You would not believe how many documents, investment pitches, etc etc are improved by looking at the artifact with the author, asking "Before we get into the line-by-line, what is this trying to say?", listening attentively, and saying "OK, now go back and write that."
I think one reason for this is that the ritual of writing, particularly writing within an organization, often becomes sharply disconnected from the purpose of communication, and so regrounding it and restarting tends to improve things.
A bonus point: for the cost of a teddy bear or less, you too can improve your writing by having someone always willing to ask you "What is this trying to say?"
Oh I have a story about teddy bears. One moment; worth a new thread.
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An observation: I intentionally try to bias in the direction of Yes for any “I have no social proof yet” projects, particularly for ones which have bootstrapped any indicia of competence.
Partly this is to give people an advance on their own future self confidence, partly I enjoy making low-investment nudges in the direction of a better world 10 years down the line (and getting notes like this some of my greatest sources of professional joy), and partly...
... the world would be better if more people sent better cold email and the systemic way to reach that outcome is to reward good cold emails.
One of the biggest questions in the world with the most grossly insufficient amount of brainsweat applied to it:
Are we experiencing unprecedented levels of institutional failure or unprecedented levels of transparency into prevailing competence levels?
I do not have a very strong opinion on this one, and think we are plausibly seeing both in different places, but it really, really matters which of those is the bigger factor.
An underappreciated (I think) data point into “It’s not just institutional failure” is how much observably works where the working is an impossible to fake proof-of-work.
In the finest tradition of blameless post-mittens I will observe only “That is a thing which once happened to an organization during a period of intense stress and we can all make our orgs robust against ever needing to make that call.”
A long time ago, in a place far far away, I worked in a call center as a CS operator and order taker. Working in a call center tends to be stressful, and the public is often abusive of the people who work there.
A 10+ year veteran told me her secret.
Call centers have flowcharts and processes for when you are allowed or required to hand off the call. She advocated for one unauthorized handoff: to a teddy bear, which she had long ago purchased and stationed in her cubicle.
"The teddy bear has no ego. The teddy bear has no memory. The teddy bear has no feelings. The teddy bear can always, always say exactly what it needs to to the customer, and then it goes back on the desk, and sleeps here overnight.
I feel professionally irked every time I get a payment request which requires me to do something borderline absurd to optimize for the person who will have to check, by hand, that all X00 recipients have paid.
This should be a computer program! We can do it! We have the technology!
In Japan the typical way this is handled is overloading one of the three fields of customer-specifiable information on a domestic bank transfer request with content to optimize for the lookup speed of the person doing reconciliation. Often they're syntactic clusterflops to do so.
People generally overestimate how many folks worldwide are working on X specifically, for basically any usefully scoped X.
It’s often on the order of hundreds to single digit thousands directly on the problem, with an order of magnitude more for each ring you go out.
This suggests many opportunities. You are able to reach a surprisingly large chunks of audiences that matter. Your individual contribution matters more than you would naively expect, particularly if you leverage it well. You will see same people over and over again in career.