Why edited is always better
The best movies, blog posts, collections of holiday snaps, kitten videos, feature articles and so on are all edited. Editing is what sets “good” apart from “rubbish”.
The ability to edit; to focus and clarify ones output is what sets a communicator apart from those who merely shout.
Regardless of what you think of Signal Vvs. Noise (I have voiced my own concerns in the past), there is no debating that Jason Fried is a master editor when it comes to both his products and his writing. The latter are always clear and concise.
The same goes for posts from Ryan Carson. Or the work of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (he of “Delicatessen” and “Amélie” fame), San Francisco chef Gary Danko, cartoonist Martin Kellerman, former KTVU news anchor Dennis Richmond and author Ian Rankin. They are all great editors, and thus communicators.
The one thing they all have in common is the ability to cut out the unnecessary, focus on what they want to achieve and staying true to that goal until it has been reached.
Cut down on the number of photos you keep on hard drives and on Flickr, clean up your presentations, delete a few social networking accounts, review that unpublished blog post, take a second look at that biz plan or site mock-up. Clarify. Edit. Bliss.
