In his most recent appearance on “Late Night With Stephen Colbert“, Lin-Manuel Miranda talked about his long-running series of “Gmorning/Gnight” tweets, and Colbert asked him which ones get the biggest Twitter response. His answer:
“The ones that get the biggest response are the ones are the ones I am writing to myself that morning. Because … often what I’ll do is write, ‘what do I need to hear right now?’ and then I’ll just switch the pronouns. And those are the ones that invariably resonate the most with people. The more personal I go, the more someone else responds to it.”
I think it’s important to note that Miranda is differentiating between two types of personal. He doesn’t often go intimately personal: pictures of his kids are off-limits, and he’s not talking about a “what I ate for breakfast” kind of personal.
How he goes personal is by making it emotionally personal. He is addressing his own personal emotional needs, and reaching people with that emotional candor. You don’t need to overshare to have that candor, and you don’t need to be emotionally candid to overshare. They are two different things.
Share the things you need to hear and you’ll find yourself reaching more people in an authentic way. It applies to writing, tweeting, composing, even conducting.
(Incidentally, these different types of openness come up in Brené Brown’s new book, Dare to Lead. I’m taking the advice I gave myself yesterday and checking out of screens for the weekend, so I can dig in to it!)