The Only Way to Get Your Ideas Across Is by Overcommunicating Them
Or, spicing up generic communication and have 10x impact
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
A request: If you like this essay, could you do me a favour and hit that 🤍 heart so that it becomes a ♥️ heart? This helps me understand what kind of topics I should write more about. This also signals Substack that more people should read this essay.
Q: How to better communicate ideas?
Most of the time, what is said or written is seldom communicated. A bulk of it is lost in translation, misinterpreted, or immediately forgotten. In order to convey our intended message, a viable solution is overcommunication. But overcommunication is often misunderstood as repeating the same thing over and over again. It cannot be further from the truth.
Each of us live in our own worlds with varying priorities. The reality is that other people pay much less attention to you than you think. They’re often far too absorbed in their own subjective experiences to give their full attention to your talk, email, or presentation. Least of all, you can never expect them to pick up on cues related to your intentions.
The only way to get your ideas across is by “overcommunicating” them. A bad example of overcommunication is saying something over and over again. No matter how good your intention or how strong your message, it gets irritating to hear the same thing, and it does more harm than good.
People love things that are different, even if they aren’t novel. Most of all, people despise the obvious and the boring. Therefore, to overcommunicate our ideas, we have to find ways to make them non-obvious. A good way to achieve the same is to spice things up via narratives, phrases, and labels.
Narratives are real-life anecdotes, stories, parables, or fables that reinforce what we are trying to say. For example, famous business lessons are conveyed using case-studies which run like a movie (with a happy or a tragic ending).
An excellent story (with a happy ending) is that of the Airbnb guys in their early days. Brian Chesky, the company’s cofounder and CEO, has a talk from 2010 where he narrates the first 1,000 days of Airbnb when they were powerless and obscure. It’s a story of how they racked up unpaid credit card bills to cover expenses, and how they sold packaged cereals to get themselves out of debt, thereby calling themselves “cereal” entrepreneurs.
The story is fun and super interesting, yes, but the point of the story is also to communicate that creativity solves problems. But instead of saying just one sentence, Chesky “overcommunimates” the idea with an interesting narrative. The resulting impact is 10x.
But you don’t necessary need a long narrative to make an impact every time. Often, powerful phrases can get the job done as well. For example, rather than saying something boring and obvious such as, don’t give up — something people have heard so many times that they’ve grown numb to it — a popular Y Combinator phrase is, be like cockroaches.
In this short phrase, there’s a good advice wrapped in a powerful analogy. Even though you are saying less, you are definitely overcommunicating this idea with a powerful and catchy phrase.
Yet another form of overcommunication is labelling the phrase with a catchy term. If you refer being like cockroaches as having a “Cockroach Mentality” it works equally well, especially in written communication.
Overcommunication doesn’t necessarily mean saying the same thing in different ways. The core idea is to say it in a way that it makes tremendous impact. And the tremors of a good impact can be felt easily. Why else do you think catchphrases such as, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” or “Hasta la vista, baby” or are so popular? People love a good line.
Now, this needs practice; a good deal of it. And it’s impossible to come up with stories, phrases, or label on the spot. This needs preparation and planning as well.
Your first and foremost job is to be on the lookout for relevant stories and examples. This not only means reading a lot but also drawing connections to whatever you are trying to communicate.
To overcommunicate well, you also need a shift in mentality. You have to start by accepting that other people don’t usually know what you’re trying to say. Therefore, if you want someone to completely understand something, you need to appeal to their senses. Whatever you are trying to say should hit them hard. You have to make them feel rather than make them understand.
Therefore, being subtle about your ideas is never a good idea, especially in high-stakes situations. Err on the side of caution whenever possible by using stories, phrases, and labels to overcommunicate your views. And don’t forget to add a pinch of hyperbole. Nobody can say no to a bit of drama.
Interesting Finds
Philosophy should to taught to children in all schools. Children’s questioning can constitute the most primary of philosophical activities: reflecting on the meaning of ordinary experiences and concepts in order to develop an understanding of the world, others and themselves. Kids don’t just say the darnedest things. Playful and probing, they can be closer to the grain of life’s deepest questions. (Sally Davies / Aeon)
Misinformation is a challenge globally, but in India, it’s practically baked into the ruling party’s communications. This article takes a look at the steep challenges facing fact-checkers in Modi’s India, where the government continuously uses social media accounts to spread misinformation. While the platforms that are host to this misinformation, like Facebook and Twitter, have made attempts to curtail it, it hasn’t been enough to stem the tide. (Soina Faleiro / Rest of World)
Related: India is fighting another epidemic of false COVID-19 information. Across India, journalists have reported that COVID-19 deaths are being undercounted. One reporter likened the Indian government’s response to that of Soviet officials during the Chernobyl disaster, calling it a “Soviet system where you hide one number, and then cover up another number to hide the first. And then you create policy based on the fake number.” (Rahul Bhatia / New Yorker)
A dozen eggs cost 13 cents in 1933, down from 50 cents in 1929. The familiar narrative of the Great Depression places banks among the institutions that suffered fallout from the crisis. The reality is more complex. Apart from other reasons, banks extended too much credit, ignored the Federal Reserve, and didn’t maintain adequate reserves. (Suzanne McGee / History)
I promise this story about microwaves is interesting. While researching on microwaves, maker and YouTuber Tom Scott finds an article that said, “The microwave was invented to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s experiments.” This leads him down the rabbit hole of the interesting history of how microwaves came to be. (Tom Scott, YouTube)
People no longer work just to put food on the table. In addition to funding basic needs, they work with a vision of self-fulfilment, purpose, and growth. They expect their jobs to foster identity, meaning, and belonging—existential needs that used to be met in the realm of religious and traditional structures. Leaders who treat employees as whole people—not just workers—can create workplaces that actually work. (Esther Perel, Fast Company)
A history of the Israel-Palestine conflict in 8 key episodes. Prof. Matthew Hughes charts eight key moments in the history of the hostilities since the founding of the modern state of Israel. If you want a brief yet comprehensive narrative of the everlasting conflict, this is it. (Matthew Hughes, HistoryExtra)
What I’m Reading
“I’ve often been asked about this personality trait—my ability to maintain composure in the middle of crisis. Sometimes I’ll say that it’s just a matter of temperament, or a consequence of being raised in Hawaii, since it’s hard to get stressed when it’s eighty degrees and sunny and you’re five minutes from the beach. If I’m talking to a group of young people, I’ll describe how over time I’ve trained myself to take the long view, about how important it is to stay focused on your goals rather than getting hung up on the daily ups and downs.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land
Timeless Wisdom
When you have options, you don’t have to care about the average outcome—only the favourable outcomes. Because your wins far outweigh your losses. You get a larger payoff when you are right, which also makes it unnecessary to be right too often.
Optionality helps us avoid fixed plans, and gives us the opportunity to revise our agenda, so that we can change things up based on new information.
A simple example is having many options to read. Read multiple books at a time. Thus, if you get bored with one, you are not obligated to continue reading, since you have the option to read another one. But if you are limited to school material and get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing.
If you are bored in any situation, you always have three options: remove yourself from it, change it, or accept it. Having optionality gives you the freedom to choose from the first two.
Before You Go…
If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend. Also, consider subscribing. If you aren’t ready to become a paid subscriber yet, you can also give a tip by buying me a coffee. ☕️
I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋