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Jason Shah: recommendation

18 Sept 2022 Lenny's Podcast Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)

“Cut, cut, cut, and just remove. And so, I think I found that really useful in emails I write or documents I write to this day is just going over, not because you're saving ink by cutting words, but because it forces clarity of thought.”

— Jason Shah

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Jason Shah
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
recommendation
Recorded
18 Sept 2022
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…The tidbit about not using the word great is so interesting. Is there anything else there that you could share about just basically just like how to write effectively and communicate and launch. Is there any other tidbits along those lines? Yeah, that's a good question. In addition to not using the word great and words like it that are either subjective in what they mean or unclear in what they actually mean, definitely using numbers more than adjectives. Strict concision, I would go over these documents countless times, and there's a phrase, I can't remember, it's either Mark Twain or another famous writer who said kill your darlings, right? Cut, cut, cut, and just remove. And so, I think I found that really useful in emails I write or documents I write to this day is just going over, not because you're saving ink by cutting words, but because it forces clarity of thought. Fewer words means every word is 10 pounds in weight instead of one, and that means that the decisions you're making, the trade offs are far more intentional, and in the case of great, if you say something is great because we're going to deliver something in two hours versus Amazon's great because the selection is very wide, the implications on strategy are completely different. And so, that's one of the benefits of being very specific and very concrete in language. I didn't intend to go too deep into this topic, but no one's ever covered this working backwards process on this podcast, so it's kind of interesting to talk about it a little bit more maybe. How does that actually work? So, you sit there and you actually write out a press release that would go out when you launch this thing. Is there like a template used? Is there anything you could share for folks that want to try this out and/or point them to a resource that will help them down this road?…

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