Expect to repeat.;...really; expect to repeat

-
Google has proved a surprisingly good place not just for great work and good food, but also pretty savvy management advice.

Something I've heard from execs at Google a few times (appropriately!) now is the need to repeat to get your message it across. I've heard it stated two ways that I've really liked:

"By the time you start to get bored saying something, is the time other people are starting to believe what you're saying"

or

"It takes saying something 20 times, before people start to get it"

I have to admit this was something that annoyed me when I first started here. I'm sure I encountered it before Google as well, but it seemed much more often out here (both internal and external to Google.)

I'd often find myself thinking "...but I'd told you this" or "we'd talked about this last week" even as I went over it yet again. It'd get a little annoying.

But I've realized that ideas and messages just take time to get through. Some of it because
  • people are distracted or have too much going on (as someone once said 10% of the attention/headspace of a really smart person is a pretty average intellect) and given our multi-tasking ways at work that's pretty much what you have to work with most of the time.
  • surprisingly many people just need to hear something again and again before they believe you. The re-enforcement just helps.
  • some things just need time to sink in.
  • I may not have explained it very well the last time.
  • ...and of course some skulls are just thicker than others :-D
So these days when I'm asked to repeat my logic/arguments for something, a smile tends to come to me. I see it just as part of the process and means I'm a little closer to getting the person to believe.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The "Rescue Me" minisodes

-
I'm a fan of the FX show " Rescue Me " I was lukewarm when Dennis Leary mentioned the mini-sodes on his Daily Show visit. But, for the Rescue Me's particular situation it works really well. First the mini-sodes are actually good! they use characters from the story and tell a little anecdote they were clearly pretty cheap to produce through what seems like a little bit of complicated mess, they're distributing like crazy: YouTube , Crackle (Sony's site), the FX site (powered by Brightcove), Hulu These do exactly what they're supposed to do new episodes aren't coming till Spring 2009 , the fans need something to tide them over and keep the show in their memory: done potentially rope in new fans (short episodes, lower commitment to start watching the show) without freaking out old school media which is loathe to risk potential DVD sales by putting older episodes/clips online: done Its not completely clear to me how much this is by their own design, and
Read more

A short love letter to ~8 years on Google Search - 8 things I’m grateful for.

-
  After a few weeks off, I started a new gig within Google yesterday and it hit me that for the first time in almost eight years I won’t be working on some part of Google Search. Eight years ago, I told the team when I was interviewing that I was “looking for a place to call home for a while and grow there”. My experiences here more than met that need.  I used to write a regular “10 things about…” listy column for a while at a college newspaper. So in that style here’s 8 things (one for each year) I feel grateful to have experienced/learned in this time. Also, like that column which I banged out the night before it was due, this post is something that I don’t need to do, yet I feel somehow compelled to do (and so it’ll likely be longer and less crisp than it should be :-))    It actually is awesome to work on something so many people use and love, and that positively touches people’s lives. There’s a talk I give externally about Search and a line I often end up using is how the mission
Read more

Avengers Endgame: how trivial passions can nudge a career

-
Image
The Internets reminded me that today was exactly 2 years since Avenger's Endgame was released. I remember that day vividly for a few reasons I woke up before sunrise (way before the alarm went off).   I wore this (now that I think about it) borderline appropriate T-shir t and then..  .. showed up before 7:00am to watch that movie at Century Shoreline before going to work.  This is still the only movie that has a scene that can make me tear up consistently every single time (I know, I know - it's ridiculous).  That day was interesting from a work perspective for another reason. Along with a few other people at work (and with some crazy last-minute negotiating), we'd pulled together the Thanos Easter Egg on Search. It was typical of a lot of Easter Eggs on Search at the time, in that it wasn't really anybody's job, but we pushed it through because we loved the idea enough to do it. My day job on Media experience on Search helped me justify it a little bit I guess.
Read more