THE LEAFLET
March 13 2025
draft as invitation, did anyone ask for this, when to police grammar
DRAFTS AS INVITATIONS
One way to quiet your perfectionism is to look at your first draft as an invitation. When you share that draft with someone you create a shared experience. You have built a bridge between your consciousness and someone else’s. There’s a thing in the world now, a thing that exists, that you and your reader can look at together.
When you share your draft, you invite your reader to walk across that bridge, to show up, to look at something with you. You ask someone to join you for the amount of time it takes to read your draft.
Sharing your draft is like inviting someone to quickly chat or to look out the window right next to you. If it’s a long draft, maybe it’s like inviting them to walk a couple miles on a route you have recently walked, or to try a restaurant you find interesting, at the least.
This is a lovely instance of two people being human. It’s also low stakes.
For the introverts reading this, invitations may feel high stakes by default. Don’t forget - a cool, even miraculous, aspect of this kind of invitation is you don’t have to be there with the person when they accept it, reject it, or act on it.
-eric
Read the rest here.
DID ANYONE ASK YOU FOR THIS?
Complexity in your product may mean you haven’t started with your minimal viable audience. Derek Sivers has a charmingly rigorous criterion for a Good Business Idea. Your business needs to meet a need for a particular kind of person, ideally a kind of person you know yourself, a kind of person you also ARE yourself. For Sivers in the 90s, this meant building a rudimentary website where indie musicians could sell their CDs. Sivers was an indie musician. At the time, you couldn’t sell a CD at a store unless you had a record deal and possibly also a distribution deal. So once he found a way to sell his own CDs on a website he built, friends started to ask him to host and sell theirs. Straightforward; simple. A great example of a business that came about as a result of ~local demand.
This orientation differs from a market- or competitor-focused one. It can feel smartest to start with the current menu of options and add something to one of those options. You imagine yourself drawing the attention of future customers with your added feature. You offer [all this status quo stuff] AND [your new feature].
That “AND” can get you in trouble. You can use it as a false proxy for “a friend asks me to meet this need for them”. You can assume there is demand for the AND. By definition, the AND probably means your product is more expensive to create than incumbents - you take on the cost of making their thing, then add the cost of bolting on the AND.
It can feel counterintuitive for a builder. But Sivers’ insight is sneaky powerful - sort out first who you are building for. Then decide what you are building for them.
-eric
Read the rest here.
WHEN TO POLICE GRAMMAR
RANT: This is a vote against “execute on” and “solve for”. These phrases have their places. And but also these particular phrases seem to claim all the places.
If you have an idea and you are doing that idea, you are executing it. You are not executing on it.
If you have a problem and you are handling that problem, you are solving it. You are not solving for it.
Like my rant against ellipses, this one won’t change the fundamental course of your business or relationships. And but also, your words are a big core element of your work and your relationships. Choosing them with care, refining those choices, modeling how you want your people to make those choices - all worthwhile.
PRINCIPLE: There’s a meta-thing at play here with the modeling. You might need the kind of culture where people ignore persnickety grammatical niceties like this one (in cases where speed matters most, for example). In that case, don’t waste time on them. Praise and champion swift action and casual cliches.
If, on the other hand, you’re in a line of work where clear, precise communication really matters - digging into these small habits of speech can be a great place to put your attention.
CASE STUDY: One time at Carver, we did a whole staff training on reversing the word order of a common phrase. As of that training, we taught “kids learning English” not “English language learners”. In that school, how we talked about and to kids was pretty much the whole ball of wax. That 45 minute training was a great use of time. The core insight of it and the immediately applicable action it asked of us rippled out through all 180 days and 1,440 class periods that followed. And the very fact of it, the training on this tiny grammatical thing, signaled in a strong way - we take this seriously around here. When it comes to how we talk about kids, there isn’t something “too small”. The details are the substance.
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Economist Robin Hanson on games that rot:
Many orgs probably rot via consensus games slowly displacing outcome games. At first the founders and first employees are betting on the firm, but later folks are betting on rising in the firm, not so much on the firm itself.
Novelist Charles Yu on time healing:
Unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience.
Memoirist Carmen Maria Machado on representing wrongdoing:
We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric