You walk into a cheese shop. You’d like some cheese. This seems reasonable — it is, after all, a cheese shop.
“Certainly, sir. What would you like?”
Red Leicester? No. Tilsit? No. Caerphilly? Fresh out. Venezuelan Beaver Cheese? Not much call for it.
Forty-three cheeses later, you realize something: this shop has no cheese. It never had cheese. But it has tremendous confidence about the cheese it doesn’t have.
Sound familiar?
If you’ve ever sat through an enterprise software demo, you already know this sketch by heart. You walked in needing one thing. A simple thing. “Can your platform do X?”
“Absolutely. Let me show you our dashboard.”
Forty-three features later, you realize: it doesn’t do X. It never did X. But it has tremendous confidence about X-adjacent capabilities you never asked about.
The deeper pattern
The cheese shop sketch isn’t about cheese, and the software demo isn’t about software. They’re both about the same human reflex: when you don’t have the thing someone needs, perform competence about everything else.
We all do this. Not just salespeople. Not just John Cleese.
When your friend asks for honest feedback and you give them a compliment sandwich. When your kid asks why the sky is blue and you explain the entire electromagnetic spectrum. When your boss asks if the project is on track and you describe all the parts that are on track.
Same sketch. Different cheese shop.
The life lesson
The most powerful thing you can say — in a sales call, in a friendship, in a marriage — is: “No, I don’t have that. Here’s what I do have.”
It feels dangerous. It feels like you’re losing. But the person on the other side of the counter can tell when you’re cycling through Venezuelan Beaver Cheese. They always can.
Honesty about what you lack is the fastest way to build trust about what you have.
Or, as Cleese might put it: the cheese shop would’ve been a perfectly fine shop if it had just been honest about being a library.