Compress to Impress

Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton as compared to Donald Trump as Presidential candidates, I'd venture that more people can recite Trump's mantra—Make America Great Again—than Clinton's. I don't know if she had a slogan, or if she did I don't remember what it was. Her most memorable turn of phrase from the campaign trail was probably "then

Rhetoric can get a bad name because some lump it in with other language tricks like those used in clickbait titles. "You won't believe what happened next" or "This will restore your faith in humanity" or "ten signs you're a Samantha." Those aren't ways for making something stick, those are ways for making someone click.

Go back even further, and there are dozens of examples of Bezos codifying key ideas for maximum recall. For example, every year I was at Amazon had a theme (reminiscent of how David Foster Wallace imagined in  Infinite Jest  that in the future corporate sponsors could  buy the rights to name years ). These themes were conc

What Jeff understood was the power of rhetoric. Time spent coming up with the right words to package a key concept in a memorable way was time well spent. People fret about what others say about them when they're not in the room, but Jeff was solving the issue of getting people to say what he'd say when he wasn't in the room.

I never chatted with Bezos about this, so I don't know if it was an explicit strategy on his part, but one of his great strengths as a communicator was the ability to encode the most important strategies for Amazon in very concise and memorable forms.

Take one example "Day 1." I don't know when he first said this to the company, but it was repeated