I deeply appreciate jazz today because of Joni Mitchell.
I fell in love with bluegrass when I discovered Dolly Parton’s trio of bluegrass albums.
And Jimmy Page, whose guitar work drew on classical structure (and blues and folk), introduced me to classical music through the back door of some of Led Zeppelin’s most legendary riffs.
Three artists from very different musical worlds taught a pop-rock teen in the California suburbs about new forms of music.
And I absorbed it all like a sponge.
What This Means For Your Work
Many of the experts I work with bring me a body of work structured like jazz or classical music, not necessarily harder than pop, but asking something different of the listener.
Instead of repeating, themes grow and change. The harmony can surprise you if you grew up only listening to simple songs. The music might wander, but it still makes sense because the musician knows where it’s going.
Much expert work is built the same way: densely argued, internally referenced, and often quite beautiful if you already have the ear for it.
The problem is that their audience often prefers pop, rock, or country. Long, dense paragraphs full of jargon can feel like a foreign language to most readers, one they didn’t sign up to learn.
The question isn’t whether your work should stay sophisticated.
It’s whether the first thing a new reader encounters sounds like the music they already know how to hear.
How Joni Reached Me
Let’s explore how Joni Mitchell turned a 70s pop-rock kid into a lifelong jazz lover.
Rewind: I grew up on Southern California long-play FM radio: Chicago, Dylan, Eagles, Ronstadt, and Joni. Back then, most people thought of Joni as a folk artist. This made what happened next all the more disorienting.
I’d spent the previous year memorizing Joni’s album Court and Spark. I remember the day I brought home her latest, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It seemed a fitting title for my life at the time; after all, I was earning the cash to fuel my album habit by mowing the neighbor’s lawns.
I set the LP on my bedroom turntable, lay on the floor with the liner notes in hand, and cranked up the volume.
The first song could have been found on any of her previous LPs, an infectious blend of folk-pop.
Then the second song started, and the familiar rules of pop music faded, replaced by bold jazz experimentation. The third track returned to a familiar jazz-tinged melody. The album switched back and forth between pop and jazz.
I won’t lie, the album didn’t grab me right away. At first, I didn’t understand it. I lifted that needle more than once to find the more familiar tracks. But after a while, a kid gets weary of having to lift himself off the floor to change a track.
So, I’d listen. I let go and let her new music wash over me.
Those liner notes I’d been holding became my map. I’d read which artist played that standout solo I’d keep replaying, and on what instrument. On my next trip to the record store, I’d look up those names and ask the man behind the counter to play Miles Davis or Jaco Pastorius for me.
And that’s how Joni Mitchell taught me about jazz. She made me work to understand and love her albums, and that work opened a door I’ve never closed. Today, along with Blue and Hejira, The Hissing of Summer Lawns remains one of my favorite Joni records.
Joni Was Practicing The Doorway Principle
Here’s what I had as a kid that your readers probably won’t: nowhere to be and nothing but time. I’d lie on that floor until the album ended — not always because I loved it, but because getting up felt like more work than listening.
Your readers won’t do that. They get one unfamiliar bar, one paragraph of jargon they don’t recognize, and they’re gone.
You don’t get a second chance to make the music make sense.
The Doorway Principle is simple: before you invite someone into your world, give them something familiar to walk through first.
Looking back, if Joni Mitchell had released only experimental jazz from the beginning, I probably never would have heard of her, or her roster of guest jazz artists. But I listened as she slowly moved from folk to pop to jazz. Song by song, album by album, she built a musical pathway that helped shape my own tastes.
If you have big ideas and complex, deeply interesting concepts you want to share, you face the same choice: begin with jazz and attract those who already understand your “music,” or back up a bit, find common threads your reader can actually hold onto, and use those as a doorway into your world.
Translation is Not Talking Down
I’m not saying it’s easy, especially if you’re too close to your own body of work. But making your work accessible doesn’t weaken it. It lets more people experience it.
Translation is not shrinking or dumbing down. It is writing something a beginner to your approach can finish and act on.
I know that can make some people uneasy. When they hear “write for beginners,” they worry it means talking down to readers or sanding off what makes their work special. Here’s the difference: talking down assumes the reader is less capable. Translation assumes they’re smart in many other domains — they just haven’t entered yours yet.
Like Joni, you don’t have to stop making jazz. But also like Joni, don’t hand a first-time listener an album with only the most difficult tracks. Give them a doorway. They’ll find their way in.
How to Translate Your Big Ideas
Over-complication is a pattern I see across almost every expert I work with, from doctorate candidates to chiropractors to spiritual teachers.
Your language is probably losing people in one of three ways before they even get started: Campus, Craft, or Circle Language.
Campus Language – academic speak, written for other academics. Latin to people who never enrolled.
Craft Language – the words your training and methodology handed you, a tool or framework only you’ve internalized, and a body of work that refers to itself. Beautiful if you already have the ear for it.
Circle Language – insider, coaching, or new-age dialect the person you most want to reach does not yet speak.
You don’t have to abandon that language. I’m just asking you to consider that the reader may not understand you in every public piece.
Here are some suggestions for translating each of the three.
Campus: Leave the Review Committee Behind
A physician I worked with had spent decades building a research record any peer would respect. Publications, citations, a full academic CV. He wanted to reach a lay audience, but he struggled.
After several rounds of drafts, I finally asked him a simple question: Who are you writing to?
The answer surprised him as much as it did me. He was still writing to other experts, just trying, as he put it, to use simpler language. And it wasn’t working, because the problem wasn’t the words he was choosing. It was the person he was picturing.
I suggested he try something different. I told him to imagine one of his patients, someone willing to do whatever it takes to get better, but drowning in too much information and unsure who to trust.
Each draft after that improved, and he began writing every article for that patient. The campus language didn’t disappear—it just stopped showing up where it didn’t belong. What he posted online was something a patient might actually read all the way through, then send to a friend.
Before and After: The Same Idea, Two Different Readers
Here’s a typical Campus-speak sentence I might see:
“This article operationalizes a mixed-methods framework for narrative identity reconstruction in midlife knowledge workers.”
Ummm, I’m sure someone understands that sentence. Rewriting it in warmer prose doesn’t make it a beginner piece. It makes it a campus piece, written so a curious outsider can follow along.
Something more like this:
“I studied men and women in midlife professional jobs who had to rebuild a sense of self after the old story – the job, the role, the ladder – stopped fitting.”
This is language a smart outsider can repeat over dinner. Nothing true was removed. The message can now reach more of the right people.
Craft: Become Aware of the Internal Shorthand You’ve Picked Up
A chiropractor in a small town was competing with eighteen other chiropractors. She specialized in a licensed instrument that let her treat people who couldn’t tolerate a manual adjustment – sensitive patients who had been hurt by a chiropractor and never gone back.
Only a few colleagues and some patients recognized the instrument’s name. For everyone else, it meant nothing. Still, she was using that name everywhere: on her website, in ads, even in the phone book, as if the tool itself would attract the right people.
Of course, people weren’t searching for the tool’s name. They were searching for a way out of pain that wouldn’t hurt them again.
Redesigning for the Reader Who Doesn’t Know the Craft
Here’s how we redesigned her public-facing content. One page on her site named the instrument for those who already spoke that language and knew what to search for.
Everything a new patient might actually read- the local landing pages, the about page, the short article a daughter might send her father- had to work as if the reader had never heard of the tool and didn’t care what it was called.
The first few sentences written for people new to her specialized craft sounded something like this:
Have you stopped going to the chiropractor because they hurt you that one time? I can help. Gentle adjustments without the sudden jerky movements or the crack and pop of traditional chiropractic.
In the rest of the copy, she still mentions “a gentle tool,” which is her version of jazz. It’s accessible because she doesn’t name it. She just says she uses a different kind of adjustment for sensitive patients.
The tool stayed. It just stopped being the welcome mat.
Within several months, she was seeing patients from towns three hours away. Adult children brought their parents, people who hadn’t visited a chiropractor in years because they were afraid of getting hurt. She eventually hired two more doctors.
Circle: Translate or Stay Invisible
Anna is a trauma therapist who came to me baffled. She was attracting clients, but not the right ones, and she couldn’t figure out why.
A quick look at her bio and her social feed made the problem clear. She was using the dialect of her training, her community, and her practice. What really struck me was that every client she attracted thought she meant something completely different. The same words were landing ten different ways.
A sentence from her offer sounded like this:
A twelve-week container to activate your highest timeline and decondition scarcity at the identity level.
If you already lived in her world, that might make sense. But the person Anna wanted to reach- capable, tired, a little lost, still speaking everyday English- read that sentence and saw either a puzzle to solve or a red flag.
When she led with it on a sales page or in a post, she asked strangers to decode it before they could even decide if they were interested.
Dropping the Dialect, Keeping the Work
So we stopped translating her world and started speaking to the one her readers actually lived in.
You’ve read the books, taken the courses, done the therapy. Still something’s off. You know more than most people about why you feel the way you do. That hasn’t made it easier. Twelve weeks to close the gap between what you know and how you actually live.
Once she made that shift, something changed. Clients came to her because they understood what she actually did. Not what they thought she did, not their version of the terminology – her real work. The mismatched clients thinned out. Because she was no longer hiding behind the language of her inner circle, those who stayed were drawn to her, not what they projected upon her.
The metaphysics didn’t go anywhere. Circle language has its place in the content people read once they’ve stepped through the door. It just can’t be the door itself.
The Rule All Three Share
Decide who the writing is for before you decide how much of your craft, circle, or campus language it can bear.
If it’s for people already in your world – peers, patients who asked for the instrument by name, readers who have followed you for years – let your inner jazz player dominate.
If it’s for the 80% of your content created for someone encountering your work for the first time on the bus, in a waiting room, or scrolling at midnight, you are not abandoning jazz.
You are making something a first-time listener can stay with long enough to want to discover the rest of your work.
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