“Less is more.”
We’ve heard it on countless occasions. We may even have said it more than a few times. And it’s so often the perfect counsel, in any variety of situations. But how often do we blow the opportunity to actually practice it?
This comes to mind on the heels of the first candidates’ forum in my campaign for the District 200 Oak Park and River Forest High School Board.
There are nine of us vying for four spots and even with two absent, that left seven people communicating their background, their motivation for running, the issues that we feel are top priorities, and so forth.
To a person, we all stumbled on occasion in keeping within the time allotted by the moderator. Some were more stumble-prone than others, and I like to think I was among a subset who weren’t quite as long-winded. Even so, at the next forum, and the one after that, and the one after that, I will do my darnedest to heed the words of Brian Burkhart, “Chief Word Guy” at SquarePlanet Presentations + Strategy:
“More information in less time isn’t better. To use an analogy, drinking from a firehose leaves an audience with the message equivalent of feeling disoriented, tortured and still thirsty because nothing actually went where it was supposed to.”
Yep…what he said!
Related Posts:
A Recent Reminder on the Power of Brevity, More or Less
A Less-Is-More Creative Gem From Bill Daniel
