"I only do it at work"

Some readers will say the reflex is a work thing. At home they're fine. It's the office where the sorries come out, and the office is where it matters least, because it's just how offices talk.

I'd turn that round. The office is where the read costs most, because the office is where the read becomes decisions about you.

Go back to Dev. Same job, same questions, same colleague. Dev says "quick one". You say "sorry to bother you". Over three years the colleague has had two thousand exchanges with each of you, and in one set the asker owned the question and in the other the asker apologised for it. Ask the colleague, or the manager, which of you seems more senior, and they won't be able to say why they think what they think, and they'll think it anyway. That's the trade from chapter 3, compounded, and it's the thing that sits under a promotion conversation without ever being named in it.

The meeting is where it shows most. "Sorry, can I just" at the start of every contribution is a request for permission to speak, made to a room that hadn't thought you needed it, and after enough of them the room does think so. Ideas that arrive apologising for themselves get weighed as apologies first and ideas second, and the same idea from someone who said "I think there's a problem with the north figures" without a preamble gets weighed as an idea. You've watched this happen and put it down to Dev being more confident. Dev isn't more confident. Dev just doesn't say sorry before saying things.

The email is where it's most visible, because it's written down. Go and look at your sent folder. Count the ones that open with sorry. Then look at the replies you got, and notice how many treated the request as optional. The softener in writing is a softener the reader can look at twice, and it does its work twice.

So if you only do it at work, the book is about the one place it costs you most, and the method in chapter 21 is about the sentences that do the work of the sorry without the trade, and they're the sentences Dev has been using all along.