Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: How to Be a Top Performer & Great Writing Hacks

Episode Date: January 9, 2021

Have you ever watched someone blow out the candles on a birthday cake and wondered, “Do I really want to eat cake after someone blew and spit all over it?” I have -even long before Covid-19. So I start this episode with a look at the risks of eating that cake once the candles are out. http://foodnetwork.wikia.com/wiki/Food_Detectives A lot has been written about peak performance. There are books, articles, podcasts, seminars, speeches, and many gurus all claiming to know the magical steps to achieving high performance in your career. So, who’s right? What are you supposed to believe? Marc Effron, author of the book 8 Steps to High Performance (https://amzn.to/2OsZqso) has taken a look at a lot of the material and separated the fluff from the science. Listen as he explains what really works if you want to really excel in your career. Ever wondered whether or not you should buy a new car if your old car works just fine? Since cars last much longer than a generation or two ago, a lot of drivers struggle with the decision to buy a new car. If you are one of them, you should listen as I discuss this topic. https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2015/07/30/autos-average-age/30820613/ When you think about it, you write a lot. You likely write emails, text messages, memos, reports and more. So HOW you write really matters if you want people to understand what you are trying to say. Josh Bernoff author of the book, Writing Without BS (https://amzn.to/2KP08xF) is on a mission to help people improve communication through better writing. Listen to what he has to say and you will instantly become a better writer. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! https://bestfiends.com Download Best Fiends FREE today on the Apple App Store or Google Play. Discover matches all the cash back you earn on your credit card at the end of your first year automatically! Learn more at https://discover.com/yes Visit https://m1finance.com/something to sign up and get $30 to invest! The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of our favorite podcasts! Listen at https://jordanharbinger.com/subscribe , Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you enjoy podcasts. Let SelectQuote save you time and money! Get your free quote at https://SelectQuote.com today! Truebill is the smartest way to manage your finances like reoccurring subscription charges! Get started today at https://Truebill.com/SYSK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Then, the steps to take to be a peak performer in your career. Starting with set big goals. So setting big goals. Now that sounds really obvious and most of us say, well of course I have big goals. But the science is really clear that the bigger goal you have, the more motivated you're going to be to achieve that goal. Also, should you get a new car even if there's nothing wrong with the old one? And we could all likely improve the quality of our writing.

But how? Let me be as clear as I can about this. Anything you write would be better if it were 20% shorter. There are some things that need a more detailed explanation, but even the things that need a more detailed explanation, you're still going to be better off if you leave some stuff out. All this today on Something You Should Know. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building.

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Hey, welcome to Something You Should Know. I read somewhere, or maybe I saw somebody speak somewhere that said, you know, one of the keys to a successful podcast is that you have to publish consistently. And that is something we've been pretty good at. Every week we publish three episodes, every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday morning at 12.03 a.m. Pacific time is when the episode is published. We've been doing it a while now, and consequently, there are a lot of other previous episodes that if you haven't heard them, I invite you to go back and listen. Most of the episodes of this podcast are pretty evergreen, and if you haven't heard them all, there's 524. If you haven't heard them all, I invite you to go back and listen.

First up today, I bet if you've ever gone to a birthday party, and this is even long before COVID came along, you've probably wondered just how healthy is it to eat cake that someone just blew all over? After all, in order to blow out the candles, somebody has to blow on the cake. And therefore, doesn't that mean that the person's spit and germs are now on that cake that you're about to eat? Well, the answer is yes, but it may not be as gross as it sounds. In an experiment with two cakes, the cake that was blown on did grow more bacteria than the control cake that no one blew on.

The interesting fact is that the more candles on the cake, the more bacteria ended up in the frosting. Presumably, that's because the person blowing out the candles had to blow more to get all the candles out. Now, the good news is that most microorganisms in the human mouth are not harmful as long as the person is healthy. So, yes, you're eating someone else's germs, but they're likely not going to do you any harm. And that is something

you should know. As a listener to this podcast, there's a pretty good chance that you are interested in self-improvement. And so you're probably pretty well aware that there's been a lot written about peak performance. How do you excel? How do you do your job better? There are a lot of gurus who claim to know the secret to peak performance. And there are tons of blogs and podcasts and articles and books and TED Talks. There's all sorts of material on how to raise your level of performance, how to reach your potential, how to be all you can be.

But with so many people telling you that they have the answer to peak performance, how do you know who's right? Well, meet Mark Efron. Mark is the founder and president of Talent Strategy Group. He publishes a magazine called Talent Quarterly, and he's the author of a new book called Eight Steps to High Performance. Welcome, Mark. My pleasure. Happy to be here. So with this seemingly endless supply of advice on how to perform better and reach your potential, what do you bring to the discussion that is different than what we've all already heard? Well, you highlighted an important

fact. There has been a lot written about high performance, and I think that adds to the confusion about what really matters. And the whole reason that I wrote Eight Steps to High Performance was to say, let's try and consolidate the facts, the knowledge that really matters, and get that out to folks so they understand exactly what to do and don't have to sort through all that information on their own to come to a correct answer. And so maybe we should define what do you mean by high performance? Can you define the term for me? Sure. When I speak about high performance, what I mean is that you are your behaviors and your delivery. So what you're doing and how you're behaving

is better than what 75% of your peers are doing. So basically, you're delivering and behaving better than three out of four people that you're working with on a consistent basis. So it's not that you have a good day or a good month, but consistently year in, year out, you're getting that done. Ooh, sounds exhausting. It's a high standard, exactly. So if I'm going to work harder and be better than three out of four people in the room, what am I going to get back? What are the benefits of doing all this? Well, the benefits are huge, meaning you're going to get not just the obvious things,

which is ideally a higher pay and more opportunities for promotion, but you're going to be able to get choice assignments, so you'll develop faster. You'll probably get more exposure to more important people in the organization. And a lot of that is going to buy you the flexibility to do more of what you want to do. High performance is essentially a way to earn yourself the opportunity to do other things that you want to do. You're going to put in the hard time to say, hey, now that I've proven how good I am, maybe you'd let me do X, or maybe I could have time to do Y. But until you've demonstrated that you're a high performer, then you really haven't

earned that extra credit to do other things. Okay, so when someone decides and agrees with you and says, all right, well, I'm going to try to be better than three out of four people at work, what does that mean? To do what? What do you do differently? The challenge is for each of us, there is what we call a fixed 50 and a flexible 50 in all of us. The fixed 50, think of that as all the unchangeable things about you. So it's your intelligence, your personality, your socioeconomic background, all the things that as of this very moment, you cannot do a darned thing

about, but that still will affect your performance. So that's the fixed 50, and what we say is ignore that. You can't do a darn thing about it. If it's great, cool. If it's not great, fantastic. The flexible 50, so that's the other half you can control, to the extent you maximize that, you can be a higher performer. And there's great science to back up all the steps, but none of the steps are that difficult.

They simply take effort. All right. Well, let's talk about them. What's the. I don't know if there's an order to them or not, but pick one and let's start there. Sure. Let's start with goals. So starting with set big goals. So setting big goals. Now that sounds really obvious and most of us say, well, of course I have big goals, but the science is really clear that the bigger goal you have, the more motivated you're going to be to achieve that goal. And so most of us might think, hey, I'm doing a good job or I'm doing a little more than last year. A high performer is going to say, what would it take for me to deliver twice what I delivered this year? And while that's

probably not a realistic goal, what it's going to do is really sharpen your focus to say, there's probably a bunch of things that I do every day that really aren't leading to high performance. If I either stopped doing those or swapped in something else, would I be a higher performer? So part of it is saying, how could I increase my performance? But that also means I need to increase my focus on the few things that really matter. So a few really big goals is going to allow most of us to be much higher performers. But where's the line between, you know, ridiculous and, I mean, I could set the goal to be emperor of the universe, but, you, but that's probably so ridiculous that it doesn't mean anything. There's a concept we introduce in the book that might be a helpful way of thinking about this.

It's actually drawn from Olympic weightlifters, and there's this theory called maximum theoretical performance. And if you're a weightlifter, that means given the size of your body, your muscles, your nutrition, kind of everything that goes into lifting more weight, what's the theoretical maximum amount of weight that you could lift? So if everything was going perfectly, what's the theoretical maximum you could lift? And what the science would say is, you know, the average Jill or Joe in the gym could lift about 60% of that maximum, and the average trained athlete can lift about 80% of that maximum. The average Olympic athlete can lift about 95% of that maximum. And what it says is, for most of us, there's a lot of headroom above where we currently perform.

Apply that concept to every day at work. So if you had the perfect motivation, the perfect training, the perfect set of tools, how much higher of a performer could you be? That's probably a reasonable way to approach, hey, what does it look like? Maybe I can't be emperor of the universe, but how about prince of the universe? Could I be duke of the universe? Is there a standard that still feels realistic, but that would still be a meaningful stretch? Yes.

But if I'm going to be duke of the universe, I might as well go for the whole thing. There you go. Let's just shoot for it. And the old adage, I'm probably going to get this wrong, I'm not great on analogies, kind of the shoot for the moon, or shoot for the stars, you'll kind of a... And the old adage, I'm probably going to get this wrong, I'm not great on analogies, kind of the shoot for the moon or shoot for the stars, you'll land on the moon or something like that. From a science perspective, it's really, really true.

And so maybe you won't become emperor, but you'll probably get a lot closer to it than everybody else who's not trying to be emperor will get. All right, so set big goals is first. What's next? Really all about your behaviors. And so when we think about behaviors at work, we don't want to simply think about what I would call good citizen behaviors. I'm nice to others. I don't lie, cheat, or steal. These are all good things. We don't want liars or cheaters or stealers at work, but that's not going to differentiate me as a high performer. It's going to differentiate me as a decent person to have in the office. What we need to do if we

want to be a high performer is understand what are the few performance-driving behaviors that my company needs to see from me. And the most straightforward way to find that out is to ask your boss. This may seem very obvious, but most of us never go to our boss and say, hey boss, you know, I'd like to think I'm, you know, pretty good. I'd like to think I behave pretty well, but are there one or two behaviors that I could either start doing or do more of or maybe even do less of that are going to make me a higher performer here? I guarantee you, your boss has at least one thing in mind right now that you could do to change your behaviors. He or she is not going to have trouble answering that question,

but we need to take the initiative to ask, and we need to get our egos out of the way and recognize we can all get better at least one thing. What's the one thing that you might want to get better at right now? My guest is Mark Efron. He's the author of the book, Eight Steps to High Performance. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most.

Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back,

and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to something you should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker,

John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So Mark, one of the things you write about and that I think is so important is the ability to, and the necessity, to connect with other people. Certainly in my life, and I've seen people who are a lot better at it than me, when you can pick up the phone and call the right person at the right time that can help you. That's gold. Absolutely.

And let's think about connecting both inside and outside of work. And the challenge for a lot of folks who aren't good at this, and it tends to be more introverts who aren't good at it, is sometimes it feels just very unnatural or fake. Hey, I don't really even like that guy. Why do I want to connect with him? People who are effective at connecting at work recognize that other people, both their peers and their boss, are going to be the best assets in their high performance, kind of the best

supporters of their high performance. And your peers can't necessarily make you a higher performer, but they can certainly stop you from being a high performer. And your boss can certainly help make you a higher performer. And so the strategy is very direct and very planful. And especially for people who aren't naturally comfortable doing this, hopefully we'll give them a bit of structure. And that starts with simply rating your relationships with your peers and key people at your manager's level. So who are the high performers at your manager's level and who are your peers? Simple one-to-five scale. Five is I have a perfect relationship. They like me a lot.

I like them a lot. One is I have no relationship. Rate them on that one to five scale. Anyone who you rate as a three or less, you need to go have a cup of coffee with them, grab lunch, get to know them and have them get to know you a little better, both personally and professionally. And that goes for your boss as well. There is a lot of room between getting to know your boss better and being a total suck-up. And what most people are concerned about is if they say something nice to

their boss, they give their boss a compliment, then they're going to appear to be the office suck-up. Again, there's a lot of gray area there. Your boss is a human being too. They like to be complimented genuinely. They like to be complimented genuinely. They like to have things that they're good at pointed out. There's nothing wrong with telling your boss, hey, boss, I thought that was a brilliant presentation. Or, hey, boss, you seem to be really good at building strong relationships around here. I'd love to hear some of your secrets about how you do that.

When I look back at the people I've worked for, my immediate supervisors, in a lot of cases I would have had a difficult time trying to establish that kind of relationship and talk to them in the way you just described. My take would be most of us really underplay that. Most of us don't have anywhere near as strong of a relationship with our boss as we should, and it's because most of us feel that there is kind of a power difference there. Well, he wouldn't want to have lunch with me, or he probably doesn't have time to have a cup of coffee. Well, probably one good way to find out is to ask the question.

Most bosses, again, they are humans, surprisingly. And they might actually want to engage in a human behavior, like having a chat with somebody about their life and what they do on vacation and really just getting to know someone better. And again, that's what's going to differentiate a high performer. A high performer might not feel comfortable with that behavior, but they recognize it's an important thing to do to sustain and create a good foundation for high performance. I know you talk about faking it, and I think that makes people uneasy sometimes where they think, but, you know, that's not genuine, that's not me, and I can't fake it.

Absolutely. It's interesting. An excerpt from the book on faking was published in the LinkedIn Weekend essay recently, and I spent the entire weekend responding to hundreds of angry comments from people suggesting that faking it was a horrible thing to do and how they would never do it in their lives. Here's what we mean by faking. What it means is that, for the example we were just talking about, some people just aren't naturally comfortable connecting with others at work.

Great. You're going to need to, if you want to be a high performer, fake being an extrovert. You don't need to become an extrovert. It's unlikely that you're going to fundamentally change your personality from being an introvert to an extrovert. So guess what? You're going to have to fake it. And I have a story at the beginning of that chapter about Adrian Brody in the film The Piano, who completely transformed his mind and body to be able to portray that role. Sometimes we simply need to say, what's the role I need to play today? I'm going to walk into that meeting where I don't

know anybody. I would naturally not talk to anybody. What would an extrovert do in that situation? I'm going to go fake that I'm an extrovert in that situation, but I know that's what's needed to be a high performer. I think we need to stop being so precious about who our genuine selves are and who our authentic selves are and say, what's needed to win in this situation? And stop using, oh, well, that's not who I am or I could never do that as an excuse for low performance. High performers flex those behaviors.

So talk about the importance of sleep when it comes to peak performance. Sure. And this is one of the most interesting findings that I was doing the research. I read more than 2,000 academic articles trying to sort through what's really proven to improve individual performance. And I looked at a variety of things that involve our body. I looked at food. I looked at exercise. I looked at sleep.

And while I really actually thought exercise was going to be the most powerful factor, it turns out that neither food nor exercise has any direct impact on performance at work. Now, they might both keep you alive, and so they're a precursor, but they're not going to make you a higher performer tomorrow. While sleep, on the other hand, actually can either help or really undercut your performance. And it turns out it's much more the quality of that sleep than it is the quantity. And the challenge for somebody who wants to be a higher performer is there is a lot of very kind of nebulous information out there. You hear things like six to 10 hours. Well, that's a four-hour difference, which is the right number. And what I describe in the book is that

if you sort through all the science, it feels like about six and a half to seven hours of high quality sleep a night is what's going to give you the foundation for great performance the same day. But I also write about in the book that that might just not be realistic for a lot of folks. And if you get that five-hour night, what are the best strategies for actually being a high performer the next day? Let me ask you about something that applies to me and to, I think, a lot of other people who don't work in organizations. And more and more people don't. They're freelancers, they work at home, or they work in very small offices with just a

couple of people. So seemingly a lot of what you're talking about doesn't apply, but there must be some things that entrepreneurs and people who work alone can take from this. Absolutely. Well, the good news here is that entrepreneurs are humans too, and so the core messages still apply. Let me just hit some of those really fast. Setting big goals, especially if you're in a more entrepreneurial situation, it can be challenging to say, hey, I've got so many things to work on or so many exciting opportunities. What are the two big things you want to accomplish this year? Getting to that

focus especially is going to help entrepreneurs who tend to have lots of great ideas to focus on the few big things that really matter. Write those things down. I have them on my board. We only have 10 people here in our company. I've got those three big goals written down on my whiteboard in front of me. So focus. Same thing around connecting.

You might think, well, it doesn't really matter. I know the few people in my organization. Well, great. What does your external network look like? Who are the people who can be most helpful to you as you want to grow? Who are the leaders in your field? How well do you know them? You should have an external connection strategy that you manage just like you do an internal

connection strategy if you're in a company. Even things like committing your body, the one we just talked about around sleep. Entrepreneurs might say, man, I love being at the office 24-7. Well, kudos for your determination, but are you managing your sleep in a way that actually fuels entrepreneurial behavior? So while a lot of these strategies that I outline in the book, each of the eight steps, can certainly be applied to large companies, they are based on the science of effective human behavior. So whether you're sitting by yourself doing great work or sitting with 10,000 other folks, they're going to be equally powerful.

Well, this is great, and I like the fact that what you did is take the science of peak performance. This isn't just your opinion of how you can be all you can be, but really what the science says. And I think that helps cut through all of the piles and piles of material out there to get right to the core of what works. So well done. The good news is we know what works. We don't need to come up with more answers. We've studied human behavior for years and years. We actually know what helps make people high performance. We should just take the shortest, surest route to do that, and that's the eight steps to high performance.

And that is the name of the book, Eight Steps to High Performance. It's by Mark Efron, and there is a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Mark. My pleasure. I enjoyed the conversation. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't

know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have a, but am I wrong? Which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice.

Plus we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from, but am I wrong? And finally wrap up your week with fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to don't blame me, but But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Think about how much you write. You write texts and emails, reports, memos.

When you add it all up, you probably write quite a bit. And you generally write to communicate with other people. What you write is meant to be read by someone else. So you write to communicate your thoughts, but you also have to keep in mind how people read. Because if people don't understand it or they don't actually read it, then what's the point of writing it? Josh Bernoff has been on a bit of a mission to help people improve their writing. He's the author of a book called Writing Without BS. Although in the real title, the BS is not abbreviated. Hey Josh, welcome. So it seems to me that over the past several years, writing has changed,

and it seems that writing has changed in large part because the way people read has changed. So people today mostly read on a screen, whether they're reading emails or websites or whatever, they're reading it on a mobile phone or a computer screen. And the writing just does not get to the point quickly enough. We're deluged with information and people don't know how to tell the truth quickly. Because they're doing what? What else are they doing? They do slow warm-ups, you know, extra sentences and paragraphs before they get to the point. They pad things out from fear. They use stuff like jargon and qualifiers to cover their butts.

And in general, they're just not capable of the kind of direct communication that's needed in today's business world. Why do you think we do that? Because everyone who writes also reads, and anyone who reads appreciates when people get to the point and write clearly and all that. So why do we not take that advice when we write? The real problem is fear and training. Fear because people just are worried about being held responsible for a clear and direct statement. Also, what they learned in high school and college was that the longer and more puffed up the stuff you said, the better grade you got. And all that may work in college. It's not going to be what gets you ahead in the business world.

And yet it would seem that just being direct would be pretty easy. Say what you want to say, just say it. You would think that, but like most simple things, it's simple to experience, but not so simple to actually learn. People have bad habits like writing in the passive voice. Actually being direct enough to get to the point in the first two sentences of an email feels unnatural to most people. And of course, they're concerned about what happens if someone actually acts on what they say. So they cover themselves with unclear and vague language. And it's really a skill to be direct in a way that communicates well and doesn't offend the person that you're

trying to speak with. So can you either give me some examples that might help, and or some maybe rules to live by that would help people clear things up? Yeah, I'll give you an example. So you may have heard that Samsung had a little problem with a few of their phones exploding and catching on fire. And they put out a release about this, but the release, while it's relatively short and clear, doesn't use the word fire anywhere in it. They call them battery incidents. Well, you know what? If you're going to try and communicate to people what the problem is, I think you have to tell the truth about the fact that some of your phones catch on fire, not call them battery incidents. Yeah, but you'd certainly understand why a company would want to

downplay that their product bursts into flames. And that's why people hire, you know, corporate PR people to smooth things over. You know, people are often in a position in business where they have to communicate bad news. And the best way to do that is to say, okay, here's what happened, here's why it happened, and here's what we're going to do about it. If your manager looks at that and understands what you're coming across with, they are much more likely to respond in a positive way than if you try and hide it and they have to figure it out by digging through all the qualifiers you put in place. What are some of the, and you mentioned getting to the point in the first two

sentences, speaking in a passive voice, talk about those things or any of the other things that specifically cause problems and how to fix them? I'll tell you one thing that people do that seems like it's obviously right and is wrong for today's world, and that is people write in paragraphs. They write emails in paragraphs. They write reports in paragraphs. And paragraphs are a very difficult thing to get the meaning out of quickly. We have all these tools now, bullets, subheadings, links, graphics, and with a little bit more effort in thinking about how you're communicating, you're in a position to create something that's easier to skim, something that's going to be a

lot more effective in a world where people have hundreds of communications that are coming at them every day. Yeah, and when you used to talk about speaking in a passive voice, what do you mean? Well, in a passive voice sentence, the subject of the sentence is not the actor. And that's easiest to understand if you look at a sentence that might say something like, these cost overruns must be closely monitored. But it doesn't say who's supposed to be monitoring them. And in general, when you have a sentence and it leaves you at the end saying, yeah, but who's supposed to be doing that? Then that sentence is in the passive voice. You need to rewrite that sentence in the active voice saying government regulators must monitor these costs overall. You know what occurred to me is that because people have been doing this for so long, writing

real fluffy and adding stuff and not being direct and speaking in the passive voice and all the things you're talking about, that we kind of just expect it and we kind of muddle through and we don't even, we don't even really get upset about it. We just figure, well, that's just the way people write. One of my principles is that real creativity comes from seeing the obvious before anyone else. And in this case, what's obvious is that there's so much BS in the communication we're all

receiving, we all correct for it. But digging through that takes extra time and effort. I've calculated that this is like a 6% tax on every dollar that's paid, every wage dollar that's paid in America, just the time that we spend trying to dig through unclear communication. So yes, it's true. We all know about it. You can live with it, or we can try and change it. And if you do, individually, you'll stand out from the people that are communicating with BS. What do you mean by front load your writing?

Front loading is a principle that says you want to have the payload, the most important information, in the first two sentences of anything that you write. And in an email, for example, rather than warming up and saying, how was your day, you get directly to, you know, the machinery has flaws and we need to change the way we tool it, or whatever it happens to be. By doing that, you ensure that somebody who is going through that quickly knows exactly what you're getting at and can decide to read the remainder of the information or to skip it because it's not relevant to them. So how do you do that? Is there a technique to make sure you do that correctly? Here's the technique for

front-loading your writing. It's natural to try and write a paragraph or two to warm up, but when you look at your writing, remove the first paragraph. Ask yourself if anything has been lost. If so, dump it. If you haven't lost anything, dump it. Now look at the next first paragraph. Do you need that? If you don't need it, dump that. Keep doing that until you get to the actual point of what you're trying to say. I know for me and for a lot of people, one of the hardest parts of writing anything is starting. Where do you start? How do you begin? And I remember hearing that the writer James Michener once said that it wasn't that he was such a great writer, but that he felt he was a good rewriter, and that what you really

need to do is just start writing. Start writing anything, anywhere, because the magic happens when you rewrite it, when you come back and fix it. Do you think that in today's world that's a luxury we can afford, or should we be able to nail it first time around? Most people don't have the discipline to nail it the first time around. And rewriting is a key skill that they need to learn. Even if you're sending an email, you want to look at it and edit it if it's going to an important person like your boss or to several people. Spend the time to make that better. I think it also helps to have an editor if you're working on a larger project, someone who can give you the perspective and say,

you know what, this piece isn't working as well, and change the order of these things. It'll be clearer that way. It would seem that social media writing is different, that somehow the rules are all different and the regular rules of writing are kind of out the window. Social media writing is very different. I actually, my first book was a book on social media, and I've been looking at it for over nine years at this point. People tend to write in a more informal fashion in social media, but these same principles of being direct and clear apply if you're going to be using, say,

Facebook or Twitter or Instagram for marketing purposes. One of the key things that people doing social media need to recognize is that once you have put something out there, you're not done. It's actually the response that other people make and your response to them that determines whether you're successful in communicating in social media. Well, it does seem when you read social media posts, generally they are shorter, and so that's in this world of where everybody's going on and on in their writing, that social media is helping people perhaps be a little more disciplined and shorter and to the point.

And I think that's influencing the way we communicate in all channels, and that's a good thing. The more informal communication is more natural in today's business world. But the other thing that the reader in social media expects is that if you say something, you're going to be able to respond to what they say, and that's why it's more of a conversation and less of a... What other things, if there are any, what are the things that when you read someone else's writing are like fingernails on a blackboard to you? I mean, just, oh gosh, if they'd only done this, or if they hadn't done that...

One of the big scourges, I think, is jargon. People use jargon to try and make themselves sound more sophisticated. But when you use jargon that your use jargon to try and make themselves sound more sophisticated. But when you use jargon that your audience doesn't understand, and let's be clear about this, most of the audience is not going to understand some obscure terminology that you're using. When you use that jargon, you are creating a very small collection of insiders who understand what you're talking about, and a large collection of outsiders who are just mystified. It's often a lot clearer. It clarifies your own thinking to be able to remove that jargon and replace it with plain language. And some companies like Apple and Google, even though they do

sophisticated technical things, have gotten very good at communicating clearly without jargon. I can imagine someone listening to you and saying, well, yeah, that may be fine for emails or things, but sometimes things take a long explanation. Sometimes things are complicated. And so you have to write that way. Let me be as clear as I can about this. Anything you write would be better if it were 20% shorter. So, no, there are some things that need a more detailed explanation.

But even the things that need a more detailed explanation, you're still going to be better off if you leave some stuff out. You want to eliminate redundancy. You want to be as direct as possible. And if you've got five points, you're going to be more effective if you make three of them and leave the other two out, then you have to drag someone through every last element of your argument. Yeah, and that is hard to do, because you think that, you know, I've got to make my case here. If I've got five points, I really should make all five

points. Look, if you have something that's 500 words long, you have to ask yourself, what will happen if people only read the first 300 words? That means that if you put the most important thing at the end, they may not notice it. On the other hand, if you communicate it as 300 great words, they're more likely to read the whole thing, and they're more likely to act on it. Well, I find like when you write an email and make three requests, you typically get an answer to the first one and nobody reads the other two anyway. Yes, one of my principles for email is that you want to have a single topic per email. Because of the way that people use email now, the subject line of the email becomes

the head of a whole thread of questions and responses. If that's on one topic that's easy to organize, it's easy for someone to put on their to-do list. If it's on five different topics, it's a disaster for the people who receive it. Do you think, just from looking at this over the years that you've been looking at this, is people's writing getting better, or is it getting worse? Is social media and email making things sloppier? What's your take on that? I guess I can look at that in two ways. First of all, people's writing is definitely getting worse, and that's just a question of sort of the law

of averages. There are more people now writing more stuff with less editing than we've ever had before, and as a result of that, there's just more sort of ineffective writing going on from people who aren't professional writers. The other side of that is the way we read. Our attention spans are shorter and our ability to concentrate is worse because we're reading on a glass screen. So even writing that would have been acceptable if it was in print ten years ago is now frustrating to get through when you're looking at it on a computer monitor. Any last words of wisdom for people that just do this

and you'll be 10% ahead of the game? I think people need to realize that whether you're a worker who writes a few emails or somebody who is a professional business writer, that writing is important to all of us in our jobs. And if you adopt these principles of writing everything shorter, front-loading, making the structure easy to see, and removing toxic elements like passive voice, jargon, and meaningless qualifiers, you'll just be making a lot better impression on the people you communicate with. Great. Well, that's good advice, no matter what you're writing. And it comes from Josh Bernoff. Josh is author of the book, Writing Without BS.

And there is a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Josh. Thanks. Bye-bye. See if you've ever said this to yourself at some point in your life. You'd like to get a new car, but it's hard to justify because there's nothing wrong with the old car. Well, if you have ever said that to yourself, you're a member of a large club. Today, the average American car is about 11 1⁄2 years old, which means that while new car owners are enjoying all the fancy electronics and other really cool features of their new car,

the average driver still has a cassette deck. The age of the average car has started to plateau over the last few years since car sales have picked up a bit. But experts say there's no rule for how long to hold on to an old car or truck. A car with good reliability can easily go for 200,000 miles or more. Interestingly, cars and trucks now have about the same average lifespan. For many years, cars had shorter lifespans than trucks, but their quality has pretty much caught up. And that is something you should know. And I'm sure there's somebody

you know that would enjoy this podcast as much as you do. So please send them the link, share it, tell them about it. I'd appreciate it. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,

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