Why Leaders should ‘Go Direct’ in Communication
I’m happy to report more progress on the book. The copy-edits are almost done. Many blurb reviews have come in from kind leaders. And I’m gradually getting ready to transition from the creation phase of the book to the marketing phase. Expect a lot more communication from my side over the next few months!
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And now, on to the newsletter.
Welcome to the one hundred and twenty-first edition of ‘3-2-1 by Story Rules‘.
A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:
- 3 tweets
- 2 articles, and
- 1 long-form content piece
Let’s dive in.
𝕏 3 Tweets of the week
That’s a simple yet powerful insight on what a prompt should do.
A great way to make you see the value of basic science.
Fascinating list – spot Mohenjodaro, Pataliputra, Vijaynagar (!) and Agra in the table.
📄 2 Articles of the week
a. ‘How to Keep Your Writing Weird in the Age of AI’ by Katie Parrott (Every)
I loved this article by Katie Parrott on how you should not let AI blunt your weird edges.
AI pulls everything toward the statistical center. Sometimes the center is exactly where you want to be. But sometimes the edges are where the interesting stuff lives.
She refers to an interesting Latin concept:
I was deep in a rabbit hole about textual criticism and the Bible when my ChatGPT tutor pointed me toward a concept that completely changed how I think about writing with AI.
Lectio difficilior potior. The harder reading is stronger.
This is a lovely analogy from (literally) Biblical times, about how successive translators (in their attempt to make the original simpler) robbed an ancient text of its quirky essence:
It’s a principle scholars have used for centuries. When faced with two versions of an ancient text and asked which is the original, they choose the one that’s more difficult to understand. The thinking is that somewhere along the way, some well-meaning copyist, intentionally or otherwise, tweaked the original to make it clearer or more sensible according to their understanding. I’m going to call this cautious copyist a “timid scribe.”
The moment I read about this concept, I saw AI playing the role of timid scribe everywhere in my own writing.
She uses an example from her own writing to illustrate how AI becomes a ‘timid scribe’:
Where I might write “altar-call energy,” AI defaults to “enthusiasm.” Where I talk about “collecting screenshots like a doomsday prepper,” it recommends “documenting examples.”
AI tries to get everyone to the glorious, professional ‘middle’:
AI takes what’s specific and makes it general. It takes what’s wrinkly and makes it smooth. The consequences are already visible: Scroll through any business blog, marketing newsletter, or LinkedIn feed, and you’ll see the smoothing happening at scale.
AI is our era’s timid scribe. It’s a well-meaning assistant that takes your weird original and makes it sound like everything else. And learning to work with it, not against it, might be the most important writing skill of our time.
Katie gives a concrete example of what this means:
Last week, I was writing a social media post about Every’s value proposition and started with this: “Most Every subscribers don’t know what they’re paying for.”
I asked LinkedIn’s built-in AI to refine it. The suggestion: “Most Every subscribers may not be fully aware of what they’re paying for.”
Look at what happened there. The AI version added hedges (“may not be”), softened the language (“fully aware” versus “don’t know”), and became considerably more professional. It also became bland, beige, and forgettable.
I loved this line – especially the contrast between confusion and character!:
Sometimes that trade (between clarity and weirdness) is worth it! Not every weird metaphor deserves to live. The trick is recognizing when you’re smoothing away confusion versus character.
So how to cope? Give context to AI:
It starts with context—lots of it. I give AI examples of my writing. I explain what I’m trying to achieve. I share my beliefs about what makes writing work, as well as the crutches I repeatedly fall back on that I want the scribe to detect.
b. ‘The Most Important Memory is Still the One Inside Your Head’ by Carl Hendrick
Carl is a Professor of applied sciences and makes some compelling points about the importance of memory in learning.
He starts with a counter-intuitive point – there is some nuance lost in the supposedly-settled debate between ‘learning by understanding’ versus ‘learning by rote memory’:
Over the last 50 years, the idea that memorisation is much less important than generalised critical thinking became a largely uncontested orthodoxy in education. Of course, rote memorisation of disconnected facts without linking them to broader concepts and ideas is a joyless, pointless enterprise but recent research suggests we may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, creating a false dichotomy between memory and understanding that has undermined the very cognitive foundations we sought to strengthen.
He emphasises the importance of memorising core building blocks like multiplication tables and vocabulary:
When we memorise multiplication tables or vocabulary words, we’re not just storing isolated facts, we’re building structured knowledge that enables mathematical intuition and sophisticated reasoning. These aren’t competing educational goals; they’re complementary processes that work together to create critical thinking and genuine understanding.
Memorising these basic building blocks can be useful in freeing up mental space for higher-order thinking:
Oakley and her colleagues’ research illuminate how genuine expertise emerges from the interplay between two complementary memory systems, each with its own character and purpose.
This is expertise: not conscious calculation, but fluency born of deep practice. The paradox is that by memorising so much you can actually forget about the very thing that took up all your cognitive bandwidth. The automaticity is a liberation and affords the bandwidth for the kind of creativity that separates novices from experts.
Carl states a simple example for multiplication tables:
Consider a Year 6 student who has deeply internalised multiplication tables. When she sees a worksheet that claims 8 × 7 = 102, her brain immediately flags the error. The mismatch between her schema and the external input triggers a prediction error — releasing dopamine, sharpening attention, and reinforcing the correct association: 8 × 7 = 56.
Now consider her classmate who never memorised multiplication tables and relies exclusively on a calculator. Presented with the same incorrect answer, there is no internal expectation to violate, no alarm bell to ring. The error may pass unnoticed, unchallenged, a kind of cognitive passivity that leaves her at the mercy of external tools.
Without internally stored knowledge, the brain’s natural error-detection mechanisms lie dormant. We become not just dependent on external tools but vulnerable to their failures, unable to distinguish sense from nonsense
This has real-life repercussions:
High school students using GPT-4 for mathematics practice outperformed their peers during lessons but collapsed on final examinations when the AI was removed. Programming students relying on ChatGPT experienced lower self-efficacy and poorer learning outcomes compared to their conventionally taught counterparts.
Among the implications, Carl emphasises the importance of building some base cognitive infrastructure:
Build Procedural Fluency: Certain basics like multiplication tables, vocabulary, scientific formulas etc should be practiced to automaticity. This isn’t mindless drilling; it’s creating the cognitive infrastructure that enables later complex thinking and creativity.
Use AI as Amplifier, Not Replacement: When students have solid internal knowledge, AI becomes a powerful thinking partner. Without that foundation, it becomes a cognitive crutch that prevents real learning.
🎧 1 long-form listen of the week
Last week, I’d shared a ‘manifesto’ by Lulu Cheng Meservey (a global expert on Public Relations) on how it is important for founders to go direct.
This week, I’m sharing the source conversation between Lulu and David Perell where they discuss how leaders and founders should communicate with the general public.
Lulu lays out what “go direct” means:
David: Go Direct. What does that mean and why is it important?
Lulu: I’ll tell you what it does not mean. It does not mean do every single thing yourself in perpetuity. The same way that being a technical founder doesn’t mean write every line of code forever or being a product-focused founder means doing every single aspect of product for the rest of your life. It also doesn’t mean alienating the press and boycotting media and refusing to talk to them and just like only tweeting. The crux of what it means is for the founder and the originator of the project. So usually the founder of the company (should) speak directly to the audience without middlemen, without screens, without filtering it through all this kind of PR corporate talk and actually revealing their true personality and their true motivations
Going Direct does not mean tweeting all the time. Lulu cautions us about minding the ship-to-yap ratio:
David: …a founder who’s vocal who’s visible who’s clearly putting their heart and soul on the line for the sake of the mission and the company – I love. And at the same time there’s no sure signal for me for a company than a founder who spends all day on Twitter. So how do you think of the juxtaposition between those two things?
Lulu: Yes there has to be a ship-to-yap ratio. Okay you have to look at the ship-to-yap ratio and for someone like Elon, he tweets like a 100 times an hour but no one thinks that the companies are being neglected… like the companies are shipping and the companies overall have just experienced insane growth. Palmer tweets a lot but then you see Anduril just like ship ship ship ship ship. And then there are some founders where nothing substantive seems to be coming out of the company other than words. And that’s where you get this meme of they’re shipping blogs they’re shipping tweets, but where’s the product? And meanwhile the founder is just like tweet tweet tweet. And so, if the ratio is off, it’s it’s a huge red flag.
Lulu breaks down her comms strategy into 3 parts: the Message, the Medium and the Messenger:
Lulu: Dwarkesh (Patel) has this great series with Sarah Paine, the historian and she talked about Mao’s propaganda strategy and somehow I never knew that this was the strategy that Mao had for propaganda – like literally the message, the medium, the messenger I think it was almost exactly the same
Of these three, she states that the message is the most important:
Lulu: …the message is the highest leverage thing to get right? A lot of founders and companies will spend a lot of time trying to get on a podcast or trying to get a press hit or formatting a tweet or making a video or something. But if the message isn’t good you’ve just wasted all of that effort. It’s like you have planned your route on selling encyclopedias and you don’t realize that these are not good encyclopedias or people don’t want them right? It’s like finding product market fit with a message where the message is the product
Fascinating tidbit – how leaders sometimes add filler words to give the impression of the speech being spontaneous and not rehearsed:
Lulu: … when Michelle Obama would give speeches or actually when Barack Obama would give speeches there would be this uh uh (filler words)… Like do you actually think that they are coming up with the words on the spot like no? This is a speech that they’ve rehearsed many times. They know it. There’s a teleprompter. They know exactly what the next word is going to be. But actually inserting these little filler words and vocal ticks that most people try to get rid of makes it feel like it’s more off the cuff and more natural.
Writing from own experience gives you monopoly:
David: Writing from experience … what makes that such a good thing to do in your writing?
Lulu: It gives you a monopoly over something. It makes you the number one expert in the world on something really small and specific.
The messenger’s credibility – sometimes the janitor has more credibility than the CEO (depending on the message):
Lulu: … different messages require different messengers. So if your message is here’s what we plan to do in the world and here’s our vision it’s pretty clear and obvious that the founder should be the messenger for that, because they are the only person alive who can say it in the first person and deliver and carry through. If the message is ‘this is a great place to work and you’ll have really good bosses’ then for the boss to say that is actually incredibly either counterproductive or it’s just it just doesn’t hit the same to have the boss say come work here because the boss is great. Whereas even the like lowest ranking person in that company would have more moral authority to say the boss is great than the boss. Do you ever see profiles of some big CEO and it’s like the janitor or the security guard saying this CEO always took the time of day to greet me and ask about my children? Like it’s actually so much better coming from that person than for the CEO…
Lulu comments on Steve Jobs’ ‘Stay hungry, Stay Foolish’ speech – make them remember one thing:
Lulu: … Don’t talk about 10 different things. Just talk about one thing. Like Steve Jobs, his famous commencement speech at Stanford where he says “Stay hungry Stay foolish.” How many people remember anything else from that speech? Like most people remember one thing. And if Steve Jobs can give the best speech of his life and have us remember one thing, what makes us mortals think that we can give an average speech or blog post or video and have people remember 10 things from it?
That’s all from this week’s edition.
Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
