Telling and telling 🫀 EBH

Of Cliff's Notes and high school reading lists.

Are Cliff’s Notes still a thing?

I ask because I went to high school and college at a time when they were THE way to cut corners about the books we were expected to read.

(I assume the internet has changed that.)

The thing about Cliff’s Notes is that they were designed solely to help you perform well on the test. They defined the themes of the book, what characters represented, how the structure worked (I’m vividly remembering The Scarlet Letter’s use of the scaffold to indicate the beginning, middle, and end, for example), etc.

They might define the language as flowery or formal, showing an example of the text to prove their statement so that you can confidently answer a test question about the writing style.

The issue here is that a generation of short-cutting students might never read the books, having read the notes, gotten their grade and moved on. To them (okay, us), Moby Dick is about man vs nature. To Kill a Mockingbird is about racism and heroism. Lord of the Flies is about the individual’s struggle between civility and barbarism.

These things aren’t true because we read the books, but because someone said it was true.

To a 15-year-old student, these notes are lifelines, allowing us to achieve more within a dictated school structure. There weren’t there for learning, they existed to help us get better grades in a shorter period of time.

Reading these books now, you will likely come to these same conclusions about what the books are “about.” But the experience of reading them makes those themes more real. More vibrant. More meaningful than just getting the notes.

Cliff Notes brings the structure, the “results” of reading these books into the foreground, often overriding what we might feel when we read the books themselves.

It’s like reading the Wikipedia synopsis of a horror movie: it will reveal the plot, but never spark the same emotional reaction as watching it in a movie theater with others.

I bring this up because I was going over a career site with someone taking my EVP Workshop class (new classes to be announced shortly) and their site was all structure, all “this is what we mean!” and no prose, no text. It was like reading a Cliff’s Notes or Wikipedia page about what the company wanted you to know about working there.

This is a variation of the “show, don’t tell” idea. Too often, we are desperate to get people to understand our brand, our EVP, that we just blurt it out. It’s like a comedian on stage saying, “I’m a comedian!” instead of telling jokes that make us laugh.

Activation of brand isn’t merely repetition and reiteration. Coke’s brand is about happiness, but only a handful of ads ever use the word “happiness.” It shows happiness. It sparks happiness. It suggests happiness. It leads us to infer happiness.

You should take a lesson in your own brand work. It isn’t about saying your EVP, its about helping someone come to that conclusion on their own.

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Ugh. I messed up the URL on the waiting list for the book. The correct URL is EB4SB.com. There’s still about 8 hours left to sign up to get the first 35 pages of the book for free.

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And to celebrate the book, I am partnering with Clinch on a webinar on April 4th: Zero to Pipeline in 60 Days. Yes, of course, it’s free!

***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

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