Did you know that saying, that we only use 10% of our brains is an urban legend? The Heath brothers point out why some urban legends have stuck around for so many years in their not so new book.

What books are you reading? Any good ones you’d recommend? Something that has inspired you or something that has taught you a few new tricks? For me I’m going to try and make sure I hit two new books a month, one on ideas / theories and the other on process / how to. So the two I’d recommend as January winds down are: “Made to Stick” by the Heath brothers and “Making Movies” by Sidney Lumet.

In the Heath bothers “Made to Stick” (one works at Stanford Business School the other a former researcher at Harvard Business School) one point they expand on that I feel like us creatives are always trying to do is get to the core of a message and make it simple…

For thousands of years, people have exchanged sound bites called proverbs. Proverbs are simple yet profound. Cervantes defined proverbs as “short sentences drawn from long experience.” Take the English-language proverb” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” What’s the core? The core is a warning against giving up a sure thing for something speculative. The proverb is short and simple, yet it packs a big nugget of wisdom that is useful in many situations.

As it turns out, this is not just an English-language proverb. In Sweden, the saying is “Rather one bird in the hand than ten in the woods”. In Spain: A bird in the hand is better than a hundred flying birds.” In Poland: “A sparrow in your hand is better than a pigeon on the roof.” In Russia: “Better a titmouse in the hand than a crane in the sky.”

The “bird in hand” proverb, then, is an astoundingly sticky idea. It dates back to 570 B.C. it has survived fro more than 2, 500 years. It has spread across continents, cultures, and languages. Keep in mind that nobody funded a “bird in hand” advertising campaign. We are right to be skeptical of sound bites, because lots of sound bites are empty or misleading, they are compact without being core. But the simple we’re chasing isn’t a sound bite, it’s a proverb: compact and core.

Sidney Lumet has had a pretty good career… his films have received more than fifty Academy Award nominations and in 1993 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club. Here is a passage from his book I found interesting that I thought could be applied and helpful to someone making any type of content…To me, there are two main element to editing: Creating tempo and Juxtapositioning images.

Sometimes an image is so meaningful or beautiful that is can capture or illuminate our original question: What is this movie about? In Murder on the Orient Express, the shot of the train leaving Istanbul had that quality. It had all the mystery, glamour, nostalgia, action and tempo I wanted the entire movie to have.

Obviously in movies, every shot is preceded or followed by another shot. That’s why the juxtaposition of shots is such a great tool. In the agonizing, soul-baring fights in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the shots kept getting wider and wider as father and son found themselves telling each other the cruel, ugly truths about each other. At the culmination of the fight, two extreme close-ups ended the scene; the frames were so tight that the foreheads and chins were lost.

If you found those thoughts interesting I think you’d like those books.

All the best.

- Kohl Norville