Ernest Hemingway once won a bet by writing a six-word tragedy:
“For sale. Children’s shoes. Never worn.”
As always, it’s what goes unsaid that haunts us. The negative space that screams.
It’s not surprising – Scientists say that 70-90% of human communication is nonverbal, depending on which study you read. It’s how you hold a fork. How you treat the waiter. The tilt of your head under pressure. Your office attire on Tuesday. It speaks volumes about us.
Which makes Elon’s infamous “Tell us five things you did last week” email to Federal employees so very interesting, regardless of your opinion of him. It caused quite the stir, to put it mildly.
The floodgates opened. “Can he do this?” “Is this secure?” “How could his team possibly process millions of responses?” It all misses the point entirely.
The memo was never about collecting data. It was declaring (without declaring): everything changes now.
People didn’t have to be told, the signal was devastatingly clear: we’re watching. We’re listening. The old way of doing things is done.
Who knows if DOGE has the ability to parse through millions of weekly responses. The objective was never in the answers they’d receive but in how people would act differently knowing the question had been asked.
People get really hung up on words these days. But the real power isn’t just in what you say, it’s in what you do. Especially when it speaks so loudly people can’t hear anything else.
Your move.
