Mr. Michal from LinkedIn reached out, a coach specializing in corporate and personal growth. He offers me weekly summaries of the most interesting insights from books. Thanks to him, I’ll know what important things are written in important books without reading them. It’s not about reading, after all. Why should I strain my tired eyes when Mr. Michal can summarize everything for me? It’s surprising that books still sell at all when they could just be summarized. A tempting shortcut. Except books are like Renata.
Renata is one of my favorite clients, charmingly talkative, almost like Faulkner. Renata is talkative and also runs late. She always arrives last and usually delays whoever she’s delaying for. This time she got so caught up talking that she missed the meeting entirely. To everyone’s relief, the project meeting proceeds without Renata’s stories, without awkwardness, but quickly and efficiently. Next steps are agreed upon, deadlines set, and everyone disperses. After 15 minutes, everything is settled and the project participants smile awkwardly at each other. There’s nothing left to solve or discuss. So everyone goes home.
There are deadlines, there are next steps, but something’s missing. Usually at the end of meetings with Renata, quiet copywriter David would speak up and the defining sentence of the entire concept would emerge. Right from the start. Everyone would nod appreciatively and David felt that the only sensible sentence of the whole meeting was his. But today, nothing. The entire project has a visible structure built from deadlines, tasks, and team member names, but the invisible dark matter of the project is built by Renata.
Let them talk, the talkative ones. It doesn’t matter that they’re not saying anything that isn’t obvious, that hasn’t been mentioned before, that’s off-topic. They’re chopping ingredients for our pots. Feeding our heads. Creating a corpus of shared content. They fry, salt, grate for you, so that later one introvert can wake up and the right insight can float to the surface from the cauldron of his subconscious.
When we create surveys, brevity is a fundamental rule. The expectation is that terse style prevents influencing respondents. Any extra text like courtesy phrases or question context descriptions are unwanted stimuli that distance us from truth. Let alone pictures. But often we’re not looking for obvious truth—we’re looking for ideas. And then talkativeness is appropriate. The best brand names and ideas are generated by respondents when we present them with a small literary work, a concept description of three or four paragraphs. Instead of latching onto words in the question, reading the long concept creates a field, lays down dark matter. Only from this solid foundation in the unconscious can a truly original idea form.