It’s absolutely vital to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently to large groups of people. I’ve been lucky enough to get to refine and test my skills in communicating at scale for a few decades now, and the power of talking to communities is the one area where I’d most like to pass on what I’ve learned, because it’s this set of skills that can have the biggest effect on deciding whether good ideas and good work can have their greatest impact.

My own work crosses many disparate areas. Over the years, I’ve gotten to cycle between domains as distinct as building technology platforms and products for developers and creators, enabling activism and policy advocacy in service of humanist ideals, and more visible external-facing work such as public speaking or writing in various venues like magazines or on this site. (And then sometimes I dabble in my other hobbies and fun stuff like scholarship or research into areas like pop culture and media.)

What’s amazing is, in every single one of these wildly different areas, the exact same demands apply when trying to communicate to broad groups of people. This is true despite the broadly divergent cultural norms across all of these different disciplines. It can be a profoundly challenging, even intimidating, job to make sure a message is being communicated accurately, and in high fidelity, to everyone that you need to reach.

That vital task of communicating to a large group gets even more daunting when you inevitably realize that, even if you were to find the perfect wording or phrasing for your message, you’d still never be able to deliver your story to every single person in your target audience by yourself anyway. There will always be another person whom you’re trying to reach that you just haven’t found yet. So, is it hopeless? Is it simply impossible to effectively tell a story at scale if you don’t have massive resources?

It doesn’t have to be. We can start with one key insight about what it takes to get your most important stories out into the world. It’s a perspective that seems incredibly simple at first, but can lead to a pretty profound set of insights.

They have to be able to talk about us without us.

They have to be able to talk about us without us. What this phrase means, in its simplest form, is that you have to tell a story so clear, so concise, so memorable and evocative that people can repeat it for you even after you’ve left the room. And the people who hear it need to be able to do this the first time they hear the story. Whether it’s the idea behind a new product, the core promise of a political campaign, or the basic takeaway from a persuasive essay (guess what the point of this one is!) — not only do you have to explain your idea and make your case, you have to be teaching your listener how to do the same thing for themselves.

This is a tall order, to be sure. In pop music, the equivalent is writing a hit where people feel like they can sing along to the chorus by the time they get to the end of the song for the first time. Not everybody has it in them to write a hook that good, but if you do, that thing is going to become a classic. And when someone else has done it, you know it because it gets stuck in your head. Sometimes you end up humming it to yourself even if you didn’t want to. Your best ideas — your most vital ideas — need to rest on a messaging platform that solid.

Delivering this kind of story actually requires substance. If you’re trying to fake it, or to force a narrative out of fluff or fakery, that will very immediately become obvious. When you set out to craft a story that travels in your absence, it has to have a body if it’s going to have legs. Bullshit is slippery and smells terrible, and the first thing people want to do when you leave the room is run away from it, not carry it with them.

The mission is the message

There’s another challenge to making a story that can travel in your absence: your ego has to let that happen. If you make a story that is effective and compelling enough that others can tell it, then, well…. those other people are going to tell it. Not you. They’ll do it in their own words, and in their own voices, and make it theirs. They may use a similar story, but in their own phrasing, so it will resonate better with their people. This is a gift! They are doing you a kindness, and extending you great generosity. Respond with gratitude, and be wary of anyone who balks at not getting to be the voice or the face of a message themselves. Everyone gets a turn telling the story.

Maybe the simple fact that others will be hearing a good story for the first time will draw them to it, regardless of who the messenger is. Sometimes people get attached to the idea that they have to be the one to deliver the one true message. But a core precept of “talk about us without us” is that there’s a larger mission and goal that everyone is bought into, and this demands that everyone stay aligned to their values rather than to their own personal ambitions around who tells the story.

The truth of whomever will be most effective is the factor used to decide who will be the person to tell the story in any context. And this is a forgiving environment, because even if someone doesn’t get to be the voice one day, they’ll get another shot, since repetition and consistency are also key parts of this strategy, thanks to the disciplined approach that it brings to communication.

The joy of communications discipline

At nearly every organization where I’ve been in charge of onboarding team members in the last decade or so, one of the first messages we’ve presented to our new colleagues is, “We are disciplined communicators!” It’s a message that they hopefully get to hear as a joyous declaration, and as an assertion of our shared values. I always try to explicitly instill this value into teams I work with because, first, it’s good to communicate values explicitly, but also because this is a concept that is very seldom directly stated.

It is ironic that this statement usually goes unsaid, because nearly everyone who pays attention to culture understands the vital importance of disciplined communications. Brands that are strictly consistent in their use of things like logos, type, colors, and imagery get such wildly-outsized cultural impact in exchange for relatively modest investment that it’s mind-boggling to me that more organizations don’t insist on following suit. Similarly, institutions that develop and strictly enforce a standard tone of voice and way of communicating (even if the tone itself is playful or casual) capture an incredibly valuable opportunity at minimal additional cost relative to how much everyone’s already spending on internal and external communications.

In an era where every channel is being flooded with AI-generated slop, and when most of the slop tools are woefully incapable of being consistent about anything, simply showing up with an obviously-human, obviously-consistent story is a phenomenal way of standing out. That discipline demonstrates all the best of humanity: a shared ethos, discerning taste, joyful expression, a sense of belonging, an appealing consistency. And best of all, it represents the chance to participate for yourself — because it’s a message that you now know how to repeat for yourself.

Providing messages that individuals can pick up and run with on their own is a profoundly human-centric and empowering thing to do in a moment of rising authoritarianism. When the fascists in power are shutting down prominent voices for leveling critiques that they would like to censor, and demanding control over an increasingly broad number of channels, there’s reassurance in people being empowered to tell their own stories together. Seeing stories bubble up from the grassroots in collaboration, rather than being forced down upon people from authoritarians at the top, has an emotional resonance that only strengthens the substance of whatever story you’re telling.

How to do it

Okay, so it sounds great: Let’s tell stories that other people want to share! Now, uh… how do we do it? There are simple principles we can follow that help shape a message or story into one that is likely to be carried forward by a community on its own.

• Ground it in your values. When we began telling the story of my last company Glitch, the conventional wisdom was that we were building a developer tool, so people would describe it as an “IDE” — an “integrated development environment”, which is the normal developer jargon for the tool coders use to write their code in. We never described Glitch that way. From day one, we always said “Glitch is the friendly community where you'll build the app of your dreams” (later, “the friendly community where everybody builds the internet”). By talking about the site as a friendly community instead of an integrated development environment, it was crystal clear what expectations and norms we were setting, and what our values were. Within a few months, even our competitors were describing Glitch as a “friendly community” while they were trying to talk about how they were better than us about some feature or the other. That still feels like a huge victory — even the competition was talking about us without us! Make sure your message evokes the values you want people to share with each other, either directly or indirectly.
• Start with the principle. This is a topic I’ve covered before, but you can't win unless you know what you're fighting for. Identify concrete, specific, perhaps even measurable goals that are tied directly to the values that motivate your efforts. As noted recently, Zohran Mamdani did this masterfully when running for mayor of New York City. While the values were affordability and the dignity of ordinary New Yorkers, the clear, understandable, measurable principle could be something as simple as “free buses”. This is a goal that everyone can get in 5 seconds, and can explain to their neighbor the first time they hear it. It’s a story that travels effortlessly on its own — and that people will be able to verify very easily when it’s been delivered. That’s a perfect encapsulation of “talk about us without us”.
• Know what makes you unique. Another way of putting this is to simply make sure that you have a sense of self-awareness. But the story you tell about your work or your movement has to be specific. There can’t be platitudes or generalities or vague assertions as a core part of the message, or it will never take off. One of the most common failure states for this mistake is when people lean on slogans. Slogans can have their use in a campaign, for reminding people about the existence of a brand, or supporting broader messaging. But very often, people think a slogan is a story. The problem is that, while slogans are definitely repeatable, slogans are almost definitionally too vague and broad to offer a specific and unique narrative that will resonate. There’s no point in having people share something if it doesn’t say something. I usually articulate the challenge here like this: Only say what only you can say.
• Be evocative, not comprehensive. Many times, when people are passionate about a topic or a movement, the temptation they have in telling the story is to work in every little detail about the subject. They often think, “if I include every detail, it will persuade more people, because they’ll know that I’m an expert, or it will convince them that I’ve thought of everything!” In reality, when people are not subject matter experts on a topic, or if they’re not already intrinsically interested in that topic, hearing a bunch of extensive minutia about it will almost always leave them feeling bored, confused, intimidated, condescended-to, or some combination of all of these. Instead, pick a small subset of the most emotionally gripping parts of your story, the aspects that have the deepest human connection or greatest relevance and specificity to the broadest set of your audience, and focus on telling those parts of the story as passionately as possible. If you succeed in communicating that initial small subset of your story effectively, then you may earn the chance to tell the other more complex and nuanced details of your story.
• Your enemies are your friends. Very often, when people are creating messages about advocacy, they’re focused on competition or rivals. In the political realm, this can be literal opposing candidates, or the abstraction of another political party. In the corporate world, this can be (real or imagined) competitive products or companies. In many cases, these other organizations or products or competitors occupy so much more mental space in your mind, or your team’s mind, than they do in the mind of your potential audience. Some of your audience has never heard of them at all. And a huge part of your audience thinks of you and your biggest rival as… basically the same thing. In a business or commercial context, customers can barely keep straight the difference between you and your competition — you’re both just part of the same amorphous blob that exists as “the things that occupy that space”. Your competitor may be the only other organization in the world that’s fighting just as hard as you are to create a market for the product that you’re selling. The same is true in the political space; sometimes the biggest friction arises over the narcissism of small differences. What we can take away from these perspectives is that our stories have to focus on what distinguishes us, yes, but also on what we might have in common with those whom we might otherwise have perceived to have been aligned with the “enemy”. Those folks might not have sworn allegiance to an opposing force; they may simply have chosen another option out of convenience, and not even seen that choice as being in opposition to your story at all.
• Find joy in repetition. Done correctly, a disciplined, collaborative, evocative message can become a mantra for a community. There’s a pride and enthusiasm that can come from people becoming proficient in sharing their own version of the collective story. And that means enjoying when that refrain comes back around, or when a slight improvement in the core message is discovered, and everyone finds a way to refine the way they’re communicating about the narrative. A lot of times, people worry that their team will get bored if they’re “just telling the same story over and over all the time”. In reality, as a brilliant man once said, there’s joy in repetition.
• Don’t obsess over exact wording. This one is tricky; you might say, “but you said we have to be disciplined communicators!” And it’s true: it’s important to be disciplined. But that doesn’t mean you can’t leave room for people to put their own spin on things. Let them translate to their own languages or communities. Let them augment a general principle with a specific, personal connection. If they have their own authentic experience which will amplify a story or drive a point home, let them weave that context into the consistent narrative that’s been shared over time. As long as you’re not enabling a “telephone game” where the story starts to morph into an unrecognizable form, it’s perfectly okay to add a human touch by going slightly off script.

Share the story

Few things are more rewarding than when you find a meaningful narrative that resonates with the world. Stories have the power to change things, to make people feel empowered, to galvanize entire communities into taking action and recognizing their own power. There’s also a quiet reward in the craft and creativity of working on a story that travels, in finding notes that resonate with others, and in challenging yourself to get far enough out of your own head to get into someone else’s heart.

I still have so much to learn about being able to tell stories effectively. I still screw it up so much of the time, and I can look back on many times when I wish I had better words at hand for moments that sorely needed them. But many of the most meaningful and rewarding moments of my life have been when I’ve gotten to be in community with others, as we were not just sharing stories together, but telling a united story together. It unlocks a special kind of creativity that’s a lot bigger than what any one of us can do alone.