Summary

Our brains are not wired for numbers: math is like a second language. Good translation can help.

Better Understanding

Try Focusing on 1 at a Time, Avoid Bigism

The quickest route to having people understand your number is to start with something simple, a well-understood part of the overall scene: 1 employee, citizen, or student. 1 business, marriage, or classroom. 1 deal, game, or day. Focus on 1 concrete chunk of an experience: 1 prototypical visit, 1 day, 1 month in the quarter.

LeBron James:

  • Translation 1: Throughout the first 18 years of his career in the NBA, LeBron James scored over 35,000 points.
  • Translation 2: Throughout the first 18 years of his career in the NBA, LeBron James scored an average of over 27 points per game.

Our temptation is to go for the staggering number. “Wow, that is big.” 35,000 feels huge. 27 doesn’t. At least not at first. This misconception is something we have labeled “big-ism.” We are tempted to go for something bigger when what we really need is something with a size we can understand.

In the case of LeBron James, we don’t know how many points players typically accumulate during a basketball career. But we do know 27 points in one game. It means you were on fire that night. If that’s your average night, for high school or college, well, that means you’re really good at basketball. If you maintain that through 18 years of NBA play, well, that means you’re frickin’ good at basketball. But we can only see that by looking at the typical game. That is the power of 1.

Favor User-Friendly Numbers

Perform the following experiment on yourself, then on a friend who will humor you for 90 seconds. Glance at List A for a few seconds, close your eyes, and say the numbers out loud. Repeat for List B.

List A

  • 2,842,900
  • 73 times bigger
  • 9/17

List B

  • 3 million
  • 6 times bigger
  • 1/2

Which list did you remember better? If you said “List A,” you probably forgot which was A. The second list is easier to deal with in every way: it’s easier to understand, easier to retain, and easier to repeat. And the information it conveys is functionally the same. That new office that’s 6 times bigger won’t feel any less spacious if you find it’s only 5.73 times bigger. And try telling someone who got only half as much pay for the same amount of work someone else did that they actually got 9/17ths as much. See if they feel better.

Help People Understand Through Simple, Familiar Comparisons

Observe how local health campaigns around the world translated “6 feet” to relay social distancing guidelines during the COVID pandemic. Effective translations combine easily imagined comparisons with as little math as possible:

  • 1 hockey stick — Canada
  • 1 tatami mat — Japan
  • 1 adult gator — Florida
  • 1 surfboard — San Diego
  • 1 bear — Russia
  • 2 baguettes — France
  • 4 koalas — Sydney, Australia
  • 24 buffalo wings — Buffalo, NY
  • 72 pistachios — New Mexico

Some of these are useful; others are just cute. You’ve seen a hockey stick or fishing rod before. But if you’ve ever witnessed 24 buffalo wings or 72 pistachios lined up end-to-end, someone needs more training in table manners.

So to come up with your fathom, brainstorm items of a similar size that your audience would know well. If you get stuck, use the MacGyver principle. In the 1980s television show, MacGyver used his knowledge of science to create tools that Batman or James Bond would have spent millions on. Except MacGyver built his tools out of recycled fast-food containers from lunch. The MacGyver principle is this: Look around you. See what you can build using found objects in the environment. Consider what’s universally known to your people: local references, objects used in your field, items in the news.

Convert Abstract Numbers into Concrete Objects

Try making something concrete, and people will remember it.

How much water do we have to support life?

  • Translation 1: 97.5% of water is salinated. Of the 2.5% that is fresh, 99% is in ice caps or frozen tundra. The 0.0025% remaining can be consumed.
  • Translation 2: Imagine we have a gallon jug, only 3 ice cubes are fresh, and a few drops are consumable.

Washing hands statistics:

  • Translation 1: 40% of US adults do not always wash their hands after using the bathroom at home.
  • Translation 2: 2 out of every 5 people you shake hands with haven’t washed their hands after using the restroom.

Make It Human Scale

Concreteness is good, but a lot of time big numbers are hard to comprehend, and it’s very useful to put them in human scale.

Hummingbird:

  • Translation 1: A hummingbird’s metabolism is 46 times faster than a human’s.
  • Translation 2: This means that if a hummingbird were a human, you would be drinking a Coke every minute for all your waking hours.

Frogs:

  • Translation 1: Every frog can jump very far, 3 times the size of its body.
  • Translation 2: It’s like a player jumping from the 3-point line and dunking, but from the opponent’s side of the court. (This is also an encore technique.)

Try Switching Dimensions

Skydiving:

  • Translation 1: The chance of dying from skydiving is 8 in a million.
  • Translation 2: Pick the entire series of Harry Potter of 7 books, and mark 8 words with red crosses. If you hit any one of the words in the series, then you die. Look how small the chance is!

Taxes:

  • Instead of talking millions, billions, and trillions of tax revenue and government expenses, why not switch dimensions? Talk about citizen’s work weeks, days, hours.

Better Motivate

Tap Pools of Pre-existing Emotions

Contextualize and help people to understand.

Cranberry juice:

  • Translation 1: Cranberry juice has 44 grams of sugar.
  • Translation 2: Cranberry juice is equivalent to 3 Dunkin donuts and 3 sugar cubes.

Add Up Good Stuff

Teaching:

  • Translation 1: For each class, you assign a “Do Now”, you gain an extra 5 minutes of discussion time.
  • Translation 2: Saving 5 minutes per class is equivalent to adding weeks to the school year. Think of how many cool demonstrations or interesting topics you can add with another 3 weeks to play with.

Category Jumper

California:

  • Translation 1: California has an annual GDP of some very large number of dollars.
  • Translation 2: If California were to be a country, it would be the 5th largest country in the world measured by GDP.

Make It Personal: “This Is About You”

People are willing in most circumstances to join you in a mental journey. In the unfolding story below, the fact that I am imagining myself acting adds drama and keeps attention focused on the story.

Jeff Bezos is worth $198 billion. Let’s imagine if each step of a staircase represents $100,000 in the bank. Most people, including 1 in 2 Americans and 89% of the world, can’t even step onto the first step of the staircase because they have less. After 4 steps, we’ve lost over 75% of Americans. Fewer than 1 in 10 people will ever reach the 10th step: a million dollars.

Now put on your most comfortable hiking shoes. You’d have to climb for almost 3 hours before reaching the net worth of a billionaire. After spending 9 hours a day climbing steps for 2 months, you’d have Ironman-level quads as you finally reach the wealth of Jeff Bezos.

Bring Your Number into the Room with a Demonstration

People can easily forget what they’re told. They have a better chance of remembering what they see. But something they do becomes part of their experience in a much deeper way, getting embedded in their memory and instincts.

To demonstrate how tragic it is to waste a microsecond, Grace Hopper cut a wire the length that a signal could travel in that time to show to her programmers. A microsecond goes by so fast we can’t even register it. But 984 feet of copper wire can’t escape our notice. Especially in the early days of computing, when resources were precious, this helped programmers be conscious of waste that they couldn’t notice directly.

Hopper’s 984 feet of wire is showing the number. But if she wanted to make it into an even more memorable demonstration, she could have taken it a step further and really made her programmers experience the number. For example, if she’d tied teams of two programmers together and made them race this distance in a three-legged race. Even the fittest navy midshipman (Hopper was a rear admiral as well as a programmer) would have trouble getting through 984 feet of a three-legged race in good shape. Afterward she could tell them, “The distance you raced is what an electrical signal travels in a microsecond. Don’t waste those!”

Do an Encore

Build your message so that there’s a surprise at the end, perhaps using a category jumper mentioned above.