Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / Brevity Is the Harder Work
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, it's not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled Brevity is the Harder Work. Here we go. Today I want to start with an apology. Not mine, someone else's. From almost four hundred years ago. The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal was writing letters in the sixteen fifties, arguing a point he cared about deeply. Near the end of one of them, he stopped and admitted something. He wrote, I've made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter. He was not apologizing for saying too little, he was apologizing for saying too much, and he's telling us exactly why. He didn't have the time to trim it down. That single sentence has outlived nearly everything else that play that Pascal wrote. And I think it's because every leader who has ever sat in front of a blank email, a blank slide, or a blank agenda has felt the exact same tension. It's faster to write everything you know. It is slower and harder to write only what your reader needs. Think about the last long document you produced. May have been a memo, a proposal, a set of notes after a big meeting, and be honest with yourself. How much of that length came from clarity and how much came from momentum? Most of us don't sit down and decide we're going to write six pages. We sit down, we start typing, and then six pages just happens to us. It's the path of least resistance. Cutting it down to two pages would have taken real effort. It would have meant deciding what actually mattered and being willing to lose the rest. Here's the misread that trips up a lot of leaders. We treat length as a signal of seriousness. A long strategy document looks like it was taken seriously. A long meeting looks like the topic got the attention it deserved. A long performance review looks thorough. But length and seriousness are not the same thing. Sometimes a long document is serious, and just as often it's a first draft that never got finished, wearing the costume of a final one. Here's the reframe I want to offer you today. Brevity is not the opposite of thoroughness. Brevity is what thoroughness looks like once you've done the work of deciding what matters. Pascal wasn't lazy, he was rushed. The short version was the one that would have taken longer to produce because it required judgment. Not just words on a page. Every sentence in a short, sharp memo had to earn its place. Every sentence in a long, sprawling one just had to show up. This is worth sitting with, especially now, in a moment when so many of us have tools that can generate a polished, lengthy draft in seconds. I think the world is calling it AI slop these days. That changes what's scarce. It used to be that length was cheap and clarity was expensive. Because clarity took a human being real time and real thought. Length is still cheap. It might be cheaper than ever. But clarity, the decision about what to leave out, what your specific reader in this specific moment actually needs, that is still entirely on you. No tool can make that call for you. It doesn't know your team, your context, or your relationship with the person reading it. That judgment is yours to exercise, whether you're using AI to help you draft or whether you're writing every word yourself. Here's something to carry forward this week. Before you send the next long email, the next long deck, the next long set of instructions, pause and ask yourself Pascal's question in reverse. Not do I have time to make this longer? Because that's never the problem. Ask instead, have I taken the time to make this shorter? If the honest answer is no, that's not a reason to hit send anyway. It's a signal that the real work isn't finished yet. Leadership communication is not measured by how much you said. It's measured by how much your people understood, remembered, and acted on. Those are rarely the same thing as volume. Often they run in the opposite direction. Pascal ran out of time to be brief, and he was honest enough to say so. Most of us have more time than we think. We just spend it writing instead of editing. Something to sit with as you head into your next conversation, your next memo, your next meeting. The short version is usually the harder one. It's also also usually the one worth building.