The Power of Saying Less: Blaise Pascal, Creative Forgetting, and Absolute Conviction

The sentence that took 370 years to stop being relevant

Every word removed is a decision about what the company is willing to stand behind.

In December 1656, Blaise Pascal wrote a line that still makes every serious writer, strategist, and creative director wince with recognition: “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” The wording varies by translation, but the observation is there in the sixteenth of his Provincial Letters, published during a series that ran from 1656 into 1657. (Original French)

The sentence is often treated as a clever apology for being long-winded. I read it as a description of the labor behind clarity. Nearly anyone can explain a company with three slides of adjectives, six market trends, a catalog of capabilities, and a long paragraph about changing the world. Making the same company understandable in a few unmistakable words requires considerably more intelligence and courage. Every word removed is a decision about what the company is willing to stand behind.

That decision is increasingly difficult in marketing. More data, more platforms, more content, and more opinions give organizations countless ways to describe themselves. When people inside a company disagree, the instinct is often to make the statement more inclusive. Another audience gets mentioned. Another aspiration is added. The final sentence becomes polite enough to survive a committee and too diffuse to guide an important decision. The organization has acquired language without gaining conviction.

Pascal points toward a different discipline: the kind of thinking that makes expression shorter because understanding has become deeper. I connect it to a practice I call creative forgetting, and ultimately to the idea at the center of MOW: unleashing absolute conviction.

What creative forgetting means in brand strategy

Creative forgetting is the deliberate effort to loosen the assumptions, borrowed language, and familiar solutions that prevent an original idea from appearing. When I begin building a brand, I want to know what the company has learned about itself, but I also want to know which descriptions it has inherited without really examining them. Most industries have a vocabulary that travels from competitor to competitor. A company begins using the language of its category, the language ends up in a pitch deck, and eventually everyone forgets where it came from.

Clients sometimes arrive with an entire constellation of rival brands in mind. They can tell you who has the better website, who looks more sophisticated, who raised more money, and who seems to be taking over the market. They naturally want to keep up. I call the feared competitor the boogeyman. The danger is that the boogeyman quietly becomes the creative director of your own brand. You start measuring every decision against someone else's expression, until the most you can imagine is a more polished version of the same thing.

I work differently. My first instinct is investigative. I approach the organization with a journalist's curiosity: interview the people who built it, follow the history, inspect the details, listen for contradictions, and investigate the claims that everyone repeats. I want to know what is genuinely distinctive, what customers experience, and what leadership believes when no presentation is on the screen. I look across the world for aesthetic and cultural references, but the central truth has to be unearthed from within the organization. Much of the subsequent creative process consists of deciding what to leave behind.

Psychology offers an intriguing parallel, though it is important to distinguish the research from my proposed branding method. In a series of experiments, Steven Smith and Steven Blankenship found that a delay could improve performance on certain problems after misleading cues had induced fixation. Their 1991 study examined how fixation persisted and how a period of incubation could help problem solvers escape it. A later 2009 meta-analysis by Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod found a positive average incubation effect, with results varying by problem type and the nature of the break.

These findings do not mean that forgetting a competitor guarantees originality. They suggest that habitual cues can constrain thinking and that creating distance from them sometimes helps. In brand creation, I use the idea as a practical discipline: interrogate what everyone assumes, step away from the category's most familiar expressions, and return to the problem with a broader imagination.

Nike: Three words, decades of conviction

Consider Nike's Just Do It. Introduced in 1988, its three words have traveled through decades of campaigns, changing athletes, sports, technologies, and cultural moments. In a 2025 account of the campaign's evolution, Nike described the original line as an invitation to act despite difficulty. The expression is broad enough for a first-time runner and a world champion, yet specific in its demand for movement and effort.

The astonishing thing about the line is the amount of territory it opens while carrying so little verbal weight. It does not need to describe footwear, materials, market share, product advantages, or the competitive landscape. Those details can appear in campaigns and product communications. The central idea gives them a common emotional direction. Nike can tell many stories because it has a belief that can survive their differences.

That is the kind of compression Pascal was pointing toward. A strong idea can become shorter as the work behind it becomes more sophisticated. It also requires tremendous selectivity. If every new campaign introduces a different central promise, the audience has to begin the work of understanding all over again.

Patagonia: The clarity that changes decisions

Patagonia offers a second, more operational expression of conviction. In 2011, it placed a Black Friday advertisement in The New York Times bearing the arresting line Don't Buy This Jacket. The company's own explanation connected that message to the environmental consequences of consumption. The ad made an already existing commitment unusually hard to miss.

In 2018, Patagonia revised its purpose to “We're in business to save our home planet.” Four years later, it announced a new ownership structure designed to protect that purpose, directing profits not reinvested in the business toward environmental causes. The legal and governance arrangements are more complex than the sentence. Their relationship matters because the sentence can be evaluated against consequential decisions. It gives employees, customers, and critics a clear standard.

In both Nike and Patagonia, a short idea is strong enough to support many forms of communication. Patagonia's conviction also invites scrutiny, as any serious environmental claim should. Compression makes a belief visible; sustained behavior determines its credibility.

The discipline of subtraction inside a real brand

I've seen the practical consequences of this in our work with Pedrera, a major mixed-use development in Guatemala City. Even the project name existed in competing forms, including Ciudad La Pedrera and La Pedrera. The organization had ambitious ideas about place, community, history, and the future, but it needed an agreed foundation and language that could carry those ambitions forward.

Part of our work was the apparently modest decision to simplify the name to Pedrera, then develop the mission, vision, and messaging architecture around a more unified identity. This involved much more than wordsmithing. Different stakeholders had to recognize the same future in the language, and the language had to be clear enough to inform design and communication. The process required listening closely, finding the common conviction, and removing the ideas that obscured it.

I think of this whenever a client asks whether a statement could be expanded to include one more promise. Sometimes it can. Often the valuable work is asking whether the additional words make the truth more precise. An organization with a clear center can develop many distinct campaigns and speak to many different audiences. Its conviction gives those expressions continuity.

The same discipline applies to the creative decisions that follow. A brand system includes naming, typography, color, visual hierarchy, product language, design, and often a new website. Every element can be refined until it feels inevitable. The finished work may look effortless. The investigation, revision, and restraint behind it rarely were.

Absolute conviction is earned

I like the phrase absolute conviction because it demands a level of commitment that most corporate language never reaches. It asks an organization to discover what it believes deeply enough to make decisions around it. Conviction needs evidence, internal alignment, and a willingness to accept the implications of a position. A company that promises accessibility has to examine its pricing and experience. A company that promises invention has to create room for actual invention. The wording makes a claim; the organization makes it credible.

There is another reason the discipline matters now. Websites, executive profiles, press coverage, product pages, and third-party information increasingly become the source material for search engines and AI-generated answers. A concise, well-supported central narrative helps audiences recognize the same company across those different contexts. Google emphasizes original, helpful, reliable content and clear authorship as part of its guidance for search. The short statement at the center of a brand will never replace the detailed evidence around it, but it can help organize that evidence.

What people should remember after a brand presentation is a conviction they can repeat without the slides. It may take extensive research, difficult conversations, and a dozen discarded drafts to arrive there. The words that disappear have done their job.

Pascal understood the paradox: the shorter expression may be the one that demanded the greatest thought. In brand creation, that is where the work often becomes most powerful.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Blaise Pascal mean by making his letter shorter?

Pascal's observation suggests that clear, concise expression requires time and thought. In brand strategy, the principle applies to distilling a complicated organization's identity into a meaningful, memorable idea.

What is creative forgetting in marketing?

Creative forgetting is a proposed strategic practice of setting aside inherited assumptions, competitor-inspired conventions, and unnecessary language so that a company's original truth can emerge. It draws an analogy to research on fixation and incubation in creative problem solving.

How does concise brand messaging create competitive advantage?

Concise, evidence-based messaging makes a company's position easier for leadership, employees, customers, and partners to understand and repeat. It can guide consistent decisions across products, marketing, and customer experience.

What does absolute conviction mean in branding?

Absolute conviction is a clearly articulated belief grounded in a company's real capabilities, values, and actions. It serves as a standard for decisions and gives creative expressions a common direction.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Blaise Pascal, Les Provinciales, sixteenth letter, December 4, 1656. Original French text.
2. Steven M. Smith and Steven E. Blankenship, “Incubation and the Persistence of Fixation in Problem Solving,” American Journal of Psychology (1991). PubMed.
3. Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod, “Does Incubation Enhance Problem Solving? A Meta-Analytic Review,” Psychological Bulletin (2009). PubMed.
4. Nike, “Why Do It?” (2025).
5. Patagonia, “Don't Buy This Jacket” (2011) and “Earth Is Now Our Only Shareholder” (2022).
6. MOW, “What Is a Messaging Matrix?”.
7. Google Search Central, “Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content”.