From Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful.
It was November 10, 2005. I’d been governor of California for two years, and I’d just had my ass handed to me in a special election that I had called against many people’s advice, in order to present four policy ideas to the voters that I couldn’t make headway on by working with the legislature.
The issues?
Teacher tenure. State spending limits. Union dues and political contributions. Even redistricting reform failed to connect with them.
…
Simply put, I’d filled the bucket with a bunch of shit that most Californians weren’t interested in wading through at the time. It was my fault, and I wasn’t going to do that to the people ever again.
Arnold was speaking in terms of supply rather than demand. Customers won’t wade through anything – unless they really want it. Unless they understand and value it.
And you know what the key was to selling that infrastructure package to the people? Having learned my lesson from 2005, I rarely ever used technical words like “infrastructure” by themselves. Instead I talked about needing to fix our old roads and build new ones so parents wouldn’t be stuck in traffic for so long and miss their kids’ soccer practices so often.
People don’t care about the roads, they care about their time on those roads. That was the job to be done.
The Waiter's Pad 