Inflating a Blimp with a Bicycle Pump

If you are truly serious about becoming an excellent persuasive communicator, one of the most important things you can do is to become a writer. You don’t have to do it for publication and in fact you don’t even have to be particularly good at it, but the more you write the better you will get at expressing your ideas.

Everyone wants to be admired for their brilliance of thinking and expression, and we envy those who seem to possess it naturally and effortlessly. We may even feel a twinge of envy and despair that we can’t do it ourselves. But I suspect that many of the people who seem to have natural gift actually work very hard at it.

Here’s what a brilliant writer, Kurt Vonnegut said about it:

“Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”

I’m not a novelist. I don’t aspire to be one, and you probably don’t either. But we can still learn from Vonnegut’s sentiment. What can we use from his idea?

Write it down. Sounding halfway intelligent means you sound like you thought about it, but for important meetings and conversations, I don’t believe it counts as thinking until you’ve written it down. That’s because it always sounds better in your head than it looks on paper, at least the first time. As Barbara Minto says in her book, The Pyramid Principle: “No one can know precisely what he thinks until he has been forced to symbolize it—either by saying it out loud or by writing it down—and even then the first statement of the idea is likely to be less precise than he can eventually make it.”

Make time. You don’t have to shoot for the great American novel, because you have a day job. But you still have to carve out some time to give it the attention it deserves. As the old saying says, if you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to do it over? Besides, how many times have you regretted something you wrote in haste, especially now that everything written electronically will live forever?

Start early. Patience is a powerful tool, but you have to start early for it to work. I used to think I did my best work under deadline pressure, but  I’ve found that starting early to let the idea marinate in my unconscious mind usually pays off in the form of insights and flashes of semi-inspiration at the most unexpected times. It’s better for my blood pressure, too.

Pump up the pump. The metaphor of inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump isn’t exactly correct. When you pump long enough, you get better at pumping, and somehow the pump begins to get upgrades as well. Over time each push of the handle gets a little more productive, in either quantity or quality. It’s the idea of personal kaizen, where thousands of small improvements use the magic of compound interest to add up not just mathematically but geometrically.

Inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. It’s a powerful idea, brilliantly expressed. I wonder how many times he wrote it and rewrote it?