Peter Winick advises content creators to audit whether their work balances stories with data. If you're too heavy on numbers, add anecdotes. If you're all stories, find the evidence to back them up.
Hi, this is Peter Winick from Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I wanted to ask you to ask yourself a question. And the question is, when you look through your body of work, whether it's your books, whether it's your speeches, however you put your work out in the workplace, take a look at it and ask yourself, is there a balance? And the balance should be between anecdotes stories and evidence. And oftentimes I find when reading content or reviewing content that we— people tend to gravitate towards one or the other. Could be because they're left-brained versus right-brained. Could be because something is research-based versus not research-based. So evidence is good. Evidence is important. We want the data. We want the statistics. We want to know the percentage growth in something that happened as a result of people doing stuff with your content, particularly on the corporate level. right, and on the organizational level, we want the evidence, but we also want anecdotes. And we want anecdotes that tell the story of what that meant for that organization to have that growth rate or to have that increase in employee engagement or that increase in productivity or creativity. So take a look at your work, take a quick audit, if you will, and see if you're out of balance. And if you've got too much evidence, see if you can try to find some anecdotes. If you're heavy on the anecdote side, see where the data can come from and where you can get evidence to support the claims that you're making. Quick tip, hopefully it's helpful for you. Thanks so much.
