I spent an hour writing one text message

On Friday night I spent an hour writing one text message.

Not an email.

Not a proposal.

A text… to one of my closest friends, a man who already loves me and wants me to win.

I had something important to say. So I did the research first. Hand-wrote the message. Ran it through every tool I have. Revised it four times, not to make it longer, to make it shorter.

Cut it until every line earned its place.

Lines like this survived:

“Every company that ends up mattering goes through a stretch where the product is real, the proof is real, and the money isn’t there yet, and from the outside, that stretch is indistinguishable from dying.”

“Companies don’t die there because the thing doesn’t work. They die because the founders stop betting on themselves at the exact moment they’re the only ones who can.”

An hour. Four revisions. For one text.

And I still don’t know if he read the whole thing.

In 1657, Blaise Pascal ended a letter with an apology: “The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.”

You’ve heard the modern version, I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

People quote it as a joke about being busy.

It’s not a joke. It’s the whole game.

Brevity isn’t a style choice.

Brevity is a receipt.

It’s proof you did the work, that you digested the story before you asked someone else to. You cannot compress what you haven’t understood. So when your pitch runs three bloated paragraphs, the person on the other end isn’t reading a pitch.

They’re reading your unfinished thinking.

And busy people don’t finish your thinking for you.

They close the tab.

Here’s what I’ve learned sending ideas to some of the busiest people alive, most of which get ghosted, all of which taught me something:

You don’t have a pitch problem. You have a model-of-the-other-person problem.

You wrote that email for you. Not for them. All the polish, all the passion, all the “I’d love to work with you”, aimed at making you feel like you said it right.

Zero thought for what their Tuesday morning actually looks like: the flood of offers, pitches, spam, and AI slop competing for the same ten seconds of their attention.

Because that’s the real ladder every message climbs:

The glance decides if you get ten seconds.

The ten seconds decide if you get the click.

The click decides if you get the reply.

Lose the glance, lose everything, and most of us never think past “here’s my reel, here’s my whole story, let’s hop on a 30-minute call.”

A 30-minute call. With a stranger. That’s not an ask, that’s a mortgage.

Before your next pitch leaves your outbox, run these three questions:

1. What does their morning look like, not yours? How many messages like yours did they get today? If you can’t answer that, you’re not ready to write the first line.

2. What’s the smallest possible ask? Not a call. A one-sentence reply. “Worth a look?” “Want the two-minute version?” Make the yes cost them nothing.

3. Did you cut it in half, twice? If you haven’t revised it at least three times, you haven’t compressed the story. You’ve just typed it once and gotten tired.

The next time you’re about to hit send, don’t ask “did I say what I wanted to say?”

Ask “did I make this easy for a busy person to say yes to?”

Those are two completely different emails. One gets read. One gets deleted between two Slack notifications and a school pickup.

Write the short one. It’ll cost you the hour I spent on that text.

It’s worth every minute.

• Patrick

ps - One of the shortest letters ever written was by Hemingway. A bet, over launch, that ended on the a napkin. A full story in six words. ‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’ Thats a master storyteller who knows the craft and how to write a shorter letter…

pps - write me a six word story on where you are stuck and how i can help and each email gets a meaningful reply. try it. it’s not easy. That;s the point. The mastery is in the message…