Why ghosts are easy to paint

A painter was asked by the king of Qi what was hardest to paint.

Dogs and horses, he said.

And what's easiest?

Ghosts and demons.

The king asked why. Because dogs and horses are in front of people every day, said the painter. Everyone knows what they look like, so a mistake is obvious at a glance. Ghosts have no fixed form and nobody has seen one, so whatever you paint can't be wrong.

Once you hear it, the principle turns up everywhere.

The LinkedIn post about your general framework gets engagement. The specific claim about what happened with one client on a Tuesday gets scrutiny. The plan written in abstractions survives meetings. The plan with numbers gets attacked.

So the pressure is always toward abstraction, because abstraction is unpaintable and therefore unassailable. That's also why it changes nothing.

The test for your own work is uncomfortable and simple: can this be wrong? If nothing you wrote this week could have been refuted, you weren't saying much.

Take one thing you're proudest of and rewrite it with a specific that could be checked and found mistaken. If that scares you, that's the signal.

MOJOWAY asks coaches to bring the actual conversation rather than the theory of conversations. The specific is where growth lives, and it's also where you can be caught.