Blah Blah Blah

We don’t need more words. We need more ideas. We need them fast, and we need them to be good—and to know that they’re good, we need them to be clear.

From Clear to Boring to Foggy to Misleading, we’ve mapped out the dangers of increasing blah-blah-blah

That is just so wrong. Pictures are the part of thinking that provides us with guidance and direction.

entire education system evolved to believe that pictures are like training wheels: They’re useful only to get us started reading—and drawing should be discarded the moment we’re able to write.

We all know the power of pictures as a learning tool. Before we learned to read, we were asked to draw. But then the pictures stopped.

The escape comes in the form of a treasure map. It’s a map we can use when we have a problem and we need to find a good idea to solve it

To be useful, any map must show three things: where we are now (in enough detail to decide whether that’s a good place for us to stay), a better place to go (in enough detail to decide whether that place really does look more inviting), and a clearly marked path between the two (in enough detail to make sure we won’t get lost along the way).

We don’t need more words. We need more ideas.

The more we talked, the fewer problems we solved.

That’s bad, because words have become our default thinking tool. Even worse, for most of us words are our only thinking tool.