So lately I’m writ­ing a fundrais­ing pro­posal; a man­i­festo; a series of blog posts; a press release. All at once. One thing.

Spend­ing a lot of time writ­ing, rework­ing, simplifying—because the fund­ing audi­ence for this pro­posal is very broad (you may well be in it), but more impor­tant because my under­ly­ing vision is maybe like five steps removed from any­thing anybody’s done before. I’ve pitched the thing to about a dozen trusted lis­ten­ers, and while there’s been loads of enthu­si­asm and only lim­ited mutual con­fu­sion in the end, on aver­age every con­ver­sa­tion con­tains about five missed insights, of the form:

I: See, the whole point of this is X.

They: OK. I think I get it. Sure. But it sounds like you’re just describ­ing a Y.

I: Ummm, no. Y is fine, and great, but this is X. Y’s have a, b, and c. We specif­i­cally avoid a and b, and give c away for free. See?

They: Ohhhh! OK! Cool!

[repeat 4 times, replac­ing X, Y, a, b, c]

So that’s a chal­lenge. You may be able con­vince some­body to give you a patent or fund your busi­ness or fund your grant pro­posal on the virtue of one X/​Y disconnect—that’s your improve­ment, your com­pet­i­tive edge in entre­pre­neur­ial ven­tures, your key insight in the life of the mind. If you’re look­ing for a cul­tural trans­for­ma­tion that entails some deeply-​​held social and cul­tural norms (aka “want to change the world”) and there are five or more of these lit­tle star­tling jumps… you haven’t got the right metaphor yet.

Don’t worry, I won’t be vague any­more beyond the end of the month, and maybe the end of the week. I’m down to two X/​Y pairs now, and I spent a long philo­soph­i­cal time last night stamp­ing that out.

In the life-​​cycle of a big project, whether it’s a book or a busi­ness, a grant or a pro­gram, there comes a tran­si­tion between its exis­tence as cagey vapor­ware and its crys­tal­liza­tion into an autonomous named entity. A kind of project indi­vid­u­a­tion.

My friend Ron is writ­ing a book, and he’s also at this embry­onic stage where he’s loathe to show it around. Not so much because it fails to match his vision, but I sus­pect because the story isn’t clear, yet. He knows his story, as I do mine; what’s wanted is the trans­for­ma­tion into some­thing com­mu­nica­tive, with rel­e­vance to the right sub­set of listeners.

A pitch’s rel­e­vance depends not merely on the words on the page. You don’t inspire the reader to under­stand the rel­e­vance of a thing merely by describ­ing it in a man­i­festo, or an essay, or even a paean. The chal­lenge of con­vey­ing rel­e­vance includes con­not­ing all the cor­rect sub­texts — the suite of cul­tural ideas you want to bring to the fore and the avoid­ance of the impli­ca­tions you want to down­play. For­mat, pre­sen­ta­tion, logo, fonts, phras­ing, length of sen­tences, rhetor­i­cal style, pro­fes­sion­al­ism in the writ­ten or spo­ken word, graph­i­cal style: to every lis­tener or reader these define you as a mem­ber of some stereo­typed group. Not just the first impres­sion, but every impres­sion con­veys meaning.

Some­times even those con­fus­ing dis­con­nects, those X/​Y mis­matches, can be used effec­tively in con­vey­ing meaning.

One’s goal is not to drop the idea on the table in front of the audi­ence. One’s goal is, or should be, to cre­ate in the target’s mind a state of deep under­stand­ing. The best sto­ries leave no room for “Why would any­body do that?” or “Why would you do it that way?”, and often don’t even waste time say­ing it out­right. They can make the nec­es­sary schema plain with sim­plic­ity and grace.

Pitches are not memes. There are no memes. Pitches are engi­neer­ing projects; the lis­ten­ers’ minds are the raw mate­r­ial, and the expan­sion of the author’s vision their goal.