Some of my early blog posts and emails were awful.

Not that they didn't have useful information in them. In fact the opposite.

I tried to cram so much in to emails that they became almost unreadable. And style-wise it was almost like I was trying to lecture my readers like some sort of haughty professor looking down on them.

It was a long time before I learnt that sometimes less is more.

Giant “ultimate guide” posts and in-depth how-tos are great. But that doesn't mean every piece of content you create has to blow everyone's socks off.

Sometimes a simple lesson well expressed has more impact.

There's a reason some of history's greatest teachers used fables and parables.

It's difficult to take in more that one idea at a time. And expressing it in story format draws us in so we extract the lesson ourselves rather than having it spelled out for us.

And because we discover the lesson ourselves, we tend to remember it more and take the ideas on board more.

My first “parable” email was about how you sometimes just have to knuckle down and do hard work for a while to get a breakthrough.

A really simple lesson. Too simple I thought at the time, but I'd just run out of “clever” stuff to say.

That email got my best ever response.

Dozens of people emailing back to say they'd been through something similar. Or that it was just the message they needed to hear.

My fear that the email wasn't “clever enough” was completely unfounded.

I didn't need to spell out my ideas in detail every time. In fact by doing so I was preventing people learning for themselves.

Instead a simple story or anecdote or example making just one point rather than dozens can have more impact.

It's a lesson I often find I need to re-learn when I get a bit too full of myself and forget that my job isn't to be clever, it's to help people.

And sometimes helping people just means telling simple stories with a single lesson they can learn quickly.