Thursday, May 20, 2010

The Bigger Picture

I am lifting a post in its entirety from new media/social media marketing maven Seth Godin. When something is perfect, why mess around?

Sentences, paragraphs and chapters

It's laughably easy to find someone to critique a sentence, to find a missing apostrophe or worry about your noun-verb agreement.

Sometimes, you're lucky enough to find someone who can tell you that a paragraph is dull, or out of place.

But finding people to rearrange the chapters, to criticize the very arc of what you're building, to give you substantive feedback on your strategy--that's insanely valuable and rare.

Perhaps one criticism in a hundred is actually a useful and generous contribution in your quest to reorganize things for the better.

[And for those in need of subtitles, this isn't a post about your next novel. It's about your business, your career and your life.]

Four people tell you that there was a typo on the third slide in your presentation. A generous and useful editor (hard to call them a consultant), though, points out that you shouldn't be doing presentations at all, and your time would be better spent meeting in small groups with your best clients.


Here's the link to Seth's blog:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/05/sentences-paragraphs-and-chapters.html