Draw your attention
In the film, “The Player” during a scene at a Hollywood studio executives meeting, Mr. Levy shows Reeve, the central character, how to pitch a potential movie story. Levy holds up a newspaper and says, “Here, read a headline, any headline.”
Reeve replies, “Um…’Immigrants protest budget cuts to literacy program.'”
Levy: “Human spirit overcoming economic adversity. Sounds like Horatio Alger in
and the neighborhood. You put Jimmy Smits in, you get a sexy ‘Stand and Deliver’. Next?”
Robert Kosberg, a Hollywood producer convinced a studio to make the 1993 mascots
-movie gone bad “Man’s Best Friend”. His release was “Jaws on Paws”.
How quickly can you attract someone’s attention and interest?
Do you see the power of specific details on the speed and volume of speech?
The stories we tell about each other, and the people we want to share with
our stories are where we create meaning and friendships. while you speak vividly
about their experiences with others makes those stories more meaningful and
memorable for them to remember and repeat.
You become a more central part of their lives.
Here are some ways to speak and write so that others will repeat what you say, with pride and
happy. Each one is easy to practice.
1. Be brief.
If your characterization is short enough, then you can repeat it, as an aside or
reminder throughout a conversation. Others are more likely to remember and
repeat it. Here are some ways to be concise:
A. Use a familiar word in a new way and you may even catch a trend:
Example: Futurist Faith Popcorm predicted five years ago that people would want
be “cocooning” in your home.
B. Be catchy, using one or more of these resources:
o Alliteration: “Peak performance” and “high tech/high touch.”
o Rhyme: “Jaws on Paws”
o Essay: “First things first,” advice from Steve Covey.
o Puns: Tongue Fu!, title of the book by Sam Horn.
C. Use unexpected turns of phrase: to connect with people in the first
meeting, I suggest “go slow to go fast”.
2. Make favorable comparisons with familiar objects
When people in your work world are immersed in your jargon, their comments can
stand out when making a comparison to a product, person, or
situation outside your profession or industry.
Example: At the high-stakes Quist H & Q Healthcare conference, venture capitalists
Hear 20-minute talks from the CEOs of startups and public companies seeking funding.
Gold stock analysts reporters favorable. The tension is high and the schedule is
full. Most of the presenters talk fast, using a mixture of scientific words and
financial language. The speaker from the biotech company Amgen walked past the
podium to center stage, he hiked up a suit and shirt sleeve to expose his
raised forearm. He opened his talk by saying, “You will feel the effects of this medical treatment.”
patch faster than it takes a Porsche to go from zero to 90″.
3. Hijacking a familiar catchphrase to use it in a new way.
After a company has spent millions to create a witty, well-known slogan, turn it into a
new address for its intended meaning.
Example: Redwood Hospital in Northern California used this billboard variation of
the popular slogan for milk to ask for blood donations: “Do you have blood?”
4. Pin your suggestion to a relevant story
To make people listen and remember your view, set it up with a short
anecdote.
Example: What if you wanted to suggest that people were looking at a problem?
from the wrong perspective? Consider offering this story first: There is an old joke
in Soviet Russia about a guard at the factory gate who at the end of each day saw a
worker leaving with a wheelbarrow full of straw. Every day he thoroughly
He searched through the contents of the wheelbarrow, but never found anything other than straw. One
One day he asked the worker: “What do you gain by taking home all that straw?” “Tea
wheelbarrows”.
5. Spoil your translation to bring humor
If you are with a mundane group, offer your variation of a well-known expression in a
Foreign language. Change a single letter and provide a definition for the new one
expression.
Share these rules and their expression with your colleagues and ask for their
contribution. New York magazine ran such a contest in 2001. Here are some of the
winning contributions:
HARLEZ-VOUS FRANCAIS: Do you know how to drive a French motorcycle?
FRIENDLY GODS: We are wild and crazy!
PLEASE ANSWER: Honk if you are Scottish.
POSH MORTEM: Death styles of the rich and famous.
ALOHA OY: Love; greetings; bye bye; Of such pain that you would never know.
VISA LA FRANCE: Do not leave your castle without it.
COME, VIDI, VELCRO: I came, I saw, I stayed.
ZITGEIST: Clearasil doesn’t quite cover it.
6. Veil the truth with humor
Much of life is fast-paced and tense. Consider opening a mock meeting
serious inspiration or admonition, then smiling. You will find true life, like Dilbert
examples everywhere you can save for your dry humorous use.
Here are some of my favourites, collected by Accountemps one year:
“What I need is a list of unknown specific problems that we will find.”
(Lykes Lines Shipping)
“This project is so important that we can’t let things that are more
important interferes with it”.
(Advertising/Marketing Manager, United Parcel Service)
‘We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to
discuss it with the employees.
(Switching Supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division)
7. Encapsulate a situation
Offer a vignette that captures an emotion.
Example: At the end of 2002 a book by Jenny Lee will be published, entitled: I Do. I did,
And now what?: Reflections of a woman on married life, which the agent characterized
thus (after drawing our attention): “a tirade that (almost despite itself) ends as a
marriage celebration.”
Financial analyst Alan Parisse shared this perhaps apocryphal newspaper.
ad with me: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”