The Sum He Did Himself

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town the low ground of a farm was often sour with water it had no way of shedding, and there were men who went about with clay tiles and a narrow spade to cure it.

Two drainers in one town, the same clay tiles from the same yard, the same two shillings the chain.
Both were asked up to the same farm in the same August week, to the same wet field below the barn.
One of them explained what draining does for a crop, and explained it correctly.
The other asked what that field had yielded at harvest against the field above it.
The farmer answered, and then did a sum of his own by the hedge, unasked.
Same trade, same tiles, and the asking man dearer by two pounds. Why was only one of them laying tiles in October?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two drainers in the town I have never named, both sound workmen, both buying their tiles off the same yard. The farmer had said at market that the field below his barn was no use to him before May, and that week both men walked up to look at it.

The first drainer knew his business better than the second. He went over the field, put his spade in at three places, and told the farmer what he had found. Drained ground warms a fortnight earlier in the spring. Roots go down in dry ground and sideways in wet, so a drained acre carries something in a bad year where an undrained one carries nothing. All of it true, said plainly and in the right order. He left a figure of thirty-four pounds and a short note of what draining does, written out fair.

The second drainer walked the same field and said very little about drainage. He asked what the field above the barn had yielded that harvest. Better than three quarters the acre, said the farmer. And the field below? Half of that in a kind year, nothing at all in a wet one. The drainer asked what he had paid for hay the previous spring, having had nothing off the bottom field. The farmer said eleven pounds, then put it higher himself, because there was the carriage from eight miles off, which the drainer could not have known. Then he was asked how many more harvests he expected off the place. Twenty at least.

So the farmer stood by the hedge with a pencil, doing a sum nobody had set him. Four acres yielding half what they ought, the hay bought in, rates paid on ground that fed nothing, twenty harvests to come. He made it between fifteen and twenty pounds a year, said so aloud, and wrote it on the back of an envelope out of his coat.

The second drainer's price was thirty-six pounds, and he was laying tiles in that field in October.

Be fair to the first man. He was the better drainer, his facts were sound, his price was lower, and the farmer liked him the better of the two. Nothing he said was wrong. But every sentence came from somebody who would be paid if it were believed. The sum on the envelope had no such weakness, having come out of the farmer's own head in the farmer's own hand.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A reason your customer has heard from you is a thing he can weigh against you, and a reason he has spoken aloud himself is a thing he can only act upon or go back on. Men will take a good deal of trouble to avoid going back on themselves, and none at all to avoid disbelieving you.

The first part of the mechanism is suspicion, and it is reasonable suspicion. A customer discounts what he is told in proportion to what the teller gains by his believing it, and he does not apply that discount to himself. He keeps no record of being led to a thought, and remembers the figure as his own because it was. You can argue a man out of your claim in four sentences. You cannot argue him out of his own arithmetic without insulting him.

The second part is that his figure is better than yours. You can only guess what his trouble costs him, and your guess will be round and wrong in the direction of your own interest. He knows, including the parts you would never have counted, such as eight miles of carriage on bought hay. So the question buys accuracy as well as assent, and what a customer already stands to lose moves him further than anything you can offer him to gain.

The question must be built properly or it does nothing. It must be about his affairs and not your trade, he must be able to answer it out of his own head or his own book, and the answer wants to be a quantity, a date or a name rather than an opinion. Ask a man whether the thing is costing him money and he will say he supposes so, which commits him to nothing. Ask what he paid for hay last spring and he will tell you the figure, and the telling is the whole of the work.

Then take it down in front of him and give it back in his words. If he said sour ground, write sour ground. A customer who meets his own phrase in your estimate reads it as an account of his own thinking, and one who meets your phrase reads it as sales talk.

Two cautions. A question a man cannot answer gets an answer regardless, because silence is uncomfortable, and the figure he invents to fill it will be too low and will bind him as firmly as a true one. You will have manufactured evidence against your own price, so ask only for what he keeps in his head or in a ledger. The second is that this must be a question and not a snare. A man who catches himself steered towards his own words disowns them with more heat than he would have used to refuse a claim of yours. The test is whether you would be content with any answer he might give, including the one that loses you the job.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What is the one figure only my customer can supply? There is nearly always one, and it is nearly always the figure the decision turns on. Find it before you go, and go intending to ask rather than to present.
2. Did he say it, or did I? Go over your last three enquiries and mark who spoke the reason for doing the work. If it was you in all three, that is the whole of what wants changing.
3. Where is it written, and in whose words? A figure said aloud and then lost is half wasted. Put it in the estimate in his phrasing, with the date he gave it, so the paper he reads a week later argues in his voice.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same trade, same tiles, the asking man dearer by two pounds. Why was only one of them laying tiles in October?

Because the cheaper man left behind a case for draining, and the dearer left behind the farmer's own figure. A case has an author who stood to be paid by it, so it could be set aside a year without anybody being wrong. The figure had no author but the farmer, and setting that aside cost him fifteen or twenty pounds by a reckoning he could not quarrel with.

The verse:

Tell a man the worth of it and he will weigh you while you speak,
For the man who gains by telling is the man who can be doubted.
Ask him what the wet ground cost the year he bought his hay,
And the sum is in his writing, and he cannot argue with his hand.

Until next time. Go and write out the one question you will put to the next person who enquires, whose answer must be a figure out of his affairs and not a sentence out of yours.

P.S. There is a plain test of whether it has taken. A week later the customer either repeats his own figure back to you, in which case you are only settling dates, or he repeats yours, in which case you are still arguing.

Also in the archive: Away in April, Two Answers Out of Nine and The Borrowed Kettle.