Wes Kao: belief

Transcript context

…There's also Writing Well I think by Stephen King, that's another one that people love, but there On Writing Well is the one I really loved because it's very tactical. Going back to something that you were saying earlier with rereading what you wrote, I think the blast radius of a poorly written memo is way bigger than most people think. So if you're just shooting off a message in a Slack channel with 15 other people and it's confusing and you didn't include information you should have included, there's going to be a bunch of back and forth. All 15 of these people are reading this being like, "Okay, what do I do with this?" Whereas if you had just taken another look at it, those 15 people would be off to the races. They would've read your message and then known exactly what to do next or what their part was or what you were looking for from them. So I think about that a lot too. It's not just me writing this and sending it off. It's, "Who are all the people who are going to come in contact with this message who are going to refer to it and use it? And if I just take 30 more seconds to make sure that it's clean, how much can I unblock from their work?" That's such a good point. I like that, I love that term blast radius. It's such a good point. Just like there's so much negative leverage in writing inefficiently and inconcisely. If you spend like... Inconcisely? I don't know the word is there, but if you just spend three minutes spending a little more time making it more clear just like the impact and leverage that has, that's such a good point. I looked up the books, it's so funny. Okay, so there's On Writing Well by William Zinsser. There's Stein On Writing by Sol Stein, which is what you said you were talking about. And then Stephen King has a book called On Writing. Everyone's got the same.…

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