What to do when making an impact hinges on our ability to make large numbers tangible …
Some things are easier said than done. But I’m here to help. Ask me anything about the art of communicating and I will answer it in one of the upcoming episodes. Head over to https://michaelgerharz.com/qa
Transcript
Each year, more than 8 million children die due to poverty.
Speaker:That's a huge number.
Speaker:But how large is it, really?
Speaker:The human mind has no easy way to see that number.
Speaker:For our brain, it doesn't make much difference whether it's 8
Speaker:million or, let's say, 80,000.
Speaker:Both is basically a lot.
Speaker:Things change when we translate the numbers into dimensions we can
Speaker:relate to from our everyday life.
Speaker:8 million per year means that every four seconds a child dies due to poverty.
Speaker:Basically, during the time it takes you to listen to this sentence,
Speaker:a child has died due to poverty.
Speaker:Four seconds is an easy to grasp value.
Speaker:Four seconds is easy to experience.
Speaker:It has a clear meaning in our everyday life and therefore it
Speaker:makes the abstract specific.
Speaker:It's still the same information, but it's much more tangible.
Speaker:Even more so when you amplify it and support it with,
Speaker:say a finger snap, like so.
Speaker:Every time I snap, a child dies due to poverty.
Speaker:It's hard to see 8 million children.
Speaker:But it's easy to imagine one, which is precisely what most of us
Speaker:do when we hear that finger snap.
Speaker:With each finger snap we see a child.
Speaker:Translating difficult numbers into values that make sense in our everyday life also
Speaker:makes it a lot easier for our audiences to understand what the numbers mean.
Speaker:It makes it a lot easier to relate to the info we're trying to convey.
Speaker:And that allows us to make a bigger impact with what we have to say.