Yesterday our daughter introduced her very first boyfriend to the extended family.
Her mother and I had met him before. A few times. But this was different. This was the whole family in one room, plates of food, everyone taking turns getting a read on him. At some point he and I peeled off for a few minutes. Just the two of us. I told him what I expect. He listened. It didn’t take long.
Later, sitting back with everyone, I noticed something. Everyone in that room was being themselves. Nobody was performing. But everyone was still leaving things out. Things they thought. Things they could have said. Things that didn’t need saying.
That’s been the whole week for me, actually. Cutting things out.
This week’s unedited thought: the hardest part of writing isn’t generating more. It’s having the nerve to remove what you already wrote.
I spent this week deep in business plans and pitch decks. One session was with coworkers, working through a stretch of my writer’s block. I wasn’t stuck because I didn’t have enough to say. I was stuck because I had too much, and I was struggling to contain my writer’s bloat.
The lesson that came out of that session was simple. Anything that doesn’t move the document forward, or the conversation forward, doesn’t belong in it.
I know this lesson. I’ve known it for years. And I still fight it every time.
My natural instinct, especially with fundraising documents, is to be exhaustive. Cover everything. Answer every objection before it’s asked. I tell myself it’s thoroughness. Really it’s fear. Fear of leaving the reader with a question I didn’t answer.
But here’s what that fear misses: a pitch deck was never supposed to close the deal. Its only job is to earn you the next conversation. The one where an investor actually digs in. You don’t win a term sheet on slide 14. You win it in the six weeks of diligence that come after. Load the deck with everything and you’ve just buried the one slide that would’ve gotten you there.
Less isn’t a compromise. Less is the strategy.
Turns out the same is true with boyfriends.
There’s no version of that conversation where I needed to say more than I said. My daughter doesn’t need a transcript of every worry I’ve ever had about her, her choices, or her future. She’s an adult. My job isn’t to write her story for her. It’s to set a few borders, say what actually matters, and trust her with the rest. Because she’s earned that trust with her decisions to date. Besides, by all appearances he’s a great choice.
A massive advice dump isn’t love. It’s noise dressed up as fear. One or two things, said clearly, land. Everything past that just gets tuned out, the same way an investor tunes out slide 14.
I understand this instinctively when it comes to go-to-market strategy. I’ve watched it play out for years. I just hadn’t clocked that it applies to fatherhood too.
Look at the market right now. Go-to-market firms are raising enormous amounts of capital. On the surface, that reads like a GTM story: the category is hot, budgets are flowing, everyone wants in.
That’s not actually the story.
The real story is that in a noisy market, the companies who can cut down to one true signal are the ones winning the capital. Every founder is pitching more surface area, more features, more everything. The ones raising the big rounds are usually saying less, and saying it better. Greg McKeown wrote a whole book on this idea and called it Essentialism, and I think about it more than almost any other business book I’ve read.
Less, done well, beats more, done thoroughly. Every time.
Whether I’m helping a company sharpen its go-to-market strategy or sitting across from the kid my daughter brought home, my job is the same. I’m not the author. I’m the editor. The story is already being written by someone else, and it’s not mine to take over.
My job is to trust what’s already been decided, and cut my own instinct to over-explain, over-warn, and over-parent the room.
The best editors and the best fathers do the same thing. They say less, and they trust the story to hold.