What are Your Six Words?
Literary legend has it that Ernest Hemingway won a $10 bet by writing the shortest story he could, on the back of a napkin:
For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.
His simple six-word story resonates with both depth and tragedy, and in its terseness, provides us with a perfect encapsulation of both the tragedy of which he speaks and the man himself. He stripped away all of the unnecessary noise—adjectives, excessive descriptors, and lengthy explanations—and immediately delivered what he wants to convey.
Most of us are not renowned authors. But we can gain our own insights by utilizing Hemingway’s process to practice getting to the powerful core of meaning so often diluted by corporate jargon. Simple, declarative sentences are motivating and engage others’ imagination and desire to know more. They are therefore a business and leadership skill of use with customers, colleagues, and even in our internal dialogue as we parse through a problem. The six-word format forces us cut to the crux of the issue, refusing (if you will) to put lipstick on the pig or to seem that we know something when we do not. Instead, we offer up ourselves and our ideas with honesty.
Speaking with simplicity and clarity is a real skill. And it’s one that seems to be in far too short supply. We make things so much more complex and involved than they need to be. This confuses our clients, our colleagues, and ourselves. We know that simplicity is the key, yet we continue to eschew it.
It is harder to convey your ideas in six words than it is in six hundred. Unfortunately, the human brain lacks the capacity to absorb excessive information. When presented with an overabundance of information, the brain immediately begins to filter it and assign importance to various components. The problem with this is obvious—your audience’s brain might deem important things that YOU think are important and might disregard what is really the meat of your message.
Find your six words
You can’t articulate a six-word value proposition to your market, your colleagues, or your interviewer without first doing some homework. Take a few moments and write down a few six-word stories on the following:
- Who am I really?
- What do I value?
- What is my role in the organization/team?
- What are my life and work philosophies?
- What are my contributions to the world/my role?
Once you’ve gone through this exercise, you can use this intel to help craft a compelling personal value and branding statement. From there, you can work on creating simple, easy-to-understand statements for your clients and your colleagues. If you make things easy for people to understand, they will view you as an expert. So much depends on clarity, simplicity, and being succinct. Good luck!