Radical Change Needs A Shared Language

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

One of the toughest things about change is simply to have your idea understood. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. People need a reason to believe in change, but they never need much convincing to allow things to go along as they always have. Inaction is the easiest thing in the world.

This can be incredibly frustrating. It doesn’t matter if you’re a political revolutionary, a social visionary or an entrepreneur, if you have an idea you think can impact the world, you want people to be as excited about it as you are. So you try to describe it in vivid language that highlights how wonderfully different it really is.

The pitfall that many would-be revolutionaries fall into is they fail to communicate in terms that others are able to accept and internalize. Make no mistake. Nobody needs to understand your idea. If you think your idea is important and want it to spread, then you need to meet people where they are, not where you’d like them to be. That’s how you make change real.

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