Appearing in the Media Comes With Its Own Rules

I recently made my print debut in “Nikkei Business” and “Nikkei Computer.” Hooray.

It’s an article reporting on a conference I spoke at last year, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone involved for having me back again this year to talk about “AI,” which will surely remain a hot topic.

Now, enough with the preamble. Let me properly spill the details behind the scenes.

The invitation to speak at the conference was originally addressed to Switch Science, a subsidiary of the company where I serve as a director. I have no idea what kind of exchanges happened at the PR level, but the mission that eventually landed on me was “you go speak.” So I needed to make sure I properly represented “Switch Science” when I took the stage.

So I was just being myself. I didn’t jump for joy, but this is different from paying for an ad placement, so I’ll fairly and lightly say “hooray” for the value of appearing in influential publications like Nikkei Business and Nikkei Computer, taking that value as it is.

Now, speaking of media, I’ve given talks at universities several times before, and at those events I often get a particular request, usually at the very end during the Q&A:

“Mr. Kuzuryu, could you leave a final word for the younger generation?”

Naturally, being an adult, I say something in line with the theme of the event and the intentions of whoever invited me. (Seriously, I’m not lying, haha.)

But when I’m given some freedom, this is what I throw in:

“Stay off the media as much as possible.”

I think this line carries even more weight coming from someone appearing in the media, so let me put it out there here.

I’ll say what everyone already knows: the time given to any individual is finite. So whether it’s appearing in the media or anything else, whether it’s writing a single email or attending a single meeting, you need a clear purpose.

But the legitimate purposes for appearing in the media, or putting something out through it, are actually quite limited. In my view, there are only two:

– Promoting the launch of a new product or service – Branding yourself or your company

A common mistake people make is:

– Stating their own opinions

Unfortunately, this isn’t a very skillful way of dealing with the media.

That’s because it overlooks the utterly obvious fact that they want to say what they want to say.

I once appeared on an NHK program. I talked for about 30 minutes during the interview, but only about 30 seconds made it into the final cut. And, as anyone with experience probably knows, what got used was the part where I thought,

“Wait, did I actually say that?”

But when I watched the finished program, there was a tight, coherent story running through it, made more persuasive by combining it with other people’s comments and on-site footage. (As if there had been a script and everyone had just spoken according to it.)

This isn’t me dismissing the media, nor am I accusing the production staff of “ideological manipulation” or anything like that.

It’s simply a matter of:

Let’s each work hard while valuing each other’s benefit.

Take business, for example.

There’s someone who wants to sell something and someone who wants to buy it.

For the buyer, a certain condition is non-negotiable. For the seller, it would be convenient to sell as-is, but meeting the buyer’s request requires a bit of modification.

In a business scenario like this, what do you do?

The seller reads the buyer’s intent and negotiates to be paid a bit more in exchange for making the modification. If that deal goes through, great. If not, the buyer can look for another seller, and the seller can look for another buyer.

Coming back to the story at hand, this time there was a “pre-check” involved. Very much appreciated. I won’t go into the details here, but during the check I corrected some errors and misunderstandings, and also added a line for the purpose of branding the company. I’m genuinely grateful for that. As for the overall content, the story itself, I didn’t offer any input at all. That’s not something I should interfere with.

Both sides make good use of each other. That’s how an adult relationship gets established. Hooray.

Why do I tell young people “stay off the media”? Simply put, it’s because

you lose sight of who you are.

This is especially something to watch out for if you’ve just started a startup.

The world is good at labeling. You could also call it slapping on a tag.

That’s because labeling makes conversation vastly easier.

Properly understanding an individual as an individual, or grasping the fine details of a business or how a company is run, is very difficult. It’s much easier to understand things when you say “AI is transforming agriculture!” or “A Japanese startup is going to beat Google!” or “A brilliant young student entrepreneur on the rise!”, even though none of that actually captures the substance.

So labeling gets used to excess. And the media often plays a role in that. For better or worse.

Labeling is fine as long as you can brush it off, thinking “that has nothing to do with me, I’m just me.” But if it follows you every single day, gradually the words written on the label start to feel like your own self-introduction.

Something similar might apply to the know-how behind lightning talks. If you don’t phrase things in an easy-to-understand way, nobody bites, so you try to make everything fit into a single, clear sentence. That in itself isn’t bad, but if you keep saying it every single day, your business ends up losing any real depth.

There are a few things I learned from an old teacher back in middle school, a Japanese language teacher that nobody really listened to properly in class, though I actually liked him quite a bit, that I still remember today. Among them were the concepts of “inner speech” and “rumination.”

Human beings are, by nature, introspective creatures, or so I believe. By turning your thoughts over and over within yourself, round and round, you finally knead them into shape. Until that happens, any extraneous stimulation from outside is nothing but noise.

To strip away the noise and become purer,

“anything that adds some kind of external description of who you are”

should be met with a firm “no” as much as possible. Eventually, you’ll suffer from the gap that creates.

Well, that excludes the old hands who’ve already tasted every kind of bitter and sweet, haha.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/01/296/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.