By Amber Bradley, Editor-in-Chief, TalkLPnews
Muhammad Ali said, “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.” He talked more trash than anyone in the history of sports. He predicted the round his opponents would fall and wrote poems about his own greatness. Then he stepped in the ring and backed up every word of it. The noise was never the problem. The noise was a promise, and he kept it.
Our industry has a strange relationship with volume. Somewhere along the way we decided that quiet equals credible and loud equals lightweight. I’ve watched that assumption play out for twenty years, and I can tell you it doesn’t hold. (The female version of this is: outgoing and energetic equals unintelligent which is also a substantial misjudgment) Some of the quietest voices in this business are coasting on a reputation they built fifteen years ago. Some of the loudest are asking the hardest questions in the room and doing the unglamorous work of answering them.
Sure, an empty barrel makes the most sound. But a freight train is loud too, and you’d be foolish to stand in front of one because you decided noise means weakness. Volume tells you nothing by itself. What matters is whether there’s anything moving underneath it.
So when you’re evaluating anything in this industry, a vendor pitch, a conference, a media outlet, a leader building a personal brand, skip the volume question entirely and ask the Ali question instead. Can they back it up? Do the results actually exist? Do the people they serve keep coming back? Is the work underneath the noise real? Flash that delivers is called showmanship. Flash that doesn’t is called a warning sign, and this industry is full of investigators, so I trust you can tell the difference.
Ali understood all of this better than anyone. He knew the talking filled the seats and the training won the fights, and he did both at full volume for his entire career. That’s the standard worth holding, in the ring or in this business.
Be excellent first. Then be as loud as you want about it, because you’ll have earned every decibel.