Credible
April 24th, 2009 | Published in Process
This is post 5 in the series I started on Monday.
The chapter “Credible” in “Made to Stick” addresses what could be a big problem for me. Why should anybody believe what I have to say?
I’m not an authority. I don’t have a PH.D. in Economics. I don’t work for a well known think tank. I have no track record to support my claims. Fortunately, there is an alternative to this type of external credibility. The story I tell needs to have internal credibility.
I need to make my message credible by writing clearly enough that the reader can easily see that the ideas make sense. While economics can be complicated, it is ultimately about people and the things they make and use. All readers have intimate knowledge of most of what I am talking about. I need to strive to be persuasive enough that intuition convinces people my ideas are credible. If people can visualize how my system works, they might believe in it.
To get published, I may have to resort to getting quotes from established experts. Of course, the only way I am going to get the quotes is if the material has internal credibility.
