A car cut me off on the highway the other day. The car was going nearly 100 mph. Was the car a new Porsche 911 GT3 or a used Toyota Camry? The thing is, there are more than 1,000 times as many Camrys on the road. But our instinct is to pick the vivid and […] | Continue reading
Does it need defending? The sign on some bushes near a park in my town says, Beware: Bee’s. A local merchant adds a note to some receipts that says, Your awesome. It’s tempting to speak up and point out that the sky comma is showing up where it shouldn’t. And missing when it migh … | Continue reading
I was happily pedaling along on the rail trail when three spandex speedsters blew by me on their handmade carbon bikes. For a moment, I was disheartened. What’s the point–they’re speedy, I’m not. Then I realize that it’s not a bike race, it’s a bike ride. There is no winning, jus … | Continue reading
The average YouTube video gets five new views every day. Let’s parse that for a second. 5 billion YouTube plays a day, spread over about a billion videos means that while some videos live in the short head and get millions of views, there are a huge number of videos that get fewe … | Continue reading
We’re testing a brand new way to host a charity auction, and I’m hoping you can check it out and even bid to support BuildOn. In this post, I want to take a moment to explain the attraction and risk of unstable equilibrium, and there’s also a fun contest at the end… If you drop [ … | Continue reading
Contrary to expectations, written contracts don’t have to be adversarial. In fact, the effective ones rarely are. When you hand someone a release, a royalty agreement or even a partnership document, it pays to point out the gnarly parts, the controversial bits and the ones that a … | Continue reading
When we show up to bring humanity to work, we’re making a choice. It involves risk and effort and emotional labor. We’re here to make a change happen, and we’re giving something to make that happen. So it’s a vote. A vote for the customer we seek to serve. A vote for the boss and … | Continue reading
The first step is to imagine what the people you serve want and care about it. The second is to figure out why they don’t have it yet. If you can help people get to where they seek to go, when they’re ready to get there, the stuff called marketing gets significantly easier. | Continue reading
When someone acts in a surprising way, we can begin to understand by wondering what they might be afraid of. | Continue reading
The candidate running for re-election offers truth. This is what I did, I would like to do it again. The candidate coming out of nowhere offers hope. We can’t know but we can imagine. Kickstarter offers hope. No reviews, no tests, simply a promise of what might be. Book publisher … | Continue reading
If the ferry is leaving in fifteen minutes, do you drive faster than normal to get to the dock on time? If someone is driving close behind you and pressuring you to turn when you don’t feel safe, are you more likely to go for it? We can do our work as fast as makes […] | Continue reading
It’s tempting and fun to argue about the logo. About the way the toilet paper is hung. About how to load the trunk of the car. These sorts of arguments work precisely because they don’t matter. At all. And they distract us from the incredibly difficult work of discussing the thin … | Continue reading
Magicians know where the trapdoors are, what’s up their sleeves and how to hide the ball. And yet, mechanical skill is just the first step in being actually good at magic. The real skill is in finding the empathy to imagine that someone else might believe. To do the trick for the … | Continue reading
At the dawn of the plastic age, it was a cheap substitute. The word “plasticky” is not a compliment. Over time, the plastics industry developed new finishes, colors and most of all, cultural impact, and extra (wasted) plastic packaging was seen first as convenient, then as a sign … | Continue reading
Some fields of endeavor continue to narrow down the unknown, in search of the recipe, the efficient method of industry. And others live on Feynman’s expanding frontier of ignorance, where each closed door leads to several newly opened ones. That’s a fundamental choice in our work … | Continue reading
Then neither is “yes.” Enrollment requires choice. PS one of my all-time favorite encore episodes of Akimbo is out this week: How to get into a famous college. | Continue reading
There’s a difference between intellectual and smart. A plumber is smart, they know how to do a skilled and effective job on the task at hand. Intellectualism isn’t about practical results, it’s a passion for exploring what others have said, though this approach is sometimes misus … | Continue reading
…choose your future. It’s an odd way to think about your project, your job, your startup, but there’s little that matters more. There are two key elements: At one extreme is the first few years of Google’s growth. The salesforce didn’t matter–the customers showed up on their own, … | Continue reading
There’s often a choice between following the cultural dictates of a given group or seeking out demonstrable facts and the scientific method. Which do you expect most people would choose? Which would you choose? When we revert to a testable analysis of what works, we’re relying on … | Continue reading
There are two kinds of coincidences. The first is the one that we often talk about. It’s the make-believe magic of two things occurring that we didn’t expect to occur. When you and your long-lost college roommate end up randomly sharing adjacent bowling lanes when you’re 72–that’ … | Continue reading
Someone is going to end up with 10,000,000 followers. Someone is going to post the next viral TikTok. Someone is going to build a meme that spreads around the world. But it probably won’t be me and it probably won’t be you. Buying lottery tickets might be fun, but they’re a lousy … | Continue reading
It’s simple: This surgery will fix your problem and you’ll be better. It’s complicated: Changes in lifestyle, diet and attitude will, over time, help you feel better. Or… Our enemies are bad, and we’re good. Vote for me. The world is a big place that is filled with nuance, shifti … | Continue reading
But not all real problems lead to good businesses. There are problems all around us. People need housing, health care and food. They want delight, belonging and status. When a company shows up in the marketplace with a product or service that people eagerly choose to buy, it’s po … | Continue reading
What do we get in exchange for our work? There’s pay, of course, and the satisfaction of a job well done. There’s stress and human interaction, learning and physical exertion. We get the drama of what might happen next and the delight of actually pulling it off. And mostly we get … | Continue reading
Of course, we think we’re right. That’s why we’re sharing our opinion. But when there’s a disagreement, or we’re predicting the future, it’s likely that someone will turn out to be incorrect. Sometimes, being wrong is a minor embarrassment, with very little real cost. And sometim … | Continue reading
The early adopter bought an iPhone in 2008 and never looked back. They played a few games of pickleball and then joined a club and bought the equipment. They picked up a new magazine on the newsstand and then subscribed, and they bought the new bestseller and then read the author … | Continue reading
The trick is knowing where it is and using it well. Wanting control doesn’t always mean needing to have control. Sometimes it is simply a desire to be acknowledged. HT to Brian. | Continue reading
The cool thing is always a little out of reach. And for most of us, once we get it, it’s not seen as cool any more. This is not an accident. One definition of cool are things that are just out of reach. | Continue reading
I’m told that the hardest part of being a teaching golf pro isn’t helping adult golfers develop a good swing. It’s getting them to stop using a bad one. Our position feels so fragile, we hold on very tightly. Competence, status and connection are fleeting yet hard-won. We can oft … | Continue reading
When we’re in the middle of a cultural swirl, it’s normal to believe that everyone else is too. That’s part of the magic of a cultural swirl–it’s our friends, our work, our world. Most of these moments are actually tiny pockets. An episode of the much-talked-about TV show Success … | Continue reading
Marketing is generally about action. Marketers seek to create the conditions for a change to happen, for people to accomplish their goals and to satisfy their needs. But since 1950, some marketers have worked in a different direction. To sow confusion and doubt, and most of all, … | Continue reading
[a note to a frustrated friend, just starting out on a long career] There are three reasons that our goals might not be achieved. In order of palatability, they are: Perhaps the goals are too lofty, too based on chance, unlikely for anyone to achieve, surrounded by barriers that … | Continue reading
Growth usually feels risky. The feeling is a protection mechanism, a way to avoid failure or even the fear of failure. Of course, risk also feels risky (or at least it should). Differentiating between the two is difficult, which is why finding institutions, methods or coaches tha … | Continue reading
Everyone is entitled to their own taste. But this isn’t the helpful answer to the question, “is this good?” Whether it suits your taste might be irrelevant. “It doesn’t resonate with me” is not the same as “No one will like this.” The professional understands that they need empat … | Continue reading
That makes it easy. “I’m in favor of unfiltered online commentary (without the misogyny, racism and mob manipulation.)” “I’d like to run a marathon (without getting tired).” “I’m in favor of strict copyright law (except for the endless © trolls and with just the right amount of f … | Continue reading
What if there were a pipeline into your day, a series of emails or posts or feeds that had nothing but nice things, positive feedback and encouragement coming your way? Amazingly, you could build something like that in just a few minutes and have it forever. If the bad news (comm … | Continue reading
That’s not the same as raising the average. With the advent of the high jump, the idiom raising the bar became well understood: If you can’t jump over the bar that the current leader cleared, you don’t win. But most of the innovations that change our culture don’t actually increa … | Continue reading
The scientific rule of thumb is simple: When you make a bold claim, you need significant research to back it up. Telling us that eating vegetables is healthy can be justified by a fairly simple high school science paper. But if you want to claim that the moon is made of celery an … | Continue reading
Among the top 500 grossing Hollywood movies of all time, this movie is the most profitable in return on investment. And among all Hollywood movies in the top 1,500 at the box office, Paranormal Activity is far and away the highest return, outperforming almost any investment the s … | Continue reading
It’s easier than ever. Solvents, power tools, market research, AI, committee meetings, online reviews and ennui are all aligned in one direction. To fit all the way in. Of course, once you sand off all the edges, it’s hard to get traction. Hard to find the texture or anything wor … | Continue reading
Thanks to everyone who has read, talked about and taken action around my new book, The Song of Signficance. If you have a chance to post a review, that would be great. And you can find the podcasts here. The first step in making things better is talking about it. | Continue reading
The hard part isn’t good ideas. It never has been. The hard part is choosing. Ask GPT for ten subtitles for your book, or sixteen ways to hold a surprise party, and you’ll be delighted at how useful they are. Ask Dreamstudio or Kittl for some logo designs, same thing. There is cr … | Continue reading
If so, it might be worth learning. If so, it might pay to let someone who has learned it take care of it. Coding is a skill. But it’s not clear that the person who knows how to code should be doing your design. Teaching is a skill. But simply because someone is good at […] | Continue reading
Robert Johnson is known as the king of the Delta blues. One reason is that his small output was brilliant. The other, bigger reason is that the recordings that remain of his short life are among the earliest that sound good… most audio recordings from before 1936 sound antique an … | Continue reading
If you go to a health food store and buy some pills with selenium, colloidal silver or other mysterious substances in them, it’s possible that they’ll make you feel a bit better. On the other hand, if you take a large dose, you’ll get sick or possibly die. In very small doses, al … | Continue reading
A new business is complicated. It involves weaving together suppliers, partners, customers, processes, technology, leases, employees, logos, capital and more. Along the way, it’s easy to get distracted, but focusing on the hard parts is a useful way to move forward. You could wor … | Continue reading
One takes a little more effort than the other. While throwing shade might be more fun, it eventually runs out of energy. It’s designed to end conversations, not start them, to intimidate, not encourage. Turning on lights helps everyone. | Continue reading
Part of the challenge of hanging out with cannibals is that it’s very difficult to get a good night’s sleep. The math of finding a group of people that cares about community is pretty compelling. While individual selfish choices might feel productive in the moment, if they underm … | Continue reading