Watermelon is awesome. Most everyone will agree with that. It's awesome, primarily, for two reasons. First, it's really freaking delicious - all that sugary watery juicy greatness. Second, it's HUGE. I mean, watermelons are just really big. I don't care how many people you're inviting over for dinner; you only need one watermelon. They're big, and they're delicious.
Watermelons face quite the conundrum, what with them being so big and so delicious. I mean, how are you supposed to eat something that big. Have you ever tried to just straight up eat a watermelon? Like, buy if off the shelf, rub the dirt off on your shirt, and eat it? I haven't. That would be crazy. It only takes an ounce of common sense to say that watermelons are just way too freaking big to eat.
They're really delicious, though. I want my watermelon. The way I see it, there's two solutions to this problem. You could, probably, search around and try to find a really small watermelon. Like, maybe go to the farm, and pick one that's not ripe; or make them gentically engineer one for you. I don't care, just get a small watermelon. Now what are you supposed to do with that watermelon? Can you imagine what someone would do if you gave them a watermelon the size of their hand? Probably throw it at you; they're sure as hell not going to eat it.
Small watermelons aren't going to work. I don't want them to be thrown at me. The other idea - and this is brilliant - is to cut the dang thing into smaller pieces. Yeah, make them bite size, throw them in a huge bowl, and serve them to people. 9 times out of 10, I bet people eat the watermelon instead of throwing them.
My emails are like watermelons. I write really long emails. They're big. They take a long time to read. When you first open an email from me, you're probably going to be annoyed because of how big it is. The trouble is, my emails are delicious. I don't mean literally, of course; what I mean is that my emails contain a lot of good content. We call that a high "signal-to-noise" ratio, in the biz. When I send emails, they generally have pretty complex technical concepts, or complex thoughts that really only make sense in my head.
So, like a watermelon, I could give you these big scary complex technical thoughts all in one go. I could say something like "There's a corrupted block on the hard drive platter, likely due to fluctuating voltage from the power supply." You're probably not going to understand it, though. You're going to start reading that email, and immediately regret putting that giant freaking watermelon in your mouth.
I've got two options again. I could take these really big complex thoughts and turn them into one small swallowable idea. Perhaps like this, "Your hard drive's dead, idiot!". That's not good, though. People want to know why. People want to know how. People want to know everything they can about the subject you're talking about, even if they can't digest the complex thought as easily as you can. I'm not saying I'm smarter, I'm just saying it's a lot easier to write a complex thought than it is to read one.
So I cut my complex thoughts into really small bite size pieces, and serve it to you in one giant email. I'm going to explain every facet of the complex thought in a way that you can digest; not only because you want to understand it, but because I want you to understand it. My emails are freaking delicious - I want you to enjoy them.