Occam’s Razor is a principle from philosophy which can be applied to writing – all writing, including your first most important story. In Latin Occam’s Razor is sometimes called lex parsimoniae, or “the law of briefness”. This Latin roughly translates as “more things should not be use than are necessary.” For example, if there’s two … Continue reading Applying Occam’s Razor to your writing
Category Archives: million dollar message
The worst possible brief for the lucky person who has the task of putting your messages down in words, is ambiguity. Trying to nail the first story, or 1001st, but not being clear what the one key idea is you’re trying to say is dead-on-arrival stuff for a writer.By being clear what it is you’re … Continue reading Do your copywriter a favour, only give them one idea to illustrate
The worst possible brief for the lucky person who has the task of putting your messages down in words, is ambiguity. Trying to nail the first story, or 1001st, but not being clear what the one key idea is you’re trying to say is dead-on-arrival stuff for a writer.By being clear what it is you’re … Continue reading Do your copywriter a favour, only give them one idea to illustrate
If a website has an ‘About’ video, 90% of visitors will view it. But don’t make the mistake of trying to put too much in it. A script for a 90 second video will be about 10-12 sentences long – with the pictures supporting this written/spoken narrative. Ten sentences means you only have the opportunity … Continue reading Why your video can only tell one story
The truth won’t kill your business, but a non-truth my well push it down that path. Having a value proposition which doesn’t resonate with who you are, or who people think you are is extremely counterproductive. You’re not only trying to fool your customers, you’re trying to fool yourself. As an example, for a few … Continue reading Why you should tell the truth when naming your baby
Adding more words to a message is easy. It usually adds up to simply being more noise. The ability to remove unnecessary, extraneous words, which add nothing to a narrative, is the main trick we need in our writing. What we leave out, the stuff that’s superfluous to the story, is how we demonstrate clarity … Continue reading Musicians play the notes, maestros play the pauses
The goal of any story is to have a reader, view or listener get the point…quickly and easily. It doesn’t matter whether the story is the reason why we’re late for a meeting or the moral behind an Aesop Fable. Someone is telling someone else what happened. The core idea of your said or read … Continue reading Why One Central Truth is vital for your key message
The great default word – solutions – should never be used in your value proposition, or Million Dollar Message. (Actually, there is one place is can be, race to the end if you want to know where). For a start, all businesses provide a solution in one way or another. So, to use it in … Continue reading ‘Solutions’ is not the solution (even if it feels like it should be)
Many of us, myself included, are inclined to say yes to requests for help. Even though we don’t really want to, or have the capacity, to help, we hum and haw, and say maybe or yes. Being at a recent group meeting where one of the participants found it equally difficult to turn down help … Continue reading Why you should “say no quickly”
Unless you’re a psychopath it’s very likely you carry some ‘imposter syndrome’ on at least one of your shoulders. We all live with the secret fear one day we’ll be exposed as not so clever or competent as we pretend to be. The weight of our (self-imposed) expectations of ourselves forces us to be complicated. … Continue reading Why we’re afraid to be simple