This is how so many newsletters of mine begin: just a few doodled mind maps in a notebook.

These pages led to the latest Tuesday letter, “Room To Think,” which was an excuse to mash up an Elisa Gabbert essay with my recent daily reading of Montaigne’s essays.

The subject line of last Friday’s newsletter “Don’t let your dreams give up on you” was something I heard a fourth grader say a few weeks ago. I immediately knew I needed to make it into one of my lifted type collages and it’s become a mantra of mine ever since.

You can read the newsletter here.

In hospitality and customer service, perfect is elusive. Someone is going to miss a shift, have a bad day, or fail to understand a situation.

But there’s a second kind of error, the one that’s far more common. When management makes bad choices, or underinvests in systems, training and people, it’s not really an error. It’s a choice that costs everyone involved.

These are choices with consequences. Don’t blame the actors if you have a lousy script.

When you built that automated phone tree to save a few dollars on customer service, you were choosing to lose some of your best customers. When you planned a lazy and boring menu for the group meeting at your hotel, you chose to send a message of carelessness. And when you ask under-appreciated and poorly-trained staff to step up and be the face of your organization, you’re risking your future.

Customer service is a chance to create delight and impact. It can amplify or undermine the marketing investments that you say are important–and yet, management often fails to see the systems they are building and maintaining. Begin with, “we’re doing these things on purpose, with intent.”

As in all things, getting the systems right is the foundation for everything else that follows.

Your hospitality strategy is the problem, not bad luck or uncaring staff.

We’ve forgotten how often society had an answer for that question.

Perhaps our shift away from a dictated answer not only gives us freedom, it also creates ennui and fear.

The culture of a generation or two ago told you where to study, what to study, how to cut your hair, what to wear, where to work, how to present within your class or identity, what to listen to, what to eat, what to drive, where to live and more.

Things have changed, slowly and then all at once.

You’re way less likely to get picked.

The gatekeepers have left the gates unlocked.

And yet, the indoctrination of ‘supposed to’ continues.

The disconnect is real. Like all change, it’s not easy. One of the early subtitles of my new book was, “figuring out what to do next.”

Owning our choices is a privilege that we can learn to dance with.

There are very few activities that are fully reversible.

Ice sculpture might be one of them. Once the ice melts, all the effort and information is lost, and refreezing lets you begin again with a new, fresh block of ice.

Of course, it’s not completely gone. The thing you made remains in your memory, and in the consciousness of anyone your artistry touched.

Yes, we leave a trail. Always.

Tread lightly, but make a difference.

There’s a lot of pressure to make things dumber. Better to make it dumb than to have someone simply walk away, apparently.

With so much to consume, and an unlimited amount to learn, there’s a race to make knowledge into a checklist item. Freon gas! Large language model! Coefficients! Many people just want to say a magic word and move on.

Of course, if we dumb things down, they become dumb.

This is not the same as simplifying concepts before adding nuance.

Four year olds easily learn to speak, and many kids in second grade can read. Not because they have a dumb version, but because someone cared enough to make the method simple.

There are simple explanations for quantum mechanics and for auto mechanics as well. They simply take a while to understand well enough to teach them to other people.

Start with basic principles, go slow and build. No need to dumb it down. Simple it up instead.

We have enough dumb. We need more simple.

I love Zamboni machines.

They’re ungainly, they’re slow but they’re also majestic. Like an elephant for ice hockey.

After each period, when the ice is chopped up by play, the Zamboni rolls out and leaves behind a sheet of perfect ice. Cold, smooth and untouched.

It’s useful to acknowledge that the same service is offered to each of us, every night. We wake up in the morning with a freshly smoothed-over day in front of us.

Our intentions determine our first few moves, the way we’ll engage with today’s ice. And those moves often lead to the next ones, and on and on, until the day is over.

Add up enough clear ice days and the pattern becomes set.

There are lights, camera and action, but mostly there’s the unreality of making it fit.

Happily ever after, a climax at just the right moment, perfect heroes, tension, resolution and a swelling soundtrack. Every element is amplified and things happen right on schedule.

Consume enough media and we may come to believe that our life is carefully scripted, and that we’re stars of a movie someone else is directing.

This distracts us from the truth that real life is more muddled and less scripted. There is no soundtrack. We’re actually signed up for a journey and a slog. Nothing happens ever after. It’ll change, often in a way we don’t expect.

We have no choice but to condense a story when we want to film it. Our real story, on the other hand, cannot be condensed, it can only be lived. Day by day.

Points aren’t just for games. Points are how we keep score and decide what to do next. Pick your scorekeeping wisely.

Too much focus on the score can bend us or break us, pushing us to engage with too much focus and without regard for balance.

And our attachment to obvious points strips us of our agency and independence.

If it’s subtle, variable and up to the user, the uncertainty can amplify our insecurity. “Wear festive clothing,” is an unwelcome line on an invitation, because the point system is unclear. How do I fit in? How do I not lose, or even win?

On the other hand, if the points on offer are industrialized, transactional or predictable, it quickly dehumanizes us into profit-seeking automatons. But at scale, this sort of easily communicated metric is common.

The word ‘jerk’ describes what happens to a human who is controlled by an assembly line (or a horse by a whip). A visitor to the first Ford assembly line was amazed at how the stopwatch and the pursuit of humans-as-a-resource mindset was turning people into puppets.

Points and compliance. Choose carefully.

Today’s newsletter might be my favorite I’ve ever sent out:

I figured a letter sent out on such a Tuesday better be full of delight. Luckily, today we have the marvelous Lynda Barry with us. To celebrate the release of the paperback edition of her masterpiece What It Is, she answered a batch of my questions via the United States Postal Service…

No artist has had a bigger impact on my work, so you can imagine what this meant to me!

You can read the whole interview here.

Filed under: typewriter interviews

There’s a huge difference between carrying a stethoscope and being a doctor.

And being a clown requires far more than getting a clown suit.

Entrepreneurs with business cards, slick websites and mission statements are confused. That’s not the hard part.

If the costume puts you in the right frame of mind, that’s great. But the hard part is the important part.

Can you list the parts that matter? (hint: they might be the parts you’re avoiding.)

Once you decide to write a book about strategy, it raises the bar for having a strategy for the launch.

People generally focus far too much on the launch of a project. Rocketships need a perfect launch, because just about everything after the launch is simply ballistic. But most of us don’t work at Cape Canaveral.

The world of books is a metaphor for a lot of industries, where old methods aren’t working well but persist in sticking around. First-time authors are often pushed into a cycle of hustle and scarcity, which leads to burnout and disappointment.

The alternative isn’t easy, but it’s worth embracing. It can be effective in more than just a book launch.

Celebrate the true fans

The seductive promise of the book industry (or movies, or fashion, or any business that has “star maker machinery”) is that they will somehow introduce your idea to strangers.

It certainly worked for JD Salinger and even Joni Mitchell. But it hardly works that way now.

This is Strategy had a great launch, perhaps the most successful book I’ve done in years, because 1,000 people showed up first and made a difference. This opened the door for others who wanted to be part of the conversation.

In their rush to reach strangers, traditional publishers ignore the opportunity to dance with people who are already excited. In my case, thanks to purple.space and the loyal readers of this blog, there were folks eager to offer me the benefit of the doubt.

Creating the launch package, with seven books, the collectible (and delicious) chocolate and the powerful strategy deck (check them out) gave this group of magical people first dibs on something special, as well as a chance to share it.

The first step to publishing a book well begins long before you decide to write a book.

Create the scaffolding for the idea to spread

Books aren’t unique, but the math is particularly compelling: They never achieve any of their useful goals in the first week. A network TV show used to get all of its viewers the first and only time it ran. A book, on the other hand, is worth writing if people are reading and talking about it years later.

The launch is a chance to model that behavior. If the launch simply focuses on getting the word out, it’s likely that the word will fade over time. But, if people talk to one another as part of what you’re doing, they’re more likely to continue to do so.

Last week, in hundreds of cities around the world, readers came together to talk about strategy. Not about my book, but about their strategy and how they can improve it. More than eighty bookstores stepped up to volunteer their spaces, and the book became a catalyst for conversation. Getting a copy wasn’t the point–talking about the work to be done was.

Ignore false proxies

How many people liked that post on Instagram? How did the book rank on the Times list? What did the first reviewers have to say?

It’s so easy to see, tempting to manipulate, and, ultimately, pointless. The proxy of the Times list has been so manipulated that it’s now meaningless–and the work publishers and authors put into shifting their efforts into this antiquated measurement is distracting and ultimately wasted.

A false proxy is convenient, vivid and unhelpful. It’s like asking a programmer how many words per minute they can type. It might be useful to be a fast typist, but it doesn’t help you become a great programmer.

Normalize the idea

I did more than 80 podcasts that launched last week. (I’m grateful for the passionate people that power this medium, and delighted by the magic of our conversations). That might seem like a way to get the word out to promote a book, but that’s not really what’s happening. People don’t usually hear a podcast and then open their phones to buy a book.

Instead, a book is a chance to have a conversation. The conversation is the product, the book is just the catalyst.

When an author and publisher spend the time and effort to produce a book, they’re actually demonstrating a commitment and sending a signal that this is worth talking about. The conversations I did, though exhausting, were a foundation for the conversations I hope that others will have going forward.

Successful non-fiction books are now a souvenir of an idea that is spreading and worth understanding.

Abundance instead of scarcity

For four hundred years, the only way to get a book on a store’s bookshelves was for some other book to come off the shelf. There wasn’t enough room for it to be any other way.

Now, with online shopping and digital formats, there’s infinite shelf space. It’s “and” instead of “or.”

That’s one reason why the launch matters so much less than it used to–it’s not a useful proxy for shelf space any longer.

My publisher understands the new math. Instead of focusing on limited access and short-term measurements, the posture is to be promiscuous with the ideas and to weave together communities of practice and interest. The magic of an idea is that if I share it with you, we both have it.

My launch partner on the audiobook has a similar mindset. While the default online marketplace model is to hold search hostage, keeping a huge share of the proceeds in exchange for offering a scarce slot in their store, there are new options. Discovery doesn’t just happen in the online store’s search box. Since most of the readers seeking the book in the early days already know my work and can find this page, I can bypass this scarce resource and offer a reader and author-friendly alternative.

Abundance is generative, and it also gives us room for gratitude. The acknowledgments of a book are my favorite part to write, because so many people, people not mentioned on the cover, are involved in producing and delivering an idea of value. I don’t get to list all the readers, of course, or the people they talk to about the book, and that’s the real point of this post, and the book itself.

If you want to change a system, change the culture. And if you want to change the culture, it helps to create the conditions for people to step up, talk about it, and take action.

Periods were an extraordinary invention. It took thousands of years of writing before we settled on this simple convention.

The most direct way to improve your writing is to make your sentences shorter.

I was reading a magazine article yesterday and was rapidly losing interest. The topic appealed to me, but I couldn’t keep reading. Then I noticed that halfway through the first column, I was still on the same sentence.

We have trouble keeping that long a string in our heads at once.

You can make sentences too long.

But it’s hard to make them too short.

Today’s newsletter was an excuse to link these three books at my spot on the kitchen table — Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, my late summer/fall diary (started on Oahu back in August), and Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three, the final installment in his sketchbook series.

It was also an excuse to post these drawings from my sketchbook:

You can read the whole newsletter here: “On memory and notebooks.”

You are someone’s ancestor.

Most immediately, you are the ancestor of the you of tomorrow.

That’s why we don’t spend every penny in our bank account, why we put leftovers in the fridge, why we earn a degree–it’s a gift to the you of tomorrow.

Each of us have a way of thinking about our ancestorhood.

The circle of now is how far into the future you’re hoping to make an impact. Do you care enough to invest in a thousand tomorrows? What will you invest in (or sacrifice, depending on your point of view) to receive in the future?

And the circle of us is how many people you’re considering in the actions you take today.

The most convenient, easiest and visceral choice is to make no choice at all. Keep your circles small, focused on pleasure and the short-term win. If we don’t think about it, this is what we might collide with. No friend at all to our descendants, including our future self.

When we’re at our best, though, we expand those circles, creating generative possibility for ourselves and those around us. Everyone feeds their circles, the opportunity is to make them bigger.

Bina Venkataraman has written about this better than I ever could.

Choose to choose the circle you want to be part of. Become the ancestor you’d like to thank.

There is a significant difference between, “I promise,” and “I’ll do my best.”

Promises are difficult to keep and ought to be offered with that in mind. Doing our best is assumed.

Someone I’ve worked with over the years happened to be driving down my street. I called out and said hello…

They ignored me. So I repeated myself.

“Oh,” they said, recognizing me. “It’s you.”

We’re more likely to see, hear and care if the person over there is actually a person. A person we know, or admire, or recognize.

If you write a nasty email to a company, it might make you feel sheepish if someone actually responds. “I didn’t know you were going to read it…”

It’s easy to exclude people who aren’t like us, who might have a disability or come from a different background or group.

Not just exclude them, but not design for them, account for them, listen to them or see them with dignity.

Sometimes, marketers, musicians or speakers dig themselves into a solipsistic rabbit hole.

They’ve heard their stuff before. They think everyone else has too.

So they bury the lede, look for new laughs and most of all, try to avoid boring themselves.

Which often leads to confusion or controversy or, most of all, a muddy message.

You’re not speaking up to entertain yourself. You’re here to teach the next group of people who need to hear from you.

Empathy in communication requires you to repeat the stuff that works as you continue to explore the next layer of what might work even better.

In the words of my late friend Jay Levinson, “Don’t change your story when you’re bored, or when your partner is bored, or when your team is bored. Change your story when your accountant is bored.”

In the words of a reader, the newsletter is “super-juicy this week.” I had the most fun sharing a bunch of Halloween links:

2. Spooky reading: I really don’t think you can go wrong with the classics. I love Frankenstein, Dracula, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — as with many classics, they’re much weirder than you can even imagine. I also love short story collections — a big favorite of mine in recent years was Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories.

3. Spooky ear candy: If you’re throwing a Halloween party, I made a silly little “Monster Mash” playlist you can throw on. (I love this Halloween Nuggets: Monster Sixties A Go-Go box set.) I also recommend Walter Martin’s Halloween episode. If you just want some solo October vibes, check out my mix “The October Country.” And I told you about Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee back in April, but it’s now available on Bandcamp. Probably my favorite album released this year — check out the song “Dracula.”

4. Spooky viewing: We watched the original 1942 Cat People with the kids and they seemed to dig it. I love those old horror movies produced by Val Lewton — we might try I Walked With A Zombie on them next year. Other hits with the kids are the classic Universal monster movies like Frankenstein and Creature from the Black Lagoon. I’ve heard Over the Garden Wall is good, but haven’t checked it out yet — there’s a new two-minute stop motion film coming soon to celebrate its 10th anniversary. If you need something lighter, there’s always It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown — preferably from a bootleg VHS rip with vintage commercials, since Apple TV owns the streaming rights now and it won’t be broadcast on TV. (I’ve stopped relying on streaming media for our holiday favorites and buy classics I know we’re going to watch again on physical media.) For really little ones, I recommend Room on the Broom.

You can read the rest here: “Digging deep.”