracing constraints on your work. Do you have an opinion on, like, what's the anatomy of a great constraint?

So constraints are paradoxically one of those things that we think a constraint will constrain our creativity, right? It will limit our output. We won't be able to do as much stuff. But we actually find when we look at how people behave is that it does the exact opposite. It actually forces people into areas they weren't going to be before. And so the, you know, it acts as kind of a little bit of pressure, a little bit of forcing mechanism to get you out of the safe zone, out of the metaphorical box and into different space. If you're playing by the rules, everybody else is playing well, you're going to end up kind of doing the same thing over and over again. But if you start to have to do something a little bit different, you know, you can't use the letter E, right? You can't. Everything has to be black and white or, you know, you have to use, you know, you have to draw this thing with your left hand. All these different things, they can help us get out of a little bit of a rut that we might be in. But what is important is it has to be a medium amount of pressure, right? So if we have a lot of pressure, let's look at time pressure, for example. We have a lot of pressure and we say that, hey, this proposal is due tomorrow and you go off, we take two weeks to do this thing. How are we supposed to get this proposal? What happens? Well, you end up copying and pasting, right? End up using templates, end up kind of just maybe grabbing a couple easy ideas. You throw them in there and then hope it works, cross your fingers and see what happens, right? And the other end of the spectrum, if you give yourself too much time to do something, well, you know, if the proposal is due in a year, that's not my problem, that's future Bed's problem, right? He's going to deal with the proposal. And so it ends up being a kind of like too much rope to hang yourself type of thing, right? And what we really want to have is a little bit of Pressure a little bit. That just kind of forces us into, you know, imagine kind of you're pressing a balloon down, right? Like you want to force it out of the way a little bit and kind of knock it around, but you don't want to pop it. That's what we're looking for.

Gotcha. All right, well, I'm, I'm just eyeing the clock here. I have a few more things. Are you good for time, Ben? For a little while longer? Can I pick your brain? All right, I'm going to be very mercenary here and very selfish. I want to run by you as the expert on simplicity and clarity of message. And this is also very, a little anxiety producing for me, so be gentle, Ben. But can I run by you, like our slogan for our podcast and get your feedback on it?

Yeah, happy to. It's can sometimes be hard to kind of do it live.

Okay, sure. Fair enough. Yeah, fair enough. So you're, you're being put on the spot. Will match my anxiety of putting you on the spot. So, so our podcast goes like this. Basically our little one liner is that it's like a gym membership for your brain. Okay.

Okay.

So in the context of that, give you a minute to think about this. I mean, the idea is, you know, everybody knows what a gym membership is and everybody, you know, kind of knows, okay, well, that's a good thing. It's a healthy thing. It, you know, I get to exercise. I get to, you know, do whatever, whatever and build things up. And that was kind of what we were going for with that as a concept for it and kind of a quick, you know, just not have to sit there and mull it over and rub your chin and look up to the sky and go, what, what is that? That's very common, you know, so I'm hoping it hits the, you know, the, the of your five, you know, I'm hoping it's hitting the brief. I hope it's hitting, you know, it's a benefit, you know, blah, blah, blah. So criticism, ways to tweak it. Is it good enough or just what, again, to put you on the spot?

Yeah, I think it's pretty strong. I think it's pretty strong. So let's kind of go through it a little bit. So beneficial. We talked about how, you know, it's features versus benefits.

Right.

So you're not saying this is interviews with smart people, you know, hosted by another smart person. Right? That. That would be a feature. That's what you're describing. The benefit is, you know, this is exercise for Your brain. Right. So that, that starts to get close to that principle. The second one is focused. I would say this is pretty much on the mark there. When you see an unfocused message for something like this, it might be saying, well, we have the best guests and we have the highest production value and we have the funniest hosts or whatever. And that ends up being kind of like three different things that you're competing for instead of it being kind of one piece, which is, this is something that is mentally kind of stimulating. Right. And so it's, this feels focused at first plus. Okay, salient. I think that this does stand out. Right. So if you look at, you know, all these other podcast, they'll talk about like stimulating conversations or soulful conversations or this or that. Nothing's wrong with those, but that's, that's the background. So how do you, how do you kind of stand out against that background? I think that a gym membership for your brain is just enough kind of off kilter in terms of, you know, what everything else is, that it does pique my interest a little bit more.

Okay,

empathetic. Is this the language that the audience is going to be in? Are they looking for a gym membership for their brain? My only concern a little bit might be the word members. I don't think there's a better version of it off top of my head. But, you know, membership. Is this a membership or is this like a gym for your brain or something like that? So again, you know, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta test these things a little bit to see what's going to work. Work. But that's the only part that gives me a little bit of pause for both kind of empathetic and minimal. And if you cut out everything that isn't important and kept what is. You know, again, if, if you're looking at saying, is the word membership the right piece of that or. Because is it the membership or is this the equipment? Right. Like in that metaphor, what. Which one is it? I, I think, I think it works very well as, as it is right now, but that's just something maybe to kind of noodle on a little bit more.

Good, good. Well, awesome. Thank you. Good. That is very helpful and I appreciate that struggle with it too, because it's sort of like, well, is membership like, then maybe they'll subscribe, you know, is it, you know, I'm being, you know, kind of a little subconscious here, you know, and oh, yeah, I can join this and it's, you know, it doesn't cost me Anything or whatever. But you know, we know what happens with gym memberships too. Sometimes they just, they join and then never come. So.

That's a good point. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I want to wrap up with a couple of things. You, you also have the Three Simple Things newsletter. So tell us about that and how interested listeners can subscribe to it.

Oh yeah, that's been a ton of fun. So I started this about a year ago. I send out exactly what's on the tin. There's three simple things. So the first is something for me that is going to be something either I wrote. Sometimes it's an interview I've done or a talk I've done. But you know, I've covered a lot of different things over, over the past year, usually adjacent to technology and communication. This week, actually, as we're talking, I just sent out the. This was a reshare of something I wrote a year ago, which was graduation advice to my former students, you know, because today, this morning is the commencement.

I just, and I just opened it today. It is an open tab. I'm looking forward to reading it. Vince. Yeah. How timely we are.

So that's, that's what you get there. The second piece is something just interesting I found related to again, communication, technology, marketing. And so that's usually a link to an article. It could be a YouTube video, it could be a podcast. And then the third is just an idea to ponder and you know to. Usually it's kind of a piece of advice or a quote, sometimes a statistic. And so it's exactly again, what's on the label with Three Simple Things comes out every Tuesday, totally free. If you go to my website, bengutman.com you'll get a pop up for it. It'll be on the homepage. By the way, Ben Gutman is G U T T M a n n 2 t's and 2 n's. Not a great name for radio, but you got it. You got to put both of them in there to get to me.

Got it. Good. That's. I'm glad you called that out. We'll have it in all the titles and things as well too. So. Hey Ben, we've covered a lot, but is there anything that we haven't done touched on yet that you'd like to share before we wrap?

Oh, this has been a ton of fun. I really appreciate it. By the way, if anybody wants to get a the kind of free chapter of the book that's also available on my site, Ben gutman.com go grab that and that's got the intro in the first chapter.

Great.

But I'll leave here this one.

I do want to get that shouted out here. And we'll put it in the show notes too. In terms of getting the book, following your work, connecting, etc. What are some of the best ways. And we'll put this in the show notes, but go ahead and shout them out now.

Yeah, so you mentioned the newsletter, the, the free chapter. Go grab that on my site or connect to me on LinkedIn. Send me, send me a follow and send me an email if this has been something that's been useful to you. I do speaking, I do consulting and you know, happy to. To help team up on something.

Great. We'll put those in.

But yeah, I'll give. And I'll give you the one kind of takeaway here, which is just as if you were sending a letter, you have to pay for the postage. When you are sending a message, it is your responsibility as the sender to make sure that it's getting across, that it's getting heard, that it's getting understood. The receiver when we're a receiver, we have so many things competing for our attention, right? We woke up today and we cared about our dog or our vacation or our work deadline, but nobody had on their to do list. I want to click on some Instagram ad, right? I want to open up the spam email. Every ad you've ever received, ever seen, ever listened to, has been against your will, right? And so it's important for us when we're in a position of communicating that we have that humility, that we have that respect and that we understand our responsibility as part of the communications equation.

That is. That is great. That's. That borders on the poetic there, Ben. That's a great rap. So I just want to say to listeners too, as a reminder, you can get a summary of this episode and links to the show notes, etc via my LinkedIn Top Voice Companion article that will come out when this, this show hits as well as past episodes as well. And Ben, I have to say, to put it simply, thank you for your work and all you do. It's been great to spend this time with you. You. I really have appreciated it, my friend.

Likewise. Thanks so much, Chris. I really appreciate it.

Living a Life in Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot LLC. Assistant producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien executive producer and host Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website A lifeinfull for show Notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks and until next time.