Robert Downey Words

After Robert Downey, Jr., walked out of a TV interview during which the reporter brought up the actor's former drug abuse, Downey's defenders agreed: he had reformed, and there is no call to bring up his dissolute past.

Words, too, can reform themselves, giving us no call to dredge up their once-dark lives.

Linguists call the mysterious process whereby a pejorative sheds its negative connotation over time amelioration.

Like guests at a Hollywood party, we're surrounded by words (and phrases) that have—over history—ameliorated:

• 30 years ago, bad meant crummy, sick meant unwell, wicked meant vicious, killer meant murderer, and shut up meant be quiet. 

• 70 years ago, collaborating meant aiding the Nazis, and a geek meant a freak in a circus.

• 200 years ago, lumber meant trash.

• 800 years ago, pretty meant cunning, shrewd meant evil, and nice meant stupid.

Publish, Don't Perish

Everyone knows "less is more," says Alexandra Samuel in the Harvard Business Review; but masters of brevity can sound loutish on line.

And one ill-thought-out email can jeopardize a career.

When writing an email or social media post, Samuel suggests you:

• Use a conversational tone
• Start with your key point
• Avoid profanities, acronyms, bragging and kvetching
• Exercise caution with humor
• Be 30% nicer than you are off line
• Adapt your tone to the platform

No matter the topic, "if you write it down, you should be prepared to see it on the front page of a newspaper," Samuel says.

"That doesn’t mean you can’t email your colleagues about confidential business dealings, but be sure that you can live with whatever you’ve written—so don’t write down anything that would sound small-minded or unethical (particularly if taken out of context). And when you’re posting on social networks, which are out in the open, assume that anyone can see anything—including your boss, your mother, your clients, and your kids."

Watch Those Weasel Words

Weasel words—defaults for bureaucrats and politicians—are qualifiers that nervous speakers and writers bank on for cover.

Avoid them, because the more you water down thoughts with weasel words, the less clear and certain your speech and writing become.

For example, instead of saying, IT possibly seems to have suggested that Aptly may no longer be supported after December 31, say IT may no longer support Aptly after December 31.

At the same time, avoid absolutes like always, never, will not, cannot and nothing is worse than.

Avoid statements like, Nothing is worse than displaying your password. Really? What about your company's recent job-cuts, the drought in California, or Syria's civil war?

The King of Clockwork

I envy the grimacing joggers I pass on my way to work every weekday morning for their samurai discipline and inveterate svelteness (a quality I lack).

Leadership and personal productivity experts goad us to rise above mediocrity by forming useful habits.

Surpassing champs like Kant, Edison and Einstein, the king of the clockwork habit could well be Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope.

He wrote with such regularity, that he produced 47 novels—plus 32 plays, short stories and nonfiction books—in his spare time.

Stephen King (with 60 novels and 200 short stories, no slouch either) describes Trollope's habit in his memoir, On Writing: 

"His day job was as a clerk in the British Postal Department (the red public mailboxes all over Britain were Anthony Trollope's invention); he wrote for two an a half hours each morning before leaving for work. This schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happened to finish one of his six-hundred-pound heavyweights with fifteen minutes of the session remaining, he wrote The End, set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book."

Your Event is Either an Experience or a Waste of Time

While they puzzle over details, many event organizers never grasp the key to a satisfactory event.

It has to deliver an experience.

In the same way a restaurant is not about food, an event's not about tables, chairs, booths, badges, busses, signs or even speakers.

An event is about an experience.

Restaurateur Danny Meyer says the restaurant's job isn't to serve food.

It's to create an experience of wellbeing: to instill in each patron the sense that "when we were delivering that product, we were on your side."

Delivering an experience justifies the patron's expenditure—not of money, but of time—Meyer says. "When they leave, are they going to say, 'That was a good use of my time?'"

"The most precious resource we all have is time," Steve Jobs once told a reporter.

Are you delivering an experience, or wasting your attendees' time?