What is Dale Maxfield Talking About?

I’ve come to know my strengths and weaknesses pretty well over the years.  I’ve heard from several people reading my last few blog posts that can’t quite wrap their heads around what I’m talking about.  I’m here to tell them it’s not their fault, it’s mine.

Remember those math tests that started around middle school where you had to “show your work” in addition to providing the solution?  That’s how it feels for me a lot of the time.  I do research, I think about things and I arrive at a solution.  In my eagerness to share my discovery or perspective on a topic I frequently gloss over how I came to that conclusion.

So now I have a new problem to solve – how to get my message across to people that may benefit from it without:

• Completely losing them by glossing over the steps I took to get to what I’m saying
• Bore them to tears with way more detail than they want or need

I wrote the 1000 True Fans posts as a series rather than one long manifesto.  It was a deliberate attempt to provide a complex solution to a complex problem in manageable pieces.  For myself and my brother John, who has been along for the ride as I’ve come up with a lot of this over the last year, seeing it in print is liberating and helpful.  It makes tangible something we’ve been thinking and talking about for a long time.  Taken as such, maybe the right audience for those posts all along was me, myself.

Now that I’ve gotten it down, I can work on how to present it.  Maybe I need to make a video.  Maybe it would be better as a live presentation.  I don’t know yet.

But I do want you to know that if you’re scratching your head about these blog posts I personally don’t believe it’s that I’m talking over your head or beyond your expertise.  I think it’s my job to figure out the balance between writing something too long to ask people to read and too short to properly explain what I’m talking about.

Do you have any advice for me on this?  Feel free to hit me up on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.  Thanks for reading!