7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 30
There’s a quote attributed to Blaise Pascal: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
Most people read that as a joke about editing. It’s not. It’s one of the truest things ever said about how real clarity works.
The simple version of anything is never where you start. You start with the mess — every idea you have, every angle you can think of, every framework and connection and tangent your brain wants to chase. That’s the long letter. It’s necessary. You have to write it.
But the long letter is not the product. The long letter is the process.
The product is what’s left after you cut everything that doesn’t make Monday morning better for the person holding it. That takes longer than the mess did. It takes focus, honesty, and the willingness to throw away things you’re proud of because they don’t serve the person you’re building for.
I’ve watched this play out in my own work this year. I cut nearly half my first novel in editing — not because the writing was bad, but because I was explaining things the story had already shown. Yesterday I wrote a closing line I loved — a declaration about what I was going to do next. The editorial pass cut it because the essay had already made the point. The line served me. It didn’t serve the reader.
I’ve been developing an AI education product for weeks. It kept growing — more frameworks, more depth, more layers. Then I asked myself what the simplest useful version looked like. The answer fit in one sentence. That is where I am headed.
Simplicity isn’t where you start. It’s where you arrive after doing the hard work of going through everything else first. The short letter takes longer than the long one. But it’s the only one worth sending.
David Willis 