One Trillion Alien Civilizations? Ho-Hum

Don't bury your lead, they teach journalists. The same lesson applies to how you communicate with others in your career. 

In the third to last paragraph of his article in The New York Times Sunday Review, University of Rochester astrophysics professor Adam Frank writes that even under the most pessimistic calculation "a trillion civilizations still would have appeared over the course of cosmic history". 

Earlier in the piece he wrote, "In a paper published in the May issue of the journal Astrobiology, the astronomer Woodruff Sullivan and I show that while we do not know if any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations currently exist in our galaxy, we now have enough information to conclude that they almost certainly existed at some point in cosmic history."

Now I don't mean to be splitting hairs but there is a significant difference between life somewhere else in the universe and a TRILLION civilizations.

But for the moment, let's set aside the news that there have been at least 1,000,000,000,000 civilizations before ours.

Don't bury your lead

Whether you discover life on Mars or a better way to sell deodorant, don't bury your message 95% of the way into your presentation. 

Don't meet your CEO in the hallway and ask her about the weather and tell her about your vacation and thank her for the expanded menu in the cafeteria and forget to mention that you just figured out the chemical formula for a new product that could generate $100 million in sales for your company.

Now I understand that in science and business people like to cover their butts and avoid going out on a limb, but I assume that you have some things to say that have great value to the people around you. Put these messages on a stage! Invest in a spotlight. Write them a nice script. You might even - I'm serious - add music.

(I once helped my wife with an internal presentation to her team at work. We put it to music, and the whole thing was a huge hit.)

By the way, every week I encounter professionals who say they are already doing this. They send me links to articles with a note that says something to the effect of "this really nails my message". I often write back - in the nicest way possible - to confess I still have no idea what their message is. I do this to be constructive, not cruel; it is often impossible to identify.

Here's the problem: in your head, you know everything you know. But no one else possesses your body of knowledge, your history, your beliefs, your assumptions, and your communications preferences. They lack all the context that's stuck in your head.

So you need to ask yourself again and again: is this clear to my target audience? Do I have the focus in the right place? Have I buried my message or highlighted it?

And please, please, please promise me... if you discover that one trillion civilizations have come before us, you will put this news in your headline.

Bruce Kasanoff is a social media ghostwriter. Learn more at Kasanoff.com. He is the author of How to Self-Promote without Being a Jerk, a 55-minute career guide packed with dozens of useful tips.