What matters deeply to you still has to mean something to somebody else.
You know exactly what you mean.
This thing matters to you. You’ve thought about it, lived with it, maybe spent years getting to it.
So you explain it to somebody else.
They nod.
There’s a pause.
“Come again?”
Welcome to interpretation.
In Monday’s issue of COHERENT, I wrote about defining success for yourself.
There’s a catch.
The moment your definition of success requires somebody else to participate in it, you have another job to do.
You have to help them understand why they should care.
It makes perfect sense from where you’re sitting.
Say you deliberately keep your company small because you like knowing your clients.
You call that focus. Someone else calls it failure to scale.
You leave a big corporate job to build something you actually give a shit about. Someone wonders whether you got pushed out.
You turn 30 years of experience into a book. To you, it’s the thing you’ve been working toward your entire career.
To Amazon, it’s SKU #whatever.
You don’t get to control what people make of things.
But you’d better understand what they might make of them.
That’s where interpretation enters the picture.
Interpretation doesn’t have to be fair to be real.
Maybe we’ve been giving selling the wrong job.
We tend to think selling means taking something and making it sound more impressive.
Bigger.
Faster.
More revolutionary.
More disruptive.
More whatever-we’re-calling-things-this-quarter.
I think that gets the job almost exactly backwards.
“Selling the truth” is making something understandable enough that another person can recognize its value for themselves.
That requires translation.
Because the thing you’ve been thinking about for three years has been in their head for three minutes.
They don’t know the backstory.
They haven’t lived through the decisions.
They don’t know why you rejected the obvious alternative.
They don’t know what you know.
And they certainly don’t arrive caring about it as much as you do.
That’s not their job.
You can define success for yourself.
You cannot define somebody else’s reaction to it.
If what you’re building requires customers, they get a vote.
If it requires employees, they get a vote.
If it requires investors, they definitely get a vote.
If it requires readers, listeners, partners, donors, members, patients, clients or a community, they all get a vote.
That’s a lot of voting!
But it doesn’t mean handing them the steering wheel.
It means understanding that something can be deeply personal without being exclusively about you.
Your job is not to abandon what matters to you until the market approves.
Nor is it to keep repeating yourself louder and assume everybody else is slow.
Your job is to find the bridge between why it matters to you and why it might matter to them.
That bridge is interpretation.
And sometimes the truth needs translation.
What do they already believe? What might they misunderstand? And ultimately, why should any of this matter to them?
That’s not compromising the truth. That’s selling it.
Build whatever the hell makes sense to you.
But if you want people to come with you:
Help them see what you see.
Of course, first you need to know what they’re seeing.
That’s what the Authority Sensor is for.