Language for what people already believe

One of my favorite shirts says, “Free speech makes free people.”

I wear it because the sentence is true and worth sharing. It has the secondary effect of advertising FIRE, the free speech organization that sells the shirt.

People regularly stop me to praise the shirt’s message. Sometimes they ask what FIRE is. The shirt never feels like a pitch.

It gives people language for something they already believe, or helps them see a problem more clearly, before it asks for anything.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson have followed a similar approach with Basecamp, the collaboration software.

I read them first for their thinking about work: why meetings drag, why busyness isn’t the same as productivity, why calm is better than chaos. I internalized a lot of that before I ever thought about their software.

A shirt slogan, a blog about work. Each appeals to who we want to be. Neither asks for anything. The pitch, if it needs to come at all, comes later.