In the past few weeks, I’ve finally had the time to dive into a couple of those big, monster projects—the type that you always talk about getting around to, but something more urgent always seems to come up. And yet here I am, with a pause in ongoing proposals (my firm is saturated with work), and, suddenly, surprisingly, I am confronted with an open schedule and several big, monster projects looming at the far end of the summer, leering at me across the expanse of empty weeks.
And this is scary.
And it’s not as though I haven’t been thinking about these big, monster projects. I’ve even had meetings about most of them, discussing their scary features a broad, sketchy way, even as I’m no closer to feeling prepared to take them on.
There’s a Lee Iacocca quote that comes to mind for me, about the difference between writing something down versus just talking about it:
In conversation you can get away with all kinds of vagueness and nonsense, often without even realizing it. But there’s something about putting your thoughts on paper that forces you to get down to specifics.
Anyone who has worked with speech-to-text transcriptions knows exactly what Iacocca means. I recall a mind-blowing academic assignment for my Intro to Linguistics class back in college, which asked us to record, transcribe, and analyze a five-minute chunk of conversation. Understanding that any old conversation would do, I flicked on my voice recorder in my suite’s common space on Saturday night, while three friends and I were hanging out. Here’s me:
You know what I thought would be cool, though? The…the online [student newspaper] is so like…like limited in its…its capacity, but I thought it would be cool to just like…write articles and just post them. I mean have someone like copyedit them obviously because it would be associated with the [student newspaper] but if I just like wrote the article and then po—and then had it edited and then posted it…like about I don’t even know…
Ah, gotta love the like about I don’t even know. And this isn’t even an egregious example! There are worse in the transcript, but the above sample highlights exactly what Iacocca means about “vagueness and nonsense.” This snippet doesn’t really “sing” with clear thinking; instead, it’s muddy and awkward and hard to grasp.
So, getting to back to those big, monster projects that I’m facing down—I’m tempted to just “talk things through” with colleagues. Sounds easy to have a couple of brainstorms and then just dive into the work?
But, faced with the (relative) monumentality of tackling something like planning for the firm’s 40th anniversary celebration, Iacocca’s quote occurs to me and I feel compelled instead to put thoughts on paper. In other words, write a memo—a word that somehow manages to look out-dated. When words are on paper, it’s difficult to face them if they’re vague and nonsensical!
Taylor Coe 