Single sentence

I think this one piece of advice is worth a few minutes of your time.

It might change the way you approach your work, your ideas and what you're trying to achieve.

Jonathan Harris, the artist, was working at Fabrica in Italy when he met his mentor, Andy Cameron. For three weeks he'd been gathering project ideas and was excited to share his notebook full of ideas with Andy. He talked for 15 minutes.

Andy listened, then offered one piece of advice.

When you have a new idea, ask yourself, could you explain it to an ordinary Italian man in the piazza? If he could understand it, respond to it and find it interesting, you might be onto something.

That simple observation changed how Jonathan approached his work.

He realised many of his ideas had been too clever for their own good. They were what he called "inside baseball" ideas. From then on, he made sure every project could be expressed in a single sentence.

• With his book We Feel Fine, it was: “A search engine for human emotions.”
• With the mosaic 10 x 10, it was: “Hourly snapshots of life on earth.”
• With Cowbird: “A public library of human experience.”

You can check these projects out here.

There's a bigger lesson here. It's easy to become attached to the cleverness of our ideas. To make things more complicated than they need to be. To use language that demonstrates our expertise rather than communicates our thinking.

Lots of experts do this.

Let me ask, are you trying to make something genuinely worthwhile, or are you trying to demonstrate how clever you are?

There's a difference. And it's worth thinking about. A question worth asking yourself:

If you had to explain what you're trying to achieve in one sentence, what would you say?

That's all, until next week.

Clive