Husband, father, son, brother, friend, entrepreneur, urbanist, and wilderness lover.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love
HT Justin Owings
If he would just add this feature, we can solve that problem.
If you just pick me up a little early, we’ll be able to get there in time for the previews.
Before you take off, please take care of just one more thing.
I’m presently trying to omit the word from my vocabulary, and that’s made me hyper-sensitive to others using it.
Just is passively presumptive. Most of the time I insert a just, I am really saying, “I know that this is probably a bigger deal than I want to acknowledge, so I’m tossing a just in there to make me feel better about asking it.”
Dropping it from my sentence changes the sentence’s meaning. I am no longer masking my request as something that’s inconsequential; I’m simply making a request, and leaving it open to the recipient of the request to assess the request’s relative difficulty. Also, by consciously dropping the just, I’m reminded to ask the follow up question, “How would that affect you?”
I’ve been trying to do this for a week or so, and I think it’s making me a better communicator—or if not better, then a little more mindful.
What are some other words like just?
Managing bottom-up change is its own art. You can start by honoring errors. You have to have a certain number of mistakes and small failures or you’re not trying hard enough….
Almost all innovation in all a system happens at fringes. So maximize fringes. The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.
Geoffrey Graham 