REVIEW: "The Art of Explaining" - a book for everyone who tells stories

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

It is often difficult to explain to relatives or friends what you do at work. It is even more difficult to explain to a child in simple words something from a difficult adult world. Dozens of times a week we are faced with the need to explain to our colleagues, clients, partners, relatives or even strangers something that is very important to us and could potentially become important for them. How do you master this difficult art of explanation?

First impressions of the book

The Russian translation appeared thanks to the wonderful editorial staff of "Mann, Ivanov, Ferber" (wonderful - because without the efforts of this team of publishers, translators and designers, it is unlikely that many of Lifehacker's readers have met over the years with great ideas and useful advice for everyone who wants "Pump" your life and work, mind and body, knowledge and practical skills). On the table in front of me is a tangerine-colored paperback book with funny patterns inside and convenient "pockets" on the sides of the cover to hide the pages that have already been read (instead of a bookmark).

Everything is written quite simply and accessible, examples in places require more thoughtful reading into the text - but I personally love this format. I don’t know if they will understand me perfectly after I finish reading this book to the end (due to the busy work rhythm I only moved to the second half of the book, but I’ve already learned a lot for myself, a couple more pages - and I’ll definitely become an explanation hacker:)).

What is this book about

The Art of Explaining is about how to find the main feature of your product and convey to those who need to evaluate it: to your consumers, clients, customers, investors, employees or just friends whose opinion is important to you. The problem is that we do not know how to explain and convey what is formulated in our head to those who want to understand us - but cannot "penetrate" into our head.

The art of succinct, accessible, and engaging explanation is not only useful for businessmen, startups, and marketers. Parents, teachers, older brothers and sisters - those who have to explain more often than some managers or directors. They should read this book too.

LeFever's book teaches:

• to plan: to identify all the vulnerabilities and prepare the correct explanation in advance;
• pack: to develop a simple strategy to generate sympathy, understanding and openness in your audience;
• present: to use simple visual aids to illustrate complex concepts.

Some useful thoughts from the author

1. The explanation seems simple to us, but in reality, few people know how to correctly explain and not confuse explanation with instructions, illustrations or descriptions.

2. Explanation is a way of packaging ideas … Explaining, we provide examples, describe, detail and convey key ideas. It also plays an important role in the ability to convey value and the ability to interest the one at whom our explanation is aimed.

3. "Curse of knowledge" is one of the first difficulties … They are faced by all those who are forced to explain something new, which is well known to the speaker, but completely unfamiliar to everyone else.

4. "If you cannot explain it in simple words, you do not fully understand yourself." (A. Einstein). It's not enough to know clever terms and phrases. If asked, you should be prepared to explain in simple terms.

5. Context and the ability to adapt your presentation to the expectations and knowledge of the target audience is very important. Your confidence in your knowledge of the topic should be passed on to others in the audience.

There is still a lot of useful information, but if all this is formulated even briefly, 5 blog posts will not be enough.

Who do I recommend reading

Teachers-educators-educators, parents-grandparents, older brothers-sisters - to communicate with their own and other people's children.

Marketers and sales managers - to work in the field.

For the management of companies and startups - to work with the team.

Teams and developers - to find common ground with non-techies.

For journalists and bloggers - to work with the audience of their publications and content projects