Comment by johnfn
6 years ago
I completely agree and love the sentiment here, but I'd modify it slightly. What the author is saying is that you can't get a person to go from 0% to 100% understanding just by telling someone. The avatar example is great - you're not going to convince people 100% that avatars are game-changing by telling them once.
On the other hand, incremental nudges are possible. e.g. when you tell someone "hey, we're going to have avatars," you might nudge from from 0% to 1% conviction that avatars will be interesting. Maybe that seems pretty useless...
But there's a way to harness it! One way to tell someone something and have them actually understand it is to have them engage in long-form content. Have you ever wondered why books need to be so long to explain topics which you could summarize in a sentence? It always perplexed me why authors like Malcolm Gladwell could write for 50k words what could be distilled into a couple of sentences, or why talks spend 60 minutes going over a couple of points that someone would summarize in a few bullet points on a YouTube comment. But eventually I realized that the extreme verbosity is crucial. You can't bring anyone from 0 to 100% understanding in a single sentence, but if you string enough sentences together, and attack your point from enough unique directions, then you really can start to move the dial.
The problem is that when you talk to someone and you say "avatars are coming!", you've got this big picture in your head of what that could possibly mean, you've thought deeply about all the possible ramifications and associations that avatars bring, and your sentence has so much implicit meaning to you. But since no one else you're telling has that knowledge, that sentence only carries a small sliver of the full context and meaning that you understand. To really get it across, you need to convey your entire context. Which takes a really long time.
And that's why you can't tell anyone. Well, not easily.
P.S. This comment got so long that it came dangerously close to wading into meta territory, but I managed to successfully avoid it. Oh wait.
Yes! I've thought the same ever since I saw the following Malcolm Gladwell Ted talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_...
The point of the talk is that when you are developing a product you shouldn't aim to sell one perfect version of your product. You should have a small range of slightly different products that cater to several niches. Instead of one "perfect Pepsi" you have a few: Pepsi, Pepsi Lite, Cherry Pepsi, Pepsi Zero (or whatever).
He repeats versions of the following phrase four times in the same fifteen minute talk:
> They were looking for the perfect X, and they should have been looking for the perfect Xs
It makes the talk extremely memorable and has stayed with me for ten or so years since I saw it.
I've felt similarly about why traditional university education tends to have value, and why coding bootcamps cannot generally convey the same value within six or twelve weeks.
I coded a lot in university, but realistically, probably less during coursework than a very intensive bootcamp would, and certainly on things that I don't even begin to touch anymore (OS, AI, databases (not accessing, writing one), compilers, etc). The value was never in the coursework, really; as the professor says to Peter Gregory in the first episode of Silicon Valley, the true value of a university experience is intangible.
It seems it's all about context. Nobody talks about context. Communicating context is difficult, you have to really understand it before you can talk about it. Therefore context is left out most of the time.
I don't think you are necessarily wrong. But in some way the text also says the exact opposite: That people will understand 0% until they have a magical "Aha" moment by which they will understand 100%.