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 couldnāt get the $10 million loan he needed to retrofit his Virgin Atlantic planes.
So instead he called Boeing and asked āif I buy 15 new planes, could you include seat back video screens?ā
āOf course!ā, came Boeingās reply.
Bransonās point was he couldnāt get a loan for $10 million, but he could for $2 billion.
Sometimes a āsmall askā is easier to refuse
...Adding is easy. Subtraction is hard.
On how technology has changed the craft of writing, author Neil Gaiman remarked;
āTyping is not work. Choosing is work.ā
Since moving from typewriters to computers, he noted, the average word count has blown out from 3-6,000 per article to 9,000 becauseĀ "itās not hard to include two ways of saying somethingā.
I canāt shake this insight because it says so much aboutĀ how we behave. At work. At home.
When writers drafted in longhand, it was painstaking to type up their final work for submission...
