Five Pieces of Advice on One Table
Think about your first month in a new job. Five different colleagues each give you one piece of advice. One says, "Always read the customer's full history first." Another says, "Copy the manager on anything about money." A third says, "Never promise a date." You write each piece of advice on a card and lay the cards out on your desk, and every morning you follow all five.
After a few weeks you start to wonder. Do you still need all five cards? Some of them may say almost the same thing in different words. Some may have mattered only in your first week. And some may never show their value on a normal day, but save you on the one bad day when an angry customer tries to trick you.
There is a simple way to find out. Keep everything else the same and go one day without one card. Then another day without a different card. If nothing changes when a card is missing, the other cards were covering for it. If something goes wrong, that card is doing real work.
This chapter has been handing out cards for eleven lessons. Each lesson tested one part of a prompt on its own. This last lesson puts every part the chapter kept into one prompt, and then takes the parts out one at a time, to see which ones still earn their place when all the others are there.