The difference between ‘buy now’ and ‘bye now’ is very thin.
Sometimes, when we push very hard for a commitment, we break the trust we’ve earned.
For a while, you might not notice the broken trust, because we’re encouraged to keep pushing, treating every individual as a walking ATM, not a relationship to be nurtured and a person to be helped.
Soon, though, you run out of the gullible and all you’re left with is distrust.
One of the diary-like joys of the Friday newsletter is getting to sit down after a week and figure out if the things in my life have been speaking to each other in any particular way.
Usually, the week is a miscellany — if not cacophony — but often a theme appears.
That theme this week is “collective creativity,” brought about by reading about Prince, jazz, and the work of being in a band. It’s a dense one, and good, I think.
The AI driven voice mail system said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you.” Of course, there is no “I” and by most definitions of sorry, it’s not.
But it made me feel better.
The overworked and slightly bitter front desk person who was the frontline flotsam in a poorly designed system couldn’t be bothered. Even though the person they worked for was cancelling the appointment, and I had just spent ten minutes returning their call through a maze of badly designed prompts and it was a hassle to reschedule, they couldn’t/didn’t/wouldn’t say, “I’m sorry.”
After all, they didn’t cancel the appointment or design the system.
“Sorry” doesn’t have to be an admission of guilt or acceptance of fault. It could simply be the kind way one human acknowledges to another human that things aren’t ideal right now.
The magic of this simple word is that it can make both people feel better.
It looks like this:
Which do we measure the most, spend the most obtaining and argue about most often? We might have it backwards. HT Russ Ackoff.
Bananas are (slightly) radioactive. The banana equivalent dose (BED) is a measurement of radiation. It’s definitely not enough to hurt you.
When we think about risk, the BED is a useful way to find perspective. Is the exposure this new thing will cause on the order of a banana? If so, perhaps we shouldn’t worry about it so much. A chest x ray might be like eating 100 bananas… it gives us a scale we can work with.
Driving a car is far more dangerous than being on an airplane. The Honda Civic dose might be a helpful way to think about the risk of a crash.
And far more people are injured or killed in collisions with deer and moose compared to sharks. The Moose equivalent dose for exposure to wild animals might be worth considering.
Finally, and most salient, the chances that you will experience significant long-term damage from wearing the wrong color shoes to fourth grade, or by asking a dumb question after a presentation are lower than being injured by a pumpkin. And just imagining the pumpkin equivalent dose makes it hard to take ourselves too seriously.
That’s the first step, certainly. If you don’t, your boss will.
The second step is to take the time you’ve freed up and do work that the AI can’t do.
Today’s newsletter was about my shelves of diaries in the studio and my practice of keeping a stack of “on this day” diaries I can re-read when I have a spare minute: “Same but different.”
UPDATE! Now sold out.
It took less than 48 hours. Thank you for making it happen.
Original post below:
[Lots of links in this post… US offer is here, international is here.]
Ideas travel horizontally.
Not from the creator to the audience as much as from one person to another.
It’s easy to misunderstand the insight of Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans. Decades ago he argued that the long tail is fueled by circles of people who lean in and support a creator’s work. 1,000 people who show up when there’s something important going on. 1,000 fans who care enough to enable an individual to create something worthwhile.
That matters. But that’s not what makes it so powerful.
Ideas that spread win.
The 1,000 fans go first, yes, but they also spread the word. Part of the creator’s job is to give the true fans something worth talking about, something that advances their mission.
When we make spreading the word worthwhile, the word gets spread.
Today, I’m launching my new book in a special package to 1,000 people.
Click here for more pictures and to order…
It’s seven copies of the book (which comes out in about six weeks), a collectible chocolate bar from Askinosie with a trading card inside, a deck of 54 strategy cards and three month’s access to purple.space, including full access to the Marketing Seminar and Strategy Course as well. The retail value is over $700. I’m working with my publisher and Porchlight to sell the whole box of joy for below cost, less than $125 in the US.
Why overdo it?
Because ideas spread horizontally. Because someone with seven books is likely to give six away. Because I believe that when people have a better understanding of how to use strategy to make things better, they’re going to want to have their colleagues join them on the journey.
And because it’s fun.
It’s fun to interact with the true fans. Your questions and stories and heroics make me think more clearly and find new ways to extend the work. And what an opportunity design and create packaging for chocolate bars, trading cards and a strategy deck as part of my day job.
It all ships in a few weeks. If it’s something you’re interested in, I hope we made enough.
Click here to see all the details. International orders (no chocolate, sorry), please click here instead.
Thank you.
That’s magical. To have the resources to expend labor on something that fills us with joy.
If you’re lucky enough to encounter this, perhaps it makes sense not to confuse the issue by also trying to turn it into labor for maximum profit.
When we focus on one, we often decrease the other.
I saw a trackback to my blog with this quote:
“The notebook is the place where you figure out what’s going on inside you or what’s rattling around. And then, the keyboard is the place that you go to tell people about it.”
Who said that? I thought. That’s pretty good.
It was me. Many years ago!
Still pretty true, although, I also figure out a lot of stuff at the keyboard, too.
(I’m a little less binary than I used to be, which I count as progress.)
My friend Alan Jacobs writes in response to a piece bemoaning the fact that nobody reads Arthur Koestler anymore:
You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for.
I am big on being a “curious elder” — and one way, I think, to expand the curious elder idea is to not just be curious about what young people are into, but to also share your curiosity about the world in a way that is generous but without expectation. To point out the things you think are good… just in case somebody, maybe even somebody younger, is looking for them.
(I should note I found the Peanuts comic by looking up the origins of the phrase.)
Related: “Be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
Friday’s newsletter, “Wondrous Variety,” started out with something I read in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia:
Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it.
I was having trouble coming up with an image for the newsletter and then I remembered this photo I took in a Costco on Oahu.
Read the whole newsletter here.
Spoiled leads to bitter.
A sense of entitlement is a trap, because bitterness demands more evidence and seeks to maintain dominance over the other emotions.
When we’re busy looking for more reasons to be bitter, we’re not taking the time to do generative work, to connect and to find opportunities to make things better. These are the enemies of bitterness… it’s easy to make bitterness worse by seeking more reasons to be bitter.
It’s so tempting to write for everyone.
But everyone isn’t going to read your work, someone is.
Can you tell me who? Precisely?
What did they believe before they encountered your work? What do they want, what do they fear? What has moved them to action in the past?
Name the people you’re writing for. Ignore everyone else.
The end of the trail is usually difficult, but without the long and winding approach, there isn’t much of a mountain.
The greatest hits reel and the stunning photographs leave out most of the hard work.
There’s a lot to be said for showing up, one foot in front of the other. In fact, those are the only people who make it to the steep part in the first place.
If you have a series of tasks to do, it’s easier to ignore this question and simply get back to work. Doing the tasks is more efficient than coordinating the help.
But if your work is a project, a bigger mission that involves making a change happen, it’s much more productive to accept help.
When we have a project, part of the work is to enlist others in figuring out how to make the change we seek.
Google made a fortune and honed sponsored search results into an art form. The theory is that people who want the traffic the most will pay for the clicks, and of course, if the advertisers don’t have something you ultimately want, they’ll just waste their money. Let the market work it out–the dollars become a self-fueling sort of search algorithm.
Google was a miracle, and it also offered smart organic results and clearly labeled ads, so most of us accepted this.
Now, though, hotel listings don’t even bother to pretend they’re sorted in any order but “what makes us the most money.” Yelp requires us to wade through fast food franchises and other lazy advertisers to get where we’re going. And recently, Amazon has jumped the shark by selling out their customers to the highest bidder.
Add smartphones to the mix, with their tiny screens and low impulse control, and the ads stop looking like ads.
Not only are the ads a worse experience for the user, they are also creating a tax on all the advertisers, and thus, on us. If the only way to get Amazon traffic is to buy the ads, then the only way to pay for the ads is to charge more…
We’ve been hooked on free media for a century. But newspapers and network TV evolved to be ever more clear about what’s content and what’s an ad. The internet, as in all things it does, hypercompetes for the last penny, costing all of us time, trust and money.
The oxymoron of “sponsored results” is that if they’re sponsored, they’re not results.
Today’s newsletter begins:
It’s back to school season here in Austin. We dropped our youngest off at fourth grade this week and walked our firstborn to middle school. How is this possible? I’ve been keeping my mind off the inexorable passage of time by putting the finishing touches on a book proposal and carving stamps from Pink Pearl erasers. (I have always loved shopping for school supplies. If you need a little retail therapy, here’s a list of the gear I use in the studio.)
I named it after an old eastern saying that I can’t quite pin on anybody specific: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
It contained some of my best writing. Cogent, clear and powerful.
I found it.
It wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered. In fact, it was hardly useful.
The opposite happens with the things we fear. When they show up, they’re likely to be a lot less fearsome than we imagined.
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