Here’s the process behind this entry:

1) I saw a baseball play that makes no sense whatsoever.
2) Taking the small, I expanded it throughout other inefficiencies in baseball and sports in general.
3) The next step was to expand it further, so baseball becomes an analogy with wider application.

There’s a storytelling philosophy that I learned from Wayne Freedman at KGO-TV in San Francisco. “Take the largest events and find the tiny humanity - take the smallest of events and find the universal truth.”

In essence, the cosmic becomes comic, and vice versa. That’s the key to connecting with people, because in scaling your point either up or down across the spectrum of significance, you eventually will cross that place where the reader or listener is at that moment. Sometimes the reader is focused on the small, and sometimes they are aloft in the expanse of philosophy. So craft a message that unites them all of the points in between, and you have something that will resonate (if you’re entertaining enough to keep them around for the punchlines).

It’s especially important in the written realm, because you are never quite sure where your readers’ heads are from moment to moment. That’s why so many blogs are ‘disposable’. They are written for a context and a moment that no one remembers the next day.

Verbal communication - whether in person or on the phone - provides feedback. The interaction allows us to cut quickly to that level where the other participants happen to be. This is why some people who are great verbal communicators have a problem translating to the written word. They rely more on the feedback than they should, and aren’t concentrating on making a message that transcends headspace and time.

Thanks… you just squeezed another post out of me — and it’s buried here in the comments!

I sat back after the read, ran my hands through my scalp, and uttered aloud (after exhaling, gleefully, “post-coitally,” almost):

“How does he do it? How’s it possible…I’m not worthy…I’m so not worthy…”

Your words issue forth like a symphonic gush of the Niagara River over the Falls. What a fantastic comparative — baseball, innovation, Adam Smith…did it really all come together during the viewing of the game on the boobtube? Honestly…was this the connection?

If I peer behind the curtain, is this revealing the identity of the genie? I mean, we all know who Banksy is now — for the record — but does that make his mastery any less world-trouncing?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1418381.ece

What you write is precisely what I try to inculcate in the local Czech young set: you DON’T have to do things like your parents, just because that’s the way it’s always been done.

Grabbed the words right out of my mouth, dear sir.

–ADM