Confessions of the Verbose

I have a problem.

It's not an issue that I need 12 steps to resolve (well not yet anyways.) It's not the type of difficulty that others might write a country song about (not yet) or the sort that caused me to get beat up in junior high. It's instead the variety of hindrance that causes massive delays at awkward times, the nature of which often don't need to occur at all. This kind of problem has been known to cause massive boredom that could be completely avoided or to not ever allow someone to get to the end  of a resume, cover letter, or 2 page job application that needed 17 extra pages attached.

Politicians suffer from it.

"It's Turribel" (as Charles Barkley would say)

It's almost a sickness, some type of disease, being dragged along every where I go that I am forced to deal with, medicate, mediate, and mitigate on a daily basis.

Are you ready for it?

I am… (far) less than concise.

Ok, maybe being on the "not so" side of concise doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but let's look at the facts.

• I can spend an hour crafting a sentence that really doesn't say anything useful to anybody

• Writing a blog post that is less than 300 words is nearly impossible for me
• Writing anything of relevance or usefulness to anyone, anywhere without taking 7 and a half times as long to say it as the average person, seems to be beyond the upper reaches of what I am capable of.

• If my life depended on being a successful copy writer, I would not be fortunate enough to make it to flag day (I know your brain is rapidly trying to place flag day in one of the calendar months and it's just not finding recognition.)

This nearly terminal condition was diagnosed by my friend Mark Seiverkropp the other day. He writes a blog called "Hard and Simple Things" which, for me, being concise fits perfectly into this category (extremely simple by definition, but very difficult.)

This is so important in the world that I work in because recruiters and hiring managers often spend less than 10 seconds looking at resumes and those that are less than concise. If you can use fewer words to say the same thing, you will often win out.

So in the spirit of brevity and twitter, I will simply provide a quote from Baltasar Gracian who said it best;

"Good things, when short, are twice as good"

Where have you found this quote to be true?