That’s a lot

But really is it? Or when you say “That’s not much!” how few are we talking about?

The thing is that what’s a lot to you might be just peanuts to someone else. What’s peanuts to you might be a fortune to others. So how much is it really?

It’s the Curse of Knowledge at play. What’s clear to us might be totally unclear to our audience. They don’t know what we know. They have a different frame of reference than we have.

The tricky part is that numbers can be equally misleading. When you speak about “5 million”, is that a lot or just peanuts? And for whom? If you’re telling me that failure rates have dropped by 2% is that a lot or not?

If we’re trying to get our audience to see what we see, we need to look from their perspective and enable them to make sense of how much it is.