| I recently read an essay by an advisor to Mario Vargas-Llosa's failed campaign for the presidency of Peru. Brilliant writer, bad speaker. [0] Being one of the greatest writers alive, Vargas-Llosa was good at giving voice to the people's dissatisfaction and ideas for how to solve them. But he failed at the other half of political communication: repetition. He was always racing ahead of the electorate, speaking on his latest ideas. He was bored with the thought of repeating himself. He never developed the habit of the stump speech, and left his constituents behind. In the influence game, one is eventually faced with a tradeoff between being a thinker who raises the upper bound, and being a communicator/popularizer who raises the median. Thinkers are needed, but if their ideas race too far ahead they languish until a popularizer takes them up. There is a middle way: continue your writing as before, but use the stump as a trailing indicator of your thought process. There is no dishonor in giving audiences an expanded version of your thoughts as of a few essays ago. Don't worry that the ideas aren't "new". Definition, then repetition. Also, learning how to be an engaging speaker at the same time as trying out new ideas is hard. Keeping the ideas constant can help you become a better speaker more quickly than you might think. And repeating yourself can even lead to better thoughts in directions you don't expect. [0] Mark Malloch Brown, "The Consultant", Granta #36 |