Too many options can create paralysis, delay, and regret.
More quotesA man walks into a pharmacy carrying a dead pigeon.
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That small irritation is an information gap: enough context to produce a question, not enough to close it. Storytellers understand this instinctively. Business writers often do the opposite. They reveal the conclusion, methodology, three learnings and legal disclaimer before anything has happened, then wonder why the reader escaped.
Withholding everything is equally useless. “You won’t BELIEVE what happened next” opens a gap but supplies no reason to trust the bridge. Curiosity is not created by fog. It needs a specific unanswered question and confidence that the answer will repay attention.
A case study might begin with the failure nobody expected. A demonstration can reveal the maddening task before revealing the shortcut. A proposal can state the costly contradiction and delay the resolution for three paragraphs—not thirty pages.
What does the reader know now? What are they trying to find out? Which detail makes that question more urgent? When have they earned the answer?
Those questions are more useful than “How do we make this engaging?” Engagement is not parsley. It is the forward pull created by managing knowledge in time.
As for the pigeon: it had swallowed the prescription. Probably. I only needed you here long enough to make the point.