Please be on the alert for:

Spam that includes your name, address, phone number and other personal details.

Phone calls that are from human-sounding bots that pretend to be from friends or trusted brands.

Job offers.

Video mashups that include AI-generated people that seem to be made just for you.

Security alerts that are actually precisely the opposite.

Links that sure look trustworthy, but go somewhere you don’t expect.

It makes me sad that people with skills spend their time building ever-more ornate scams. It also bums me out that the emails from this blog often end up in the spam folder, but spam somehow manages to make it to my inbox.

PS a few typos in yesterday’s post. Sorry. If you encounter a bad link or a typo, visit my blog for the latest, corrected version. Thanks.

First, off: “verbify” is a word. It means what it sounds like: use something as a verb.

In 2015, the late comedian Norm Macdonald tweeted about the time he met Bob Dylan.

According to Macdonald, they talked about all kinds of stuff. At one point, Bob asked Norm his favorite book of the Bible. (Norm said he liked Job, Bob said he liked Ecclesiastes.)

At one point, Macdonald said, “I remember he talked over and over about verbs and about ‘verbifying’, how anything could be ‘verbified.’”

The writer Tony Conniff wrote a piece about Dylan’s use of verbs and used “Tangled Up in Blue” as an example:

They drove that car as far as they could
Abandoned it out West
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best

She turned around to look at him
As he was walkin’ away
She said this can’t be the end
“We’ll meet again someday on the avenue”

Tangled Up In Blue

“So much of the story,” Conniff writes, “is in the rich, vivid, and active verbs. It’s something you can find in almost any Dylan song.”

Of course, it ain’t like no other songwriter has ever talked about verbs before.

“When you’re writing a song,” said Chuck Berry, “nouns and verbs will carry you right through.”

Filed under: Verbs.

Today is the release of Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s monograph Citizen Printer. 

In the foreword to the book, I write:

Kennedy’s work is evidence of the head, the heart, and the hands together at play. His is a physical process, done by a human body in time and space with the real materials of ink and chipboard and wood and machinery, pressing them all together into something new. In this digital age, it’s inspiring to see someone using their digits. Among the many images in this book that bring me joy, my favorite might be the photograph of his ink-stained hands… To hold a thing in my hands that he’s made with his hands makes me want to make things with my hands.

You can read the whole foreword in today’s newsletter, “A Man of Letters.”

Persistent, connected and kind.

Most visions of the internet in 1995 were about individuals interacting with content online. It turns out that the internet (inter plus net) is actually about connection. The apps and businesses that were most successful connected people–to ideas, to things or mostly, to each other.

The current range of AI feels like content creation. You can have an AI write your high school essay, draw you a picture or invent a recipe.

But perhaps history will repeat itself. Perhaps developers will realize that persistent knowledge of what came before and who needs help and connection is the next frontier.

(Alas, history may also repeat itself when venture backed companies build networks that are seductive and sticky, and then, once we depend on them, will intentionally make them worse to earn more profit–but perhaps we can, forewarned, guard against this).

We’re not far from many people spending their entire day with Bluetooth earbuds on, particularly as augmented reality gives us information audibly. And of course, if our ears are connected, the system knows what we’re saying and hearing.

We’re already living in a world where much of what we say and do is intermediated by our phones and keyboards. Again, the system knows.

So… what happens when the AI in our lives begins acting like a thoughtful, patient and trusted friend? Not just like the AI in the movie Her, but more focused on our networks and connections. Who’s trustworthy, talented, available or in need… It knows what’s happening now, but also what happened yesterday. Not just to us, but to those in our circle and the people they know as well…

You’re about to throw out an old board game from the attic. The AI whispers, “Hold a sec, I think a neighbor down the street has been looking for something just like that–want me to sell it to him?”

A company seeking RFPs invites all its suppliers to submit confidential overviews of their supply chain. An AI reads the material and creates Pareto optimal connections, building a confederation of several suppliers who can work together to build something faster and more efficiently than any could do alone.

Your fridge knows you love organic strawberries, and organizes 100 neighbors to buy a farmer’s entire crop, reducing waste and risk and cutting costs for everyone.

Three people are leaving a conference and they’re all calling a car to take them to the airport. Perhaps the AI offers a carpool.

We’re headed off to a community meeting, and we let the AI know that if someone there is hiring for the kind of job we’re good at, we’re open to a connection.

This is a level of intimacy, attention sharing and data that dwarfs anything that has come before, and it brings with it huge issues of permission, control and privacy.

I can think of a thousand ways that this power could be misused, manipulated and go terribly wrong. I have also seen the internet go wrong too. But this is only the beginning of the AI age, and it might help to find a north star, a standard for what happens when the connection machine works for us, instead of against us.

Most of us talk, some of us do it for a living.

When your voice is on the fritz, it can affect your entire body as well as the way you approach your day. I’ve read all 25+ of my audiobooks myself, and I used to be able to complete each one in a day or two. Now it takes months. I wanted to share some of what I’ve learned the hard way.

First, a hack: Grether’s pastilles are a miracle. Not cheap, worth it.

Next, if you’re encountering vocal challenges somewhat regularly, consider getting a voice coach.

If it’s chronic, go to an ENT specialist and get scoped. Don’t take steroids unless three different doctors confirm you need them.

One cause of persistent vocal issues could be posture. I’ve found great success with in-person help from a coach certified in the Alexander Technique. It’s not invasive and sort of fun.

But here’s the latest thing I’ve had great results from. It’s free, easy and a little silly, and it really works. The official name for it is a semi-occluded vocal tract exercise, and you can do it two ways:

Get a straw and a tall glass of water, filled about three inches deep. You’re not going to be drinking the water.

First thing: Blow bubbles. Do it calmly and slowly and consistently for a full long breath.

Experiment with changing the shape of your mouth as you do. It’s lovely.

Second thing, which is surprisingly tricky at first: Blow bubbles while you’re humming.

[Thanks to Andrew Keltz for the insight.]

Feel better.

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.

Read it here.

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:

• data
• information
• knowledge
• understanding
• wisdom

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.