Back in my teevee and radio days, I worked with some amazing people. Many are still contributing to the business, and everyone had something important to share. Some of those lessons, however, were by negative example.
We’ll call him Carl. Carl was a journeyman, bouncing from station to station in town. He was well-respected on the air, with a decent reputation for hard work. To his detriment, he had a short fuse and an even shorter tolerance for seeing things done “the wrong way.” This wasn’t the lesson I learned from Carl.
Carl was an instant charmer. He was glib, and some of the funniest things I had ever heard came out of his mouth. I wish I could remember some of the examples, as the phrases and humor would just flow with no effort.
The Turning Point
After about three months or so, I started to learn Carl’s secret. After you spend a significant period of time with a person, you start running across some of the same triggers. And wouldn’t you know it, those same glib turns of phrase would come spilling out of Carl’s mouth. Just like Pavlov ringing a bell, here came the catchphrase.
In the sitcom world, a catchphrase needs to be hammered home every week for it to permeate the culture enough that you’ll want to buy the t-shirt. In real life, catchphrases are inside-jokes at best, divisive at worst, and annoying to most everyone. It’s one thing when a violent hit in the football game results in six guys yelling “Blammo!” It’s another to be known as Blammo Guy in the mall.
Carl wasn’t as obvious as the Blammo Guy, because it took a while to experience all his triggers. Yet after a while, he was just as predictable. And not as funny or charming.
The Ninety-Trick Pony
It took me a long time to verbalize the concept of the 90-Trick Pony, but the notion has been a touchstone for me for years. And it took me even longer to understand why Carl was that way. He wasn’t stupid, nor was he shallow. For a long time, I thought it was a manifestation of insecurity, and it probably is to some degree. But now I know that Carl’s biggest problem was over-programming. He patterned himself into a rut.
When you’re a disk jockey, you have to multi-task constantly in a very unforgiving environment. For every Howard Stern who gets paid millions just to talk, there are tens of thousands who have to talk while punching buttons. In Carl’s day, it was punching buttons, swapping stacks of carts, spooling reels, and taking phone calls. And in Carl’s day, the equipment was never your friend.
Carl figured out that he could “program” himself with some fairly lengthy witticisms, and run his mouth on autopilot while briefly turning his attention elsewhere. I don’t think Carl ever discovered what he had done, and I’m not sure he was conscious of it. Half the time, I don’t think he remembered which of his catchphrases he’d just used.
Communication Ruts
Maybe you know a Carl in your life. Maybe you secretly are a “Carl,” with your own subconscious patterns that once served you well but now drag you down. We all have a little Carl in us — the part that wants to be accepted, and knows that killer line will kick us up a notch in the approval rankings. Unless, of course, everyone has heard all 90 of your Tricks and sentences you to the Pony Stable.
Carl’s biggest sin was that he merged his on-air persona with his personality. His routine became a rut that got in the way of face-to-face communication. Don’t get me wrong, he could function very well and was capable of delightful conversations. But every so often, someone would hit a trigger, and out would spill the catchphrase. It made you wonder how often he lived there in the moment with you, and just how often his brain was drifting elsewhere.
What Carl Got Right
Real communication is about making a connection. It’s about listening, talking, and remembering. It’s rather ironic, but Carl is the one who taught me the secret of connecting over the air: whether you’re broadcasting to ten or ten-million, you’re talking to one at a time. This is the part Carl got right, and it’s the piece that I hope I’ve carried over into the online realm. 
You don’t “talk to an audience.” You connect with people.
Now, go back and look at your online trail. See if there are any patterns you’ve relied upon too much, and change your routine before it becomes entrenched. After all, ponies that learn no new tricks stay in their ruts, running circles forever.
This entire post reminds me very much of a line I’d once read in Po Bronson’s first (and New York Times bestselling) how-to, WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY LIFE? I recall reading a very sage passage which went along these lines:
Don’t get used to doing the wrong thing in life, because once you get used to the salary and the recognition, you can’t transport that. You get stuck in the rut, getting juiced up by the wrong stimulii.
Or something like that…::: I’m paraphrasing, of course :::
It’s frightening — I wonder if you still ever think about Carl. Do you know what he’s up to these days?
Adam, I know exactly what Carl is doing these days.
And I’m not sharing, because I don’t want to out him. He’s a genuinely nice guy.
How many ways can a person say, “I really like your blog posting”? We do all get in linguistic and nonlinguistic ruts. It seems to me that it is easier for me to catch my “catchphrases” in writing, yet I sometimes catch myself when I say the same phrase or story.
The main idea I drew from this thoughtful posting was: Don’t be predictable. Grow. Develop. Nurture your creativity, as you nurture others as you LISTEN AND LEARN!
Thanks for the reminder.
Ike, just a curiosity — any way to RSS comments too, so I can return to the conversation w/o having to return to the post or my reader? Thoughts…?
I think we had this particular conversation a few years back- nice to see it fleshed out.
You given me pause on this one. I hope I’ve avoided the rote route.
Thanks for that cautionary tale. I teach a presentation course and have often recommended that people create story “modules” that they can insert into their presentations. But after reading this insightful article – it’s made me realize that having a set of stories you lean on over and over again – can create that bad set of things that just don’t work anymore.
@Jacob – you worked with Carl too. You know exactly who I am talking about.
@Cooper – this particular shoe doesn’t fit you. Have no worries!
@Ivana – I am a fan of modular thinking when it comes to presentations, particularly if it means the overall track can deviate to the benefit of specific audiences.
In Carl’s case, there was no filter to signal that a particular anecdote or turn of phrase was overheating, or stale. As long as you’re aware of your students and their individual proclivities to cling to a comfort zone, then you’ve done your job. (Maybe just using Carl as a cautionary tale would be enough…)
i overprogram all the time, and’m workin’ on it. if i was your editor on this, i’d say the piece is weak and suffers (and it does) because it leaves too much to the imagination. i *think* i’ve known a carl in my life, but this strong really would be 10x stronger with three examples of the things he did right and brilliant and funny and 3x examples of stuff he did wrong. you probably left that out to spare his feelings. fair enough . . but your own work suffers because of it. I’d say: Read the piece Jonah has this week criticizing David Brooks (who IS on his side) . . he begins by praising him. Then goes after him. It’s fair, and it’s real, and I don’t htink it’ll damage their friendship. it’d be weaker if jonah had said, “some people do this abstract xyz thing, and maybe you’ve seen it, and maybe it’s not cool”. . . yeah, ok. but it’s stronger the way it is. actually, it’s locked up, so here it is.
Agent Provocateur
David Brooks is one of my favorite people in Washington. It is something of a cliché to preface all criticism of Brooks with a declaration of this sort, but that doesn’t make it any less true. My admiration for Brooks extends so far that I am willing to overlook the possibility that he is, in fact, a French sleeper agent.
Let us review some of the evidence. In his path-breaking book Bobos in Paradise (2000), he described a wonderful transformation in which Americans had turned a blind eye to longstanding cultural disputes and embraced a fairly secular, apolitical ethos that emphasized aesthetics, design, and food as the lodestars of a fulfilled life. Tellingly, Brooks — who has spent time in France’s Mini-Me, Belgium — invoked two thoroughly French concepts to describe these people: “Bourgeois Bohemians.”
These Gallicized Americans congregated in liberal enclaves like Burlington, Vt. Alas, Brooks discovered them during a docile period, the fin-de-siècle of the Clinton years, and he mistook their obsessions with runny cheese and distressed furniture for post-partisanship. As soon as George W. Bush took the oath of office, never mind invaded Iraq, the Burlingtonites and Parisians alike became inflamed with ideological hatred.
Earlier in the 1990s, Brooks had become the leading scribe for an intellectual campaign at The Weekly Standard that he dubbed “National Greatness.” Much of this stuff was well argued and brilliantly written, but classically froggy in its outlook. It looked to restore a past era of greatness when — it was imagined — all eyes were on America’s civilizational happening. Very pretty buildings and nifty inventions used to pop up all over the place during our glory days, he said, but not so much anymore. The danger for Americans in 1997, Brooks wrote (during a period of remarkable innovation, one might add), was that “if they think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities, they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose.” Imagine how much more persuasive that must have been in the original French.
Now consider the latest evidence. In a recent column in the New York Times, Brooks argued that Barack Obama’s coming tsunami of public-works spending should be targeted at locking in the latest trends in middle-class living: “the new localism.” In exurbs around the country, people want more cafés, farmers’ markets, concert halls, and meeting places. Rather than spend money on refurbishing and expanding the existing interstate highway system, Brooks wrote, the government should underwrite a grand cultural strategy whereby we augment this trend by funding new town squares where we can read Le Monde over cups of café au lait. Or something.
My point here isn’t to ridicule the idea. Brooks is right that if we’re going to have a “once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment,” we might indeed want to put some thought into it instead of reflexively refilling the same old public-sector troughs and slush buckets. But first, it’s worth noting that there is something deeply . . . Continental about this approach to public policy. The French are connoisseurs of using the state as an engine of cultural policymaking. In America, the idea of using government to guide and form culture is still deeply — and, with hope, enduringly — controversial.
Second, Brooks is a gifted trend spotter — and setter — but spotting trends and locking them into national policy planning is the sort of thing that makes the ghost of Friedrich Hayek cry. The French, too, are wonderful at trend spotting. Does anyone remember their effort in the 1980s to put an “informatique” in every home? These networked computer terminals were a sensation — you could find out when the Jerry Lewis Marathon began from your own home! — and the wave of the future. Now hundreds of thousands of them collect dust in funky antiques shops. Maybe America can beat the French at their own game, but I’d rather we didn’t try to play it.
— JONAH GOLDBERG