Drowning is devastating, a tragic and painful way to go.

So much so that feeling like we’re drowning is a trigger, an overwhelming emotion that causes us to grasp, struggle and leave our best self behind.

It’s easy to experience this even when we’re out of the water. When the stakes are high and time is short, we can activate drowning mode, losing our focus, resilience, and generosity.

The ledge can be a useful way to talk ourselves out of the spiral.

If you’re in 8 feet of water, it’s easy to feel afraid. But once you realize that you’re only a few inches away from a ledge, one you can return to whenever you like, it’s possible to reset, to find your bearings.

It’s not that hard to imagine a ledge. Sure, the parts didn’t arrive on time, but our deadline isn’t for a few days, back to the ledge, let’s regroup and come up with a new plan. Yes, the project didn’t work, but our budget has enough slack in it that we can try again with a new project tomorrow.

The ledge is a combination of time and money. It’s the buffer between here and disaster. The ledge is a foundation, a place we can find our footing as we think about the next steps. And the ledge offers perspective, because we can realize that even if this moment feels momentous, it might not be.

Resilient project management and risk-taking requires investing in a ledge. When we put everything on the line and cut the timing to the absolute minimum, the stakes get higher and we expose ourselves to failure.

Part of the art of innovation is choosing projects we can afford to dance with.

And the daily emotional work is reminding ourselves that the ledge is right there. So we can refocus and go back to being our best.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the very small business, the freelancer knows each customer. By name, by volume, by preferences.

And in the huge business, expensive software, data analysts and relentless margin seeking pushes organizations to increase their yield.

But most businesses (and non-profits and groups) are somewhere in between.

We don’t think of our customer list as a spreadsheet, but it is.

Perhaps you know names, addresses, emails and purchase history–but it’s likely that the customers you pay attention to are the noisy ones, or the ones that left in a huff. We’re distracted, though, because they’re not the majority, or the profitable ones, or the ones that really matter in the long run.

Tools like numerous.ai were inevitable, but seeing it work is still something of a miracle.

Here’s a list of email addresses. Guess the first name of each customer.

Here’s a list of recent purchases. Do an analysis of which customers are the most loyal.

Here are our donors. Find out which ones respond to this sort of project.

Here’s a list of zip codes. Please build a table or graph to show us where are customers are clustered.

Here is our membership list along with recent attendees at our meetings. Who has dropped off in attendance and how should we contact them to see what’s up?

At a big company like Amazon, this is all used against the customers, creating dark patterns designed to extract more ad money while denigrating the user experience (but not enough to get people to leave).

At a small organization, though, it can be a breakthrough. It uses the smaller size of the organization to your advantage, because the insights can actually be put to use by a human. Used to make things better for the people who count on you.

This is worth the effort. And if you’re not doing it, you can hire a freelancer to do it for you. And if you’re looking for a new gig, this is the sort of project you can build a business around.

I came across this (ironically) anonymous quote recently: “The offline world is full of sticks, but the internet only has carrots.”

When we come together in groups, it can bring out the best in people.

When those groups are anonymous, porous and transient, though, the opposite can happen.

And mobs never helped anyone, ever.