Blah Blah Blah

by Dan Roam

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  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  The Back of the Napkin (Expanded Edition):

  Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

  Unfolding the Napkin:

  The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures

  1 If you’re interested in how we lost the pictures, take a look at Appendix A, “How We Lost Half Our Mind.”

  2 The preamble to the Declaration of Independence, 1776.

  3 From “High Flight,” by John Gillespie Magee Jr., 1941.

  4 Eternal.

  5 We have no idea, of course, whether anyone named Oog or Aag ever lived, but we know somebody did—and we know that their brains evolved over millions of years. Giving even long-lost ancestors names and profiles helps us more vividly imagine what life must have been like for them.

  6 Petraeus is correct: “Oil spot” is a term that has been used in counterinsurgency warfare since the late nineteenth century, when French general Hubert Lyautey coined the phrase to describe his strategy of securing, pacifying, and economically developing ever-larger territories in the French colonies of Algeria and Indochina. He called this approach “tache d’huile” because it looked like the spread of an oil droplet on a map.

  7 Readings on our Blah-Blahmeters are of course a personal and subjective measure, and mine may be different from yours. Depending on our backgrounds, educations, expertise, and preconceptions, we may well have wildly different readings. That’s fine—in fact, that’s good: The whole point of the Blah-Blahmeter is to help us recognize for ourselves the messages that get through and those that don’t.

  8 My underlying rule (learned, occasionally very painfully, through years of business meetings and presentations) is that the more effort the originator of the idea puts into it in preparation, the less effort the receiver needs to—and the more likely the receiver will be motivated and pleased to understand. In other words: If an idea is worth the audience’s time at all, it is worth all the time the presenter can invest in advance.

  9 “Simple” is a relative term. If a group of kindergartners quickly understands our presentation on molecules, it’s a guarantee we’ve come up with a simple way to describe introductory chemistry. If a group of biochemists qu {iocp us rickly understands our thesis on alternative paths in the Krebs cycle, it’s a safe bet we’ve come up with a “simple” way to illustrate advanced photosynthesis.

  10 There are certainly cases where the most divertingly dangerous message is the one delivered the most simply and clearly. There we need to be especially careful since there is no measurable blah-blah-blah to indicate nasty intent. There will be more on using Vivid Thinking to uncover and avoid this verbal double cross in the final section of this book.

  11In the final section of this book, we’ll see how important it is for a Vivid Idea to “have shape”—and we’ll spend time finding ways to look for and draw the underlying shape of any idea.

  12 When Albert was six, he became seriously ill with influenza. Quarantined to his bedroom for weeks, he was brought by his father a toy compass to pass the time. It was while he lay there in bed, contemplating how the compass might work, that Einstein got his first glimpse of what he would later call “field theory,” the basis of relativity.

  13 This book focuses almost exclusively only on “descriptive” thinking. Without getting too blah-blah-blah about it, that mean
s our uniquely human ability to give things characteristics and meaning that they don’t actually possess. It is this that gives us the ability to think “about” things, as opposed to just reacting to them.

  14 All vertebrates have a bi-lobed brain. In all except humans, the two lobes perform functionally the same tasks. It is only in humans that the two lobes are functionally different.

  15 This near-hypnotic excitement about the split nature of the brain makes perfect sense. Any simple model that can be expressed so easily yet represents so much potential insight is catnip to our entire brain. It feels right precisely because it appeals readily to both our piece-by-piece mind and our all-at-once mind. We’ll explore why in detail—and learn to use that simplicity to give our own ideas equally compelling shape—in the third section of this book.

  16 There are other parts of the brain that “see” the world in other ways as well: Our reptilian brain makes instant “fight-or-flight” decisions long before our “rational” thinking parts kick in, and our limbic brain makes near-instant emotional decisions about how we feel about what we see. But when it comes to the process we call thinking, neither of these plays a role remotely equivalent to our neocortex.

  17 To this day, one of the great mistakes of right-brain/left-brain thinking is that all language is located in only the left hemisphere. While it appears that most “words” are stored in this piece-by-piece brain, it is the right, all-at-once brain that is able to string them together, detect their combined meaning, and “read between the lines.” The left brain sees the words; the right brain sees the paragraphs.

  18 It is also an attempt by our verbal mind to “take credit” for a free gift from our visual mind, something that happens constantly as our two descriptive intelligences vie for authority. We’ll cover this ongoing debate—and its amazing consequences—in the next chapter.

  19 Keep this picture in mind; we’re going to see another equally influential picture of identical structure in Chapter 7—only that one will describe the forces that act on an airplane in flight. Coincidence? Given Porter’s background in aeronautical engineering, I don’t think so.

  20 For details on the long history of human drawing and writing, see Appendix A, “How We Lost Half Our Mind.”

  21 There are several substeps and many possible options within these rules, but for now let’s start with the basics. Throughout the rest of this book, we’ll take increasingly big steps as our overall Vivid Thinking confidence improves.

  22 Although my workshops are not about “drawing,” and I spend a lot of time making the distinction between being able to draw and being a good “visual thinker,” our perceived inability to draw remains far and away our biggest hurdle in overcoming blah-blah-blah. There are many exceptions, of course: kindergartners, architects, and (some) engineers can’t wait to start drawing. The kindergartners draw because they don’t yet know how not to, and the architects and engineers draw because they were never allowed to forget—after all, you simply can’t design a house or a device with words alone. Why we think we can design businesses, laws, and societies with words alone is the real mystery.

  23 Twenty times more than is devoted to touch and sixty times more than to hearing.

  24 Don’t get me wrong: I love art classes—remember my duck drawing? But what I don’t like is the lack of any sort of framework for the growth of our visual intellect. Why do we see the way we do? How can we think visually? How can we use our innate ability to draw in order to communicate complex ideas quickly? These are all subjects that are completely teachable, but none of them are taught. Visu { tas, ofal literacy should be as required as verbal literacy.

  25 The parallels I describe here apply precisely only to the grammar of spoken and written English. However, I have learned in my adult life to speak Russian (fluently enough to read the news and conduct business), French (well enough to make my way through a meal without completely embarrassing myself and, more important, my hosts), and Thai (badly enough to negotiate my way into and out of a Bangkok police station—twice), and in my nonacademic but road-tested understanding, the essentials of all are close enough to say that Vivid Grammar works just fine in those languages as well. I wait with bated breath for the linguists to start knocking heatedly on the door.

  26 Egyptian hieroglyphics—and the distinct but somewhat related pictograms of ancient Chinese—are a fascinating way to understand how people have used pictures to communicate throughout history. For an overview of how the ancients managed for thousands of years to marry our verbal and visual minds in written language, see Appendix A, “How We Lost Half Our Mind.”

  27 For a deeper dive into the neurobiological, linguistic, and conceptual origins of these six elemental pictures, please see my previous book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

  28 More often than not, charts are there only to show that something was measured, whether it has any real meaning or not. Don’t get me wrong: Charts are great when it comes to showing numbers in a way that other people can “get.” The problem is that we can easily get so enamored of our charts that we forget that other people need to make sense of them, too. We often swap axes, distort values, and switch coordinates in order to make things clear to ourselves, only to find that nobody knows what we’re comparing anymore. That’s why it’s always a good idea to go back to our original portraits and make sure they appear in our charts.

  29 There are also many prepositions that describe the temporal relationships of things—and we’ll account for those in the next elemental picture, the “timeline.”

  30 What it actually refers to, of course, has nothing to do with birds, worms, or even eating; as a metaphor, it uses those things as stand-ins for a whole set of items that would become pure blah-blah-blah spoken any other way. We’ll spend a lot of time with the visual importance of such metaphors in the next part of this book.

  31 This drawing of the four forces of flight is the first image any flying student is shown when he or she begins training. Since everything else a {ythr c pilot will learn depends on this simple model, it is never left far behind.

  32 Most “learned’ medieval Europeans had believed since the time of Aristotle that the world was a sphere. It took the journeys of Columbus to prove that in the popular mind—another example of people not believing something until they could see it.

  33 Which of course led to the eventual “discovery” of an entirely new, fourth part of the world and a wholesale redrawing of the map. But that is another story.

  34 To be clear, the first “form” picture we come up with might not end up being the best and, like the T-O Map, might turn out to be inaccurate as we collect more data. But all ideas start somewhere, and selecting a single starting picture—knowing full well we may need to select another later—is a wonderful way to get Vivid Thinking rolling.

  35 It’s no coincidence that there are six quick tricks and six essential pictures; the tricks and the pictures are simply two different ways of identifying the core of an idea—two different ways of saying (and seeing) the same form.

  36Think of “listen” here in the broadest possible sense. If we’re in a lecture or a meeting or talking to a friend over coffee, I really do mean just listen. But if we’re reading a book, blog, or magazine, I mean actively “listen” through our reading for the main idea of the author. If we’re watching a movie or video, I mean “listen” for the key structural elements of what is going on and, above all, what is being said.

  37 When I introduced Vivid Grammar back in Chapter 5, I said that all we need to get any Vivid Idea started is an initial noun and its corresponding “portrait.” That remains true here as well: Verbal triggers are the starting point.

  38 If we could ask William Shakespeare, the cleverest fox in the history of the English language, what’s in a name, we know exactly what he would say: Not much. Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In other words, the girl l
oves the boy regardless of what he might be called.