Between My Lines

Somewhere along the way, conversation became a pitch. We open with a hook, deliver our value proposition, keep it short, keep it emotional, and wrap it up before anyone checks their phone. We do it at work, and we do it with strangers, but the strange and sad part is that many of us now do it with the people closest to us. In this episode, Danny looks at what happens when every talk has to make sense, stay on topic and earn its place. It begins with the story of a young Beirut entrepreneur who has rehearsed the perfect sixty-second pitch, and then gets trapped in an elev ator for two hours with the investor he was pitching and a teenage delivery boy with a bag of shawarma. From there, Danny looks at the murky origins of the elevator pitch, the famous claim that we now have shorter attention spans than goldfish and why it doesn't hold up, research showing that we badly underestimate how much others want deeper conversation, and an old Arabic proverb that says talk has many branches. He also makes a serious case for brevity, admits that he's a professional compressor himself, and asks what we're losing when we never reach the third hour of a conversation. Join the conversation on Patreon at dannyballan.com or at englishpluspodcast.com.

We reach for it when we feel small: my effort is just a drop in the ocean. It's a phrase built to make us feel that nothing we do could ever be enough. But what if we've been reading it backwards this whole time? In this episode, we look again at the drop, at the ocean, and at the humbling, hopeful truth that hides in the space between them.