CHAPTER 12The Gift of Brevity
AS MUCH AS I’d like this chapter to be brief, brevity demands an enormous investment of time and energy. As Goethe put it in a letter to a friend, “If I had had more time, this would have been a shorter letter.”
First, let’s identify the root causes that undermine good communication. The opposites of brevity—waffling, droning, repetition, or other forms of boring an audience to death—occur because of predictable and avoidable issues that are best resolved before you tell a story. Surprisingly, editing too much, too soon to achieve the perfect “sound bite” or “elevator speech” can prune your story too soon and thus cripple its power to communicate.
Most of your storytelling occurs during personal conversations, presentations, ...
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