I recently re-read the Princess Bride, the original 1973 novel that William Goldman wrote and later pared down to make the screenplay for the popular 1987 movie.
I love both the movie, which has the perfect cast, and the book, which has more background material.
Such as, for example, the history of Fezzik the Giant (played by Andre the Giant in the movie).
In the book, Fezzik was Turkish, born to normal-sized parents, and was always huge. In fact, when he was born, he already weighed 15 lbs, but the doctors weren’t worried because Fezzik was born two weeks early.
“That explains it,” they told Fezzik’s mother. But as Goldman points out:
“Actually, of course, it didn’t explain anything, but whenever doctors are confused about something, which is really more frequently than any of us would do well to think about, they always snatch at something in the vicinity of the case and add, ‘That explains it.'”
It’s not just doctors, of course. All of us look for a coherent story in order to make sense of our worlds. We will run and leap at the chance for a coherent story much sooner than we will absorb a complex but drearily true explanation.
This is because of evolution. The hypothalamus, the pea-sized complex of neurons which sits directly behind the right and left eyes and is therefore the first part of the brain to process incoming information, is also, according to Harvard Medical School, the part responsible for interpreting stories (and that’s probably why it’s considered to be the seat of the story chakra).
Anyways, if you’re in the business of selling things to people, this information might be useful to you in some form.
And if you want another thing that’s useful, in the form of sales emails that snatch at something in the vicinity of the case, then you might like the following offer because it is valuable: