Start right before you get eaten by the bear

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

Wes Kao advises to get straight to the point in stories and presentations by cutting unnecessary backstory. Focus on providing just enough context to engage your audience without overwhelming them with details. This approach helps keep conversations effective and allows more time for important discussions.

Key Takeaways:

1. Limit backstory to 10-20% of your conversation.
2. Identify and share only essential context.
3. Start your narrative right before the main action or point.

Highlights from Article

cut non-essential backstory so you can spend time on the juicy part.

Backstory scope creep is real. You start with the intent of sharing the only basics, but once you start talking, you keep going. Before you know it, you’ve explained the history of your product, covered your career journey, explained what you didn’t do and why, and went on a few tangents before catching yourself.

You’d be surprised at how little backstory is needed to dive in. Once you start the conversation, you can always add relevant information later.

I define backstory to mean irrelevant sidebars, rabbit holes, tangents, preamble, and background information that’s barely tied to your main point. If what you’re sharing is relevant and what you want to talk about, I don’t consider that backstory—that’s part of your actual story.

In business contexts, your listener doesn’t want or need a long story. The story is a means to an end to help your audience feel, to get them to take action, or to get your point across.

In those cases, I like explicitly giving permission and encouraging folks to interrupt me once they get my point.

• Give permission for people to interrupt

Slack messages Put the key point at the top, then more context beneath. Here’s what this looks like:

• Include the bottom line up front

after doing a bunch of writing, and reading three impactful books (On Writing Well, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t, and Several Short Sentences About Writing), the biggest lesson I’ve learned is to cut, cut, and cut some more.

• Cut text down!

Trim as much backstory as possible because it’s usually not as important as you think. Non-essential backstory is different from useful context. Challenge yourself to remove tangents, random details, and rabbit holes.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

See other recent things I’ve read here.