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On my desk sits a small acrylic frame holding a white Post-it note. Scrawled in hasty black ink are three words: “Muscular Angry Clown.” Jack Handey wrote it.

Most people assume Jack is a fictional character. For years, his name appeared in a recurring Saturday Night Live segment called “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey,” which featured a strange joke being read over a pastoral landscape. Example: “If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”

In fact, Jack is real. He’s an accomplished comedy writer. A few years ago, I wrote him a letter. He was nice enough to write back. We traded a handful of letters after that. I learned about his creative process, which includes writing fragments of ideas on Post-it notes.

“Muscular Angry Clown” was one of those fragments, which he mailed to me. It’s just three words. And yet those three words do so much work. I see the face paint, the veins, the rage. This economy of language made me look differently at my own writing.��

I run a behavior design consultancy called , where we focus on how to ethically predict and influence human behavior. In the past, when writing a pitch deck or explaining an idea, I’d often add words to sound smart. I’d feel the urge to overexplain psychological concepts, as if longer sentences could prove my expertise. But here was Jack, painting a complete picture with three words. I realized: Every syllable should pull its weight.

Now I use Jack’s note as a constant editor. It reminds me that the most memorable sentences contain no extraneous material. I look at those three words and I start cutting. I delete adjectives and adverbs. I simplify verbs. I strip away the noise until only the signal remains.

Brevity, I realized, is the hardest part of the job. I’ve probably already written too much.