As I heard the story, Ernest Hemingway (1889-1961) was in a bar and got into a loud argument (no news there) that he couldn’t compose a story with only six words. He won with these and, over the subsequent years, claimed it was the best story he ever wrote.

The Hemingway story is an extreme example of one of my favorite types of writing — “flash fiction.” Flash, also known as micro, sudden, short-short, postcard, minute, quick, furious, and skinny, is a type of story that has a limited number of words… definitely under 1,000, but in many cases, under 500.

In one of their books, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath explain how certain words and phrases have much greater impact than do others. The key is (a) the words selected, (b) how they are presented in combination, and (c) the appeal (especially the emotional appeal) of the situation they evoke.

The Hemingway story has inspired me to attempt to capture in only six words what I think about various business subjects. For example,

DIPLOMACY: Letting others have it your way.

LEADERSHIP: Attracting others to achieve shared dreams.

MANAGEMENT: Efficiently coordinating resource consumption with results.

MARKETING: Creating or increasing demand for whatever.

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: Do it. Own it. Improve it.

None has much “stickiness” but that isn’t the point: Working with the word count limitation requires a mental discipline that I (at least) need to summon more often.

Give the exercise a try. Draw up a list of whatever subjects interest you and try to capture what you think about each with only six words.