Lessons on giving your audience goosebumps by Zac Garside.

The Curious Case of The Cautionary Door:

Melissa and I are walking down a parking structure stairwell in Salt Lake City yesterday when we come to a door with this alarming sign on it:

"OPEN DOOR WITH CAUTION."

We stop and look at each other...

Ummm.... OK. I mean, what's going on behind this door? Is it a dangerous balcony I could fall off of? A construction zone?...

What am I about to see? Is this where mafias get together for poker? Am I about to walk into a drug deal?

SOMEONE PLEASE BE MORE SPECIFIC HERE I'M SCARED.

So we walk to the bottom of the stairs, give each other one last look, then open "with caution..."

The door swings open to the right and we enter a white hallway filled with...

NOTHING.

It's a false alarm - no one there and nothing to be afraid of. But!...

There is a lone security guard manning a desk in an otherwise empty lobby. Melissa asks him why the door says to open with caution and he answers with the most uninteresting and anti-climactic reasoning in history:

"Sometimes people open the door into others who are walking by."

That's it? You made me walk down a whole set of stairs wondering if I was about to get robbed at gunpoint because I might accidentally hit someone who was walking by? Why didn't you just say "Open Carefully - Someone Might Be Walking By"

That would have made a lot more sense and been a lot less stressful.

But that's the thing about our words -

How we say stuff matters. Our words can get people to raise their guard or drop it in just a matter of seconds. We can create stress or we can create relaxation with the simple rearranging of a punctuation mark.

People don't want confusion or uncertainty, we want CLARITY. Sure, a surprise is good when it's fun. But no one wants to walk through life with "caution."

Clear is kind. Caution is kind of annoying.

Thanks for reading! You can email me at zac@zacgarside.com