Need to persuade? Try verbs

Nobody takes an action until they have imagined themselves doing it.

Those are wise words from Roy H. Williams — AKA The Wizard of Ads. After sponging up his wisdom for three days, I landed teeming with ideas on how to spur audiences with words and mental images.  A takeaway? Adjectives and adverbs — no matter how enticing — are for posers. Verbs are for persuaders. Verbs are the language of action.

Roy explains that humans have 100 million sensory detectors that connect us with physical reality — the world of our eyes, ears, tongue and skin… But we possess 100,000 billion synapses in our brains, which means that we are 100X better equipped to experience a world that does not exist than a world that does.

Getting a person to go somewhere in their mind is the first step to getting that person there in reality. Verbs are what connect the imagined action to the real one.