Can Boring be Good for You?
It can be according to CNBC.com Managing Editor Allen Wastler! In his article “Read What’s Boring… It’s Good For You” Wastler makes this comment: “People generally don’t read boring stuff, even though they should.”
The article is about boring emails and legal disclaimers that would better educate and advise people if they read them (but they don’t.) People simply don’t read these things completely because disclaimers seem to be a standard case of jumbled jargon intended to cover someone’s ass and prevent them from being sued, and email warnings blend into the billion other email meesages we receive, all of which purport to be just as import to our well being as the one Wastler mentions in his aticle.
The entire time I’m reading the article, the solution is apparent and my inner voice is screaming it at the top if its inner lung — stop making the information boring!
Finally, at the end of the article (good thing it wasn’t so boring that I stopped reading it!) Wastler says “Maybe if we spruced disclaimers up, more people would read them…” and my inner voice says, “By Jove, I think he’s got it!” (apparently my inner voice speaks a lot like Henry Higgins), but, alas, so close to the epiphany and then he shrinks away — “And if we spruced up tech emails, people would read those too? Okay, I’m dreaming.”
So close… so close…
If you want to check out a pretty cool disclaimer, look at the bottom of any product created by sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer. His fineprint (perhaps we should rename it “funprint”) states: “Don’t even think about reproducing this document without written permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer, Inc.”
Since I am an official “Gitomer Groupie” I stole (ahem, paid homage to) Gitomer’s ‘funprint’ by adding some to the Boring Meetings Suck website — just scroll to the bottom of the page to see what I mean…
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