7 Words

Todays Foodie Fun Friday post is about Michael Pollan or, more specifically, his terrific book “In Defense of Food.” While I recommend you read that as well as his earlier “The Omnivore’s Dilemma“, what intrigues me beyond the important eating advice the book provides is Pollan’s ability to whittle the book down.  We talk a lot about the elevator pitch in digital and this book has the best one I’ve ever seen.  What is it?

Seven words.  Roughly 250 pages of great writing are reduced to those seven words:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That’s it.  Remember those and you’ve got the book.  While the entire thing is worth reading in order to understand what “food” is as well as how to define “too much”, the lesson for business people is in those words.

How many words would it take you to summarize your business or the ideas that drive it?  What’s your elevator pitch?  It seems to me that unless we can reduce what we’re doing to core ideas maybe we haven’t thought the business through well enough.  That applies to a project as well as the overall venture.  It’s sort of the “what’s the big idea” question I love to ask.  How can we identify and summarize the core of what we’re trying to do?  The reason we need to ask it is simple:  by holding everything we do or are thinking of doing up against it we stay on track.  We don’t get distracted.  We don’t lose focus.

Seven words and every one of the thousands of others in the book relate to those seven.  Because of that, they hold your interest right to the last page.

Have you read those books?  Have you found your seven?