Why a smaller ask can be easier refuse
Richard Branson was sharing a story about introducing TV screens to the back of airplane seats.
He went to his board and the banks but couldn’t get the $10 million loan he needed to retrofit his Virgin Atlantic planes.
So instead he called Boeing and asked “if I buy 15 new planes, could you include seat back video screens?”
“Of course!”, came Boeing’s reply.
Branson’s point was he couldn’t get a loan for $10 million, but he could for $2 billion....
Adding is easy. Subtraction is hard.
On how technology has changed the craft of writing, author Neil Gaiman remarked;
“Typing is not work. Choosing is work.”
Since moving from typewriters to computers, he noted, the average word count has blown out from 3-6,000 per article to 9,000 because "it’s not hard to include two ways of saying something”.
I can’t shake this insight because it says so much about how we behave. At work. At home.
When writers drafted in longhand, it was painstaking to...
