About this quote

Ramble for hours and you can hide behind a wall of words. Condensing your message forces you to decide what actually matters and throw away the rest. Do you actually understand your topic well enough to explain it in sixty seconds? It is easy to dump data on people, but filtering that data is where your real value lies. Next time you prepare a pitch, spend your energy cutting words instead of adding them.

When to use it

• A startup founder is cutting down their thirty-slide investor deck to a tight three-slide pitch. They tell their co-founder: 'We need to trim this to the absolute essentials; it takes way more work to be brief.'
• A college student is trying to write a single-page cheat sheet for a difficult physics exam. They remark to a classmate: 'I spent six hours trying to fit the entire semester onto this single index card, but now I actually understand the formulas.'
• A maid of honor drafting her wedding toast realizes she has four pages of memories. She tells her partner: 'I need to cut this down to three minutes, but it is going to take me all weekend to make it punchy.'
• A copywriter is trying to fit a complex product feature into a single social media ad. She tells her manager: 'Writing the long blog post was quick, but crafting this one-sentence hook is going to take me the rest of the afternoon.'