Always try your best for success

Stephen Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine cartoon for today has the following dialogue:

Pig: What do you think is the key to success?

Goat: To always try your best.

Pig: Why is that the key?

Rat: Because that way when you fail, you’ll know you can’t do 
        any better and can then just sit around eating bonbons.

Pig: I do that now!

Rat: So you’ve already succeeded.

Goat: Let’s start over.

That cartoon reminded me I’ve seen an awful lot of quotations (and a lot of awful quotations) about success. Perhaps the simplest oft-quoted one is Woody Allen’s, which is something like that:

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

I decided to make up another of my own, as is shown above. The 1900 image of a city and key was retitled from one at the Library of Congress.

Is the glass half full or half empty?

A cliché about optimism and pessimism is that a pessimist says the glass is half empty, while an optimist says the glass is half full. There even is a Wikipedia page.

There are other more creative replies. A physicist says the glass really is half-filled with water and half-filled with air. An engineer says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. A bartender says for $2 I can refill the glass with orange juice, or for $5 I can add a fifth of a glass of vodka, and make it into Screwdrivers. (That’s a specific version of a Tom Peters quote - that the real question instead should be how do I fill the glass?). If the glass scares you half to death, then you have glassophobia.

Back on January 30, 1997 a Dilbert cartoon had the following clever dialogue:

Ratbert: A pessimist says the glass is half empty. An optimist says it’s half full.

Dilbert: Did you put your lips on my glass again?

Ratbert: And the engineer says…

Dilbert: It’s a good thing I put half of my water in a redundant glass.

On September 1, 2018 another Dilbert cartoon which inspired this post had some less clever dialogue:

Pointy-haired Boss: A pessimist says the glass is half empty. An optimist says it is half full.

Dilbert: The engineer says the glass is too big.

Pointy-haired Boss: The manager says the engineer should shut his pie hole. 

There was an article by Diana Booher on pages 12 and 13 of the February 2010 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled The Link Between Language and Leaders which said:

“As a presenter and leader, you may be called on to deliver bad news. If your audience sees the glass as half empty, you have every right – even an obligation – to help them see it as half full.”  

I looked on Pubmed and found a pair of articles from 2011 in the Canadian Veterinary Journal by Myrna Milani on Half-empty and half-full communication – one in October about the client and one in December about the practitioner. There also is a definitive 27-page article with 320 references by David Hecht in the September 2013 issue of Experimental Neurobiology about The neural basis of optimism and pessimism.

Update on September 19, 2018

Fifteen years ago there was a magazine article by Craig R. M. McKenzie and Jonathan D. Nelson titled What a speaker’s choice of frame reveals: reference points, frame selection, and framing effects that appeared in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review for 2003, on pages 596 to 602, vol. 10 no. 3. Their abstract began [percentages added by me]:

“Framing effects are well established: Listeners’ preferences depend on how outcomes are described to them, or framed. Less well understood is what determines how speakers choose frames. Two experiments revealed that reference points systematically influenced speakers’ choices between logically equivalent frames. For example, [88% of] speakers tended to describe a 4-ounce cup filled to the 2-ounce line as half full if it was previously empty but [only 31% described it as half full or instead 69%] described it as half empty if it was previously full.”

They also looked at glasses one-quarter or three-quarters full, with the results shown above.

 

Please avoid clichés, like What gets me out of bed in the morning…

Chapter 26 of the May 2017 book Al Franken, Giant of the Senate is titled What Gets Me out of Bed in the Morning. He laments that a lot of people in the government keep telling us things like:

“What gets me out of bed in the morning is making sure our veterans have good jobs.”

“What gets me out of bed in the morning is seeing to it that every child in America has a world-class education.”

“What gets me out of bed in the morning is doing everything I can to see that our electric grid is secure.”

Al Franken says instead that what gets him out of bed just is having to pee. Me too!

He also laments clichés like:

“…robust letters calling for robust funding to ensure (another cliché) a robust response to a pressing (ugh) problem.”

Would you rather hear a speaker with a wealth of knowledge, or one with an excellent depth and breadth of knowledge?

A post by George Torok on March 24th at the LinkedIn Public Speaking group asked Would you use the phrase “wealth of knowledge”? and then explained that:

“The speaker was described as having a "wealth of knowledge". It's an overused cliche that's boring because it tells you nothing. It would be better to state, "The speaker knows how to take you from ‘point A’ to ‘Point B’ Point A could be a particular problem while Point B could be success.”

Consider an example illustrated with 21 pennies. For just breadth, imagine laying them out as shown above: in a single layer with six rows - three each with 4 and 3. That’s like someone who’s just capable of introducing all those topics.

Wouldn’t you rather have someone like seven stacks of pennies, each 3 high, or three stacks, each 7 high. Those are better combinations showing both breadth and depth.

How about someone like one stack 21 pennies high? That’s a “one-trick pony” - a person specializing in only one area.

A fictional TV character combining incredible breadth and depth is Dr. Spencer Reid on Criminal Minds. He’s supposed to have a half-dozen degrees -  B.A.s in Psychology, Sociology and Philosophy, and Ph.D.s in Chemistry, Engineering, and Mathematics. See his quote page at IMDB.

How is a story like a can of beans? It also has a Best By Date.

Sometimes it is easy to tell when a story is past the Best By Date. A brief article by Natalie Walters at Business Insider on November 2nd is titled 11 tips to stop saying ‘um’ forever. It  repeated an infographic, but opens with the Startling Statistic that:

“Public speaking is the No. 1 phobia in America, according to The Chapman University Survey on American Fears.”

She linked to a Washington Post article from October 30, 2014 about last year’s survey. But this year’s survey came out on October 13, 2015, and it ranked public speaking at 26th not 1st - which is a lot less startling.   

Other times a story is past the Best By Date because it simply has become a tired cliche. Last Halloween Rich Hopkins discussed that problem when he made Another Visit to Speak & Deliver’s Story Graveyard.

Going to the dark side with a redesign of PowerPoint slides

Design of PowerPoint slides and other visual aids is partly an art. At Ehhos3 on Thursday, August 27th Leslie Belknap blogged about How We Redesigned Slides For A Buffer and Moz Webinar.

Three of the four very artistic revised slide examples were extremely dark. I mean dark like Van Gogh’s painting of The Potato Eaters (shown above), not like Darth Vader in the Star Wars films. Slides with a dark image background will work in a webinar, since each participant can adjust his screen settings to make them legible.

Don’t try slides this dark within a presentation that will be projected in a meeting room though. The blinds or curtains might not darken the room enough, or there just might be a whiteboard rather than a high-contrast projection screen. The resulting lack of contrast might approach the following cliche.

An awful rather than awesome presentation image

On May 20th at the Ethos 3 Blog Leslie Belknap discussed 3 Simple Tips for Creative Data Visualization which were to:

1)  Get real with your data.

2)  Use scale to tell a story.

3)  Add meaning with metaphors.

She began her first item by warning to:

“Banish bar graphs and pie charts from your repertoire; never use cliché charts and graphs again.”

Unfortunately her example for #3 was pretty awful and resembles the silly image shown above. (In it I have replaced all her body text with just the word blah). Her example illustrated a brief article by Laurel Delaney at Verio.com on Ten benefits of cloud computing. Leslie just put all ten headings from there on one slide in all CAPITAL LETTERS, with inverted lollipops (rather than bullet points) overlaying a cloud image. There were 37 words and almost 250 characters, which is way too long for a tweet.

She claimed:

“Even though ‘cloud computing’ has nothing to do with weather, or clouds in the sky, the image of clouds gives viewers a recognizable object to associate with your message. The familiar image serves as an anchor that will help your message stick in your audience members’ memories.” 

I think instead a cloud is a cliché image that also should never be used.

Laurel’s article had said those 10 benefits were (shown here with headings in italics):

"1]  Achieve economies of scale. Increase volume output or productivity with fewer people. Your cost per unit, project or product plummets.

2]  Reduce spending on technology infrastructure. Maintain easy access to your information with minimal upfront spending. Pay as you go (weekly, quarterly or yearly), based on demand.

3]  Globalize your workforce on the cheap. People worldwide can access the cloud, provided they have an Internet connection.

4]  Streamline processes. Get more work done in less time with less people.

5]  Reduce capital costs. There’s no need to spend big money on hardware, software or licensing fees.

6]  Improve accessibility. You have access anytime, anywhere, making your life so much easier!

7]  Monitor projects more effectively. Stay within budget and ahead of completion cycle times.

8]  Less personnel training is needed. It takes fewer people to do more work on a cloud, with a minimal learning curve on hardware and software issues.

9]  Minimize licensing new software. Stretch and grow without the need to buy expensive software licenses or programs.

10] Improve flexibility. You can change direction without serious “people” or “financial” issues at stake. "

Point #9 restates part of #5, so there really were nine points that could have been summarized less painfully in three slides with three each.

On July 2, 2014 at the Ethos 3 Blog Leslie’s boss Scott Schwertly  had discussed 33 presentation tips in 140 characters or less. She violated both his #21 and #24 which were:

“21.  Avoid using all capital letters in a presentation. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE SCREAMING AT THE AUDIENCE.

24.  Skip bullet points; stretch a list into multiple slides. Share only one idea per slide to keep your audience engaged.”

An image with ten different ideas won’t stick in your memory -  instead it will slide right out. Is that why they call it a slide?

Motivational speech versus reality - the tale of the ship and the lighthouse

 Motivational speakers seem to live in a different world than the rest of us. They tell us Great Stories containing Underlying Truths and Universal Principles. We should be able to get the world by the tail, wrap it around, pull it down, and put it in our pocket. But, we’re more likely just to live in a van down by the river.   

On October 31st Rich Hopkins blogged about Another Visit to Speak & Deliver’s Story Graveyard. In that post he listed several motivational stories that should never be used again and buried. One was The Ship and the Lighthouse. It was popularized by Stephen R. Covey in his 1989 book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. Supposedly it came from an article written by Frank Koch that was published in Proceedings, the magazine of the Naval Institute. The version on  page 33 of the 2004 edition of Covey's book goes like this: 

“Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities.

Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported,
‘Light, bearing on the starboard bow.’
    ‘Is it steady or moving astern?’ the captain called out.
Lookout replied, ‘Steady, captain,’ which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship.
    The captain then called to the signalman, ‘Signal that ship: We are on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees.’
Back came a signal, ‘Advisable for you to change course 20 degrees.’
    The captain said, ‘Send, I’m a captain, change course 20 degrees,’
‘I’m a seaman second class,’ came the reply. ‘You had better change course 20 degrees.’
    By that time the captain was furious. He spat out, ‘Send, I’m a battleship. Change course 20 degrees.’
Back came the flashing light, ‘I’m a lighthouse.’
    We changed course.”

His takeaway was that:

“Principles are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken.”

The story is considered to be an urban legend that is discussed both on Snopes and Wikipedia. There are more recent versions, including an April 8, 2008 speech published in the September 2011 issue of Morning in America where the opening line now was that classic literary cliche that:

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

Also, the battleship went from generic to the mighty U.S.S. Missouri (BB-63), as shown above. There also is a YouTube video. Rich Hopkins lamented that:

“True or not, I've heard this so many times I'm now rooting for the ship to plow right into the lighthouse.”

Well, it already has. On December 23, 2000 the motor vessel Janra, a 100 m long, 3,999 ton container ship with an 18 m beam was bound from Rauma, Finland to Bremerhaven, Germany. It collided with and completely destroyed the 20 m (66 ft. high) unmanned Troeskeln Vaestra lighthouse. The Janra began to list, and two hours later it turned upside-down. The crew all got out safely. It was towed to a safe anchorage, some containers were removed, and after two salvage attempts it was righted and towed to the Finnish port of Turku (near Rauma). It was renamed the Atlantic Comet.

The BBC story about this accident was titled Lighthouse Lost in Boat Drama, and the CNN story was titled Stranded Cargo Ship Towed to Safety. It wasn’t the first time that lighthouse had been hit. You can download and read the detailed 81-page marine investigation report. Unfortunately there was not enough light for solar panels to recharge batteries, so the lighthouse was dark when it was hit. Damages were at least 12,750,000 Euros. The moral just was to watch where the heck your ship is going.    

 An image of the U.S.S. Missouri came from Wikimedia Commons.

Too many clichés can be terrifying!

On January 23rd Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens had a cartoon that began with the three clichés and punchline I’ve shown above. Look at The Easy Life to see the terrifying hybrid image he came up with to illustrate that punchline. It might have been inspired by the Eat Me and Deathmobile float shown in the movie Animal House.

Does your speech have too many clichés?

Images of the carrot cake and sardines in a barrel came from Wikimedia Commons, and the apple pie is from the National Cancer Institute.

Don’t use official language!

In the March issue of The Spectator there was an article by Mark Forsyth titled Why do people talk nonsense in public. He lamented pompous cliches like use of a second, unneeded verb:

“The safety instructions are ‘located’ at the end of the carriage. The life-jackets are ‘located’ under the seats. They needn’t be located. They just are.”

Mark also was irritated that police usually refer to an individual (male or female) rather than just a person, man, or woman. That jargon reminded me of an old Firesign Theatre comedy skit called Driving for Dopers (in Dear Friends on YouTube at 1:06:50):

“Say, would you individuals care to walk over to my vehicle, now facing northwest going in a southerly direction at the intercourse of Highland and Exterior avenues, and there purchase 27 grams of illegal hashish?”

The only time people will tolerate official language is within a ceremonial proclamation by a Mayor or Governor, where centuries of tradition call for repeated use of whereas, and a closing like:

“...in witness thereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State of Idaho at the Capitol in Boise on this 28th day...”

Otherwise, almost nobody still talks like that. Neither should you.

Another half truth - There’s no “I” in team

If you’ve listened to sports talk radio, or watched movies about sports or business, then you’ve probably heard that tiresome old cliche. But, if you step off the beaten track and use a font like Silom with a round top as shown above (or another with a square top) you can see that the space inside the “A” really does make an “I.”

Chris Muller included it on his list of Business Cliches That Must Die, and ranted:

“Seriously? We’re using spelling now for motivation? Although there’s no ‘I’ in team, there is a ‘me’, ‘am’, ‘eat’, and ‘meat.’ Not sure if that means anything, but based on spelling, I think the team should go out for a burger.”

British cartoonist Royston Robertson added:

“You’re right, there is no ‘I’ in team. But there is ‘tea’, so I’m nipping off for a break right now...”

Better still, if you look up team in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find a 1688 alternate spelling of taime. So, there really is both an “I” and a “me” in team.

Aftermath of a “knock your socks off” sales presentation

Today’s F Minus cartoon showed us how that cliche would look. Tony Carrillo made me think sweaty bare feet might not smell very pleasant. When you reconsider, book titles including “knock your socks off” don’t seem as desirable.

That isn’t the only cliche that looked worse when illustrated. Last December one of Tom Fishburne’s cartoons showed Death by Powerpoint with chalk outlines where the bodies fell onto the conference table.

The image of bare male feet came from Wikimedia Commons. (I changed the background color).

Myths about fear and the Book of Lists

I forgot to mention yesterday that the blog post by Garth Reynolds which I discussed had a nice endorsement for Toastmasters International.

That post also provoked a comment by Robert Fineberg that:

“The greatest public speaking myth is that it’s the number one fear. It was started by a man named Wallenchesky in the early 70′s in his flawed “The Book of Lists”. Jerry Seinfeld in a stand-up routine joked that it’s higher number than the fear of death; therefore, we’d rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.

The latest Gallup surveys say that 60% of those surveyed are afraid to speak — 20% would do it if they had to — and 20% are okay with presenting.

Hardly the number one fear.”

Mr. Fineberg managed to start five new myths in the first paragraph of his comment. That's enough to frighten a unicorn!

1. The Book of Lists really was compiled by David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace. Who the heck is Wallenchesky? That name does not even show up as a book author either in the Library of Congress catalog or in WorldCat.

2. The Book of Lists was published by Morrow in 1977, which was the late 70’s, not the early 70’s.

3. The “myth” that public speaking is the number one fear did not start from the Book of Lists. That result came from a survey done in April 1973 by Richard H. Bruskin and Associates. I have discussed the survey at length in a blog post just before last Halloween.

4. The Bruskin survey was cited in Rudolph F. Verderber’s 1976 textbook The Challenge of Public Speaking even before the Book of Lists was published. Since then Bruskin’s survey has been cited in many other public speaking textbooks. They spread this “myth,” not just the Book of Lists. Should we shoot all the messengers?

5. In 1993 Bruskin’s later organization (Bruskin-Goldring) did another fears survey and they again found public speaking to be the top fear. Is it a myth if you can replicate it?

I looked around on the Gallup web site, but can’t find what Fineberg claims that the latest Gallup surveys say. Their 2001 fears survey had public speaking coming in second, after snakes.

Quoting the #1 fear from the Book of Lists is irritatingly common. I suspect many who open with this startling statistic are unaware of how ancient the book and that first survey are. It showed up a in a 2007 press release here, and again this month here. Last year Professor Tania S. Smith blogged about how it had clearly become a worn out cliche.

A new variant is to quote that survey as if it still was in the 2005 revision, The New Book of Lists. If you do a Google Books search you won’t find it in there. I also checked the index and table of contents in a printed copy over at Borders and couldn’t find it.

As I mentioned last year, that old survey just stumbles on like a mumbling zombie. Happy Halloween!

How to get beyond just using a worn out cliché

On October 29, 2009 Professor Tania Smith at the University of Calgary posted about Fear of public speaking - a worn out cliché? on her Edu*Rhetor blog. On August 29 Jim Davidson (a public speaking coach in London) made a similar post about Who says public speaking is our number one fear? Comparing fear of public speaking with fear of death (from the 1977 Book of Lists) is pretty tired.

How could you talk about fear of public speaking without making it into a cliché? Really research the topic before you give a speech. Find some more recent and specific information that actually is relevant to your audience. That means going way beyond the first page of ten hits in a Google search, or looking up an article on Wikipedia. An encyclopedia article is a reasonable first step for finding introductory information and terminology. You can follow it with a serious search of magazine articles (and books) on databases in your local public library (or better yet a local university library).

For example, suppose that your audience is a communications class at the University of Calgary. You eventually would find an article published in 2000 on Social Phobia Symptoms, Subtypes, and Severity from a survey done in 1996 and 1997 in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. That article would provide you with data from a sample of 1956 people (just a bit smaller than the 2543 in the Book of Lists). Results for a dozen different social fears are shown in the following bar chart (click on it to enlarge):






















Public speaking is the number one social fear, and speaking in a meeting or class is a very close second. The fears listed can be divided into performance or interaction situations. Returning items to a store (perhaps Canadian Tire) is an interaction which is much less scary than a performance like public speaking. By the way, why do psychiatrists always ask about bathrooms? You can take the psychiatrist out of the toilet, but you can’t take the toilet out of the psychiatrist.