6-year-old framework
help your users survive, and they will help you survive
I used to be impressed with big words growing up.
I thought it was a sign of intelligence, and it is.
But big words cost energy to understand, and using big words can do more harm than good.
It might make the speaker feel intelligent, but your user or target audience will not share this sentiment.
They will not understand what you are saying.
And if they do not understand, they will not care in the long run.
I have realised that genuine intelligence is being able to explain something in as few words as possible.
Simplicity.
Compression.
Elegance.
You do not need your audience to remember.
You need them to understand.
When I am working on a startup pitch or anything commercial-related, I ask myself:
Can I explain this to a 6 year old?
Can the 6 year old explain it back to me?
Can the 6 year old explain it to another 6 year old?
Can that 6 year old explain it back to me?
If the answer is no, then further simplification is required.
Keep simplifying till it can be no simpler.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” - apparently Einstein did not say this.
Why do this?
Your target audience is human.
Humans hate to feel dumb.
We also like to talk about things we understand.
Have you ever tried talking to someone about a topic you do not understand?
It is like me trying to talk about makeup — Concealer, bronzer, blush, contours?
Nope. No clue.
The conversation ends abruptly, or it may not even start.
In startup land, we often talk about flywheel effects.
It is the idea of self-reinforcing cycles generating momentum and growth.
One action leads to another.
That action leads to another.
That action leads to another.
And that action leads to the first action.
With each turn of the flywheel, the returns from the flywheel compound.
Flywheels are mostly viewed from a product perspective, such as creating feedback loops with new features or referral programs.
But I think communication flywheels are also possible.
The process works as follows:
If you communicate your ideas simply, people are more likely to understand your ideas.
When people understand something, they are more likely to talk about it. The more people talk about your idea, the more people become aware of your idea.
The more people are aware of your idea, the higher the chances they will use your product and talk about it to someone else.
Successful startups often attribute low customer acquisition costs (CAC) to word-of-mouth marketing.
In other words, they successfully built a communication flywheel.
By simplifying how you communicate, you also boost the chances of communicating what you actually want to communicate.
Imagine you are playing a game of Chinese Whispers with ten other people.
You start the round by whispering your startup idea to person one.
Person one then takes your message and communicates it to person two.
Person two whispers to Person three, and this continues all the way to the tenth person.
How confident are you that person ten will say exactly what you whispered to person one?
If person ten repeats the same message, your message is simple enough to be remembered and repeated.
If a person ten says something wildly different, this is a clear signal that your idea is too complex.
Why does this happen?
Imagine a new scenario.
You are in mid-conversation on a date.
The topic is one that you have no knowledge or interest in.
As you sit there trying to look interested,
your brain is trying to compute this new information.
It is processing the things being said and forming new neural connections.
This activity has a cost.
And it goes beyond the cost of time wasted on a mediocre date.
It is the cost of caloric expenditure.
Your brain is using energy to understand and compute all this new knowledge.
We are biological creatures and run on energy.
Our bodies evolve through adaptation.
Over thousands of years, we have optimised our allocation of caloric expenditure.
We minimise energy to compute and process new knowledge, so we hardly notice the cost of thinking.
This cost becomes noticeable at the extremes.
Consider a profession that requires a lot of thinking or computing - chess.
Research suggests that a chess player could burn up to 132 calories an hour playing chess.
Grandmasters like Mikhail Antipov could burn nearly 600 calories over a 2-hour game.
As your date talks to you, they communicate their message.
Your brain processes this message.
The message is decomposed,
understood,
and then a response is formulated.
Your brain signals your mouth to move,
and a response emerges.
All this happens so fast that you do not even notice, but it is happening.
And each step requires a certain amount of energy.
In economic theory, we often talk about barriers to entry.
It is the idea that certain obstacles make it challenging for new competitors to enter a market or industry.
Similarly, our brains have a barrier to understanding.
If the message or idea you receive is too complex,
the cost of caloric expenditure to understand the message is too high,
and our brain gives up.
Our brain would instead retain the calories for other activities that help it survive.
For this reason, your messaging needs to be simple so that a 6-year-old can understand it.
Because if a 6-year-old can understand it, it signals that the barrier to understanding is low.
If the barrier to understanding is low, your users or target audience will spend less energy computing.
Just remember, you care about your users.
You want your users to survive and thrive.
Do not take away their calories.
Make your product easy to use,
and your ideas easy to understand.
Help them survive,
and they will help you survive.
