Clarity beats cleverness

Being concise is not about absolute word count, it's about economy of words. It's about the density of the insight that you're sharing. And so you can have a 300 word memo that's meandering and long-winded and a thousand word memo that is tight and concise.

Make the title the takeaway of the slide so that the person looking at it has to do zero work to take away. So example, you'll sometimes see, 'The problem,' or, 'The team.' Replace, 'The team,' with, 'Our team is veterans of whatever industry.'

I really believe in frameworks for things that helps drive extreme clarity. I work on a lot of different projects. A lot of times I'm ramping up a new project, I'm like, 'Where can I learn what I need to learn about this project?' I ask five different people, get five different answers. That is unacceptable.

I see people like basically think, 'Oh, I want to make this easier to read, more skimmable. I'm just going to throw a bunch of formatting and bullets and turn everything into bullets.' And it's not quite that easy of a solution. It can be a little bit of a crutch, it can be a little bit lazy because you are telling yourself that you're being concise when really, if you had to turn your sentence fragment into a full sentence, a lot of times it actually is harder than you think because you realize that you actually didn't really know exactly what you meant.