Monday memo #47
Boil it down.
The Monday memo is food for thought to fuel your week.
Hi everyone,
Note: I’m hosting a call for members later today, so if you want to join scroll to the bottom of this email (below the fold).
I’ve been hosting project studio sessions for three weeks now and am learning a lot in the process.
We have some unique challenges.
We are working on a lot of different kinds of projects: courses, novels, music albums, business offerings, card decks, industrial design, and more.
We don’t know who or how many people will show up each week, so we can’t assign people to the feedback breakout sessions in advance.
This raises the question: How can you bring people up to speed with your project well enough to get good feedback in a very short period of time?
I raised the question in last Friday’s campfire call and together we generated a bunch of good ideas from other domains.
Movies.
The film industry has a few tricks up their sleeve. Often, before a script is written, a writer will develop a one-page synopsis or treatment that paints the story in large strokes. And studios create teasers and trailers to promote a film, even while filming is still in progress. These are typically one to three minutes long.
Science.
Scientists and researchers often have to quickly bring their colleagues up to speed on their research, which is often complicated. To solve this problem, they hold poster sessions, where a scientist creates a poster that summarizes their research and findings, and then sit or stand next to the poster, using it to explain their work and get feedback.
Business.
Startups often need to compress their story into a short pitch that communicates their value to investors and customers in about the time it takes to ride an elevator, known as the elevator pitch.
Now if we bring these thoughts together there are some common themes. The constant is time scarcity. When time is short, you can’t just show up and wing it. It falls on you to do some work in advance.
Exercise.
Here’s your exercise for the week: Boil it down. Find a way to communicate the gist of your project in about three minutes. The best way to do this is to set a constraint in advance.
For example, we speak about 120 words a minute. So try to summarize your project in 350 words or less. We process images more quickly, so consider making a one-page word doc or slide, with images and text, to summarize your project.
If your project is in music or film, make a two to three minute trailer that captures the essence of your project.
This time is not wasted. Eventually, when you decide to show your work, invite people to buy it, watch it, listen to it, read it, experience it, they will want to know why and what it’s about. So the process of continually summarizing and explaining your work is valuable and will help you improve in many ways.
Try it. See what happens.
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