The One Who Conveys (1) — No Matter How Good It Is, If You Can't Get It Across, It Doesn't Exist

Following the piece on creating added value, this time I want to talk about conveying that value. No matter how good what you have is, if you can't get it across, it's as good as not having it at all.

The world is full of people with real skill who never get recognized for it. And there are others who don't seem special at all, yet people follow them anyway. The difference usually isn't ability — it's the ability to convey. When you hear "storytelling," you probably picture someone captivating an audience on a stage, but that's not what I mean. It's something you need in a single report, a single email, a single interview. Translating the value of what you do into language the listener can actually understand. That's storytelling.

Six Months Reduced to Three Lines

I remember something that happened with a team member. Ahead of a quarterly performance review, I asked everyone to summarize their achievements, and the document I got back the next day had three lines on it. "Completed development of Module A. Completed organizing Data B. Carried out Testing C." In terms of hours, that represented hundreds of hours of effort. When I asked, "Is this really all?" they answered, "I don't think I did anything beyond this."

That team member had clearly worked hard. But because they didn't understand why what they'd done was valuable, they couldn't recognize their own achievement as an achievement. So it came out as three lines. It wasn't a problem of ability — it was a problem of conveying. Even value that's been created becomes nonexistent if it can't be translated into a form others can recognize.

Five Gigabytes and a Thousand Songs

There's a famous example of what it means to convey something well. When Apple launched the iPod in 2001, competing products said "5 gigabytes of storage capacity." Apple described that same 5 gigabytes differently: "1,000 songs in your pocket." Identical specifications, but one is a number and the other is a scene from your life. It translated the spec into a unit the listener could actually picture in their mind.

We have a similar example closer to home. One money-transfer service described a complicated financial process as "transfers as easy as sending a text." Instead of talking about digital certificates or security cards, they likened it to something everyone does every day. By translating something difficult into a familiar action, the barrier to entry disappeared.

You don't even need to look far — founders explaining new services do the same thing. Airbnb, now a global lodging platform, started out with nothing more than a flat description: "a site that brokers spare rooms." In their early pitch materials, they translated this unfamiliar service into three simple benefits: travelers save money, hosts earn money, and the two share culture. The moment they translated features into benefits the listener could grasp instantly, the investment followed. One company that found it hard to explain the concept of file syncing in words skipped the finished product entirely and made a short demo video instead. By weaving in jokes and language that their target early adopters would love, their waiting list exploded overnight. The moment you translate something difficult into the other person's language, persuasion follows on its own.

Switching the Lens

Storytelling isn't flashy eloquence. Nor is it inventing something that isn't there. It's translating value you already have into the listener's language. So the first question is always the same one: "What is the listener curious about?" That's where you start.

In the next piece, I'll talk about why this translation fails so often, and about the root cause behind it — the "curse of expertise."