wonder whether the limit was ever the problem?
20 minutes. 5 paragraphs. 13 unique sentences.
Tenth grade English, deep East Texas, a classroom with no air conditioning, which is another story (and what pushed me into politics). Mrs. Andrews made us write every day. A topic, 20 minutes, turn it in. Five paragraphs. Opening, building points, conclusion. Tight, and completely formulaic…
… a machine for laziness. Each paragraph is 4 sentences, an opening and 3 supporting points. The opening paragraph and the closing paragraph run parallel, like parentheses, one starting and one ending. In between, the 3 supporting sentences of the opening paragraph become the lead sentences of the 3 supporting paragraphs. So you really only have to craft 13 unique sentences. The rest is restating. Easy. Done. Did it.
What got imposed on you young, that you are still running on today, and have never once said thank you for?
…and I never thanked her
I did not. Not once. As a budding engineer that structure served me better than almost anything else I was handed in that building, and it is a daily memorial to a woman who has no idea she is being memorialized.
Every other day this week, Compression cost somebody something. This is the one day it did not. A fixed form, imposed on a 14 year old who did not ask for it, is the only reason a man decades later could sit down and write a post a day for 365 days in a row. The limit was the gift. The limit is why the thing is possible at all.
…the night they turned the drummer down
On Nov 18, 1993, at Sony Music Studios in Manhattan, Nirvana taped an acoustic set for television. The first thing they played was About a Girl, a straight pop song that had been sitting in plain sight on a noise record since 1989. And Dave Grohl, who had spent 3 years as the loudest instrument in the room, played drums, acoustic bass and acoustic guitar that night and sang backing vocals. The signal came out from behind the kit, and it turned out there had been a different one in there the whole time. Nobody had to go and find a new person. They just turned the drums down for an evening and a whole other musician was standing there.
What are you wondering about, with no agenda?
That is worth wondering about on a Friday, because most of us spend a career trying to get the limits taken off. More budget, more headcount, more runway, more room. And then the room arrives and nothing comes out of us at all, because it turns out we were never being held back. We were being held up.
I am a bigger than life extrovert. I have never once been the quiet one in a room. And the job I do now, the one I actually love, is listening… which is what we as coaches get paid to do. I am aware of the joke. I tell it on myself regularly, usually at length, which is the joke inside the joke.
I coach a couple of extroverts like me who are now in very senior positions, and still talking a lot, and not yet realizing that each word they say now carries 10 to 100 times the weight it did 5 years ago. I was exactly like them until I noticed that with every extra thought I expressed, clarity went down. Not up. The listener got less, not more, because I had not done the work of ordering the 13 sentences before I opened my mouth. Thirteen is a small number. It is also more thinking than most of us do before a meeting.
It is still a struggle. I would be lying to say it is easy. But the Compression I embraced at 14 showed me that the form was never the cage. The form is what let anything get out at all.
…so this Friday, listen and wonder…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: No agenda. Ask someone outside the work what they heard, and do not correct a single word of it. Just listen and marvel at how different or similar it is… to what you actually wanted…
If you have ever wondered what your signal sounds like from the outside, I would love to help you hear it. Schedule time with me here.
For years I thought Nirvana was noise, and then an acoustic set and a pop song from 1989 and I could finally hear the composer. Same man, same song, different setting… About a Girl
