Some situations seem to call for an opponent. It might be our personality, the structure of the engagement or the way we’ve been taught to behave, but having an enemy seems to focus individuals and groups. For fifty years, America decided that the USSR was the enemy, and spent a … | Continue reading
If you care about a creative practice, my guess is that you’ve already seen Peter Jackson’s new Beatles movie. If not, go check it out. It’s a miracle that the movie exists at all… | Continue reading
If you care about a creative practice, my guess is that you’ve already seen Peter Jackson’s new Beatles movie. If not, go check it out. It’s a miracle that the movie exists at all. I mean, four of the most famous creative humans who ever lived, tenuously holding on to a fracturin … | Continue reading
The essence of baroque art and craft is its complexity. Difficult to create, overloaded with ornamentation, filled with grandeur and color and surprise, the focus is on the effort expended. And that dramatic display of effort has a place. It communicates a sort of emotional labor … | Continue reading
It’s thrilling. Nothing held in reserve. All in, leaving nothing behind. It’s easy to get hooked on this. And it’s easy to never experience it. The internet has made each path more attractive. It can put us into always-on mode, in a worldwide competition against infinite competit … | Continue reading
The original expression implies that preaching to the converted is a waste of time. After all, why bother marketing to people who are already on the team? The reality is that the people who aren’t enrolled in the journey are going to ignore you. They’re simply not open to being m … | Continue reading
For skilled information workers, job mobility has never been easier or more profitable. And yet, countless people stay where they are, without ever considering why. For example, there are hundreds of senior leaders and contributors at Twitter who haven’t quit their jobs in the la … | Continue reading
Launching today, a free ebook: Generation Carbon: A Carbon Almanac for Kids. A worldwide team of volunteers wrote, designed and illustrated this free PDF. The hope is that you’ll grab a copy and share it with ten people. That you’ll read it to your parents or to your kids. There … | Continue reading
For trivial matters, it’s efficient and perhaps useful to simply follow a crowd or whatever leader we’ve chosen. But when it matters, we need to make (and own) our own decisions. To do that effectively, consider: Do the reading Show your work Avoid voices with a long track record … | Continue reading
Why would someone buy a share of stock for $945? One reason might be that they think they can sell it tomorrow for $950. A more common reason is that someone bought it an hour ago for $940. Of course, this applies to more than equities. Why buy a Birkin bag for more than $25,000? … | Continue reading
Most of all, we’re experts in our own narrative, our feelings, our lived experience. No one has had that but us, and while it might be unexamined or instinctive, we’re the experts. Experts in who we associate with and what we choose to believe. And many of us are experts in what … | Continue reading
The first kind, the common kind, is when someone helps you with advice or labor to accomplish what you’ve already set out to do. The second kind, more rare and more useful, is when someone helps you realize that your original plan wasn’t as good as you thought it was, and helps y … | Continue reading
With the possible exception of hockey games, there have been few places in our modern lives where public interactions are supposed to be coarse. If (back when we could, and soon when we can again) you go to the theater, a museum, the mall, a restaurant, the library, school, the s … | Continue reading
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…” We’re standing on one foot, impatiently waiting for the shortcut, the method, the guarantee. Skip the preamble and the analysis–what’s your take? Don’t talk to me about genre and method and history. No time for that. What are we supposed to do right now? Pe … | Continue reading
There are some problems where a useful solution is a win for everyone. But not many. Certainly not the problems that have been around for a while. If there were a win win solution, someone would have probably found it already. For significant problems, someone is going to lose in … | Continue reading
This is a terrible reason to do something that makes things a little worse for other people. And a common one, of course. Much of the time, we’re willing to go out of our way to do work we’re proud of. Unless it would be inconvenient to do so. One of the reasons our best […] … | Continue reading
Your mileage may vary. Speeding up to get to a red light faster just wastes energy. Honking doesn’t make traffic go away. Doesn’t matter how fancy your car is, it’s not worth very much if they close the road. One of the worst ways to get to where you’re going is to always drive i … | Continue reading
The worst golfer in town came in last in the club tournament. Actually, that’s not true. The worst golfer didn’t even enter. Well, that’s not true either. The worst golfer doesn&#… | Continue reading
Any word that’s really important is also confusing. Words like trust, love, friend, fair, honest, lead, connect, authentic, justice, dignity–they have dozens of different meanings. Perhaps that’s because they’re important. It’s worth spending a moment to understand what we mean w … | Continue reading
Some CMOs and marketing types simply do ads and promo. Give them average products for average people and some money, and they’ll do the ad thing. And some are actually marketers. Marketing involves making a promise and keeping it. Marketers understand that your logo isn’t a brand … | Continue reading
When someone shares a new idea, or makes a pitch, or describes a dream, what would happen if you were enthusiastic? Perhaps positive thinking is contagious. Perhaps egging on the other person will help them explore the edges. And perhaps it will help them overcome their fear and … | Continue reading
Professionals put things away slowly so that they’ll be ready quickly when needed. Investing time now for time later. | Continue reading
High Noon is a cornerstone of American cinema, a sobering and memorable look at heroism and community. In the movie, the sheriff is facing near-certain death at the hands of a killer freed from prison. He has about an hour to gather a posse of deputies, because together they’ll b … | Continue reading
What’s better, a phone call or a zoom call? Which creates more intimacy, a meeting in person or a hand-written letter? The only answer is: it depends. It’s tempting to believe that being in a store, surrounded by sights, smells, packaging, crowds and helpful salespeople delivers … | Continue reading
You might have a list of them. In fact, many of us do, and consult it quite often. The list is defective for a number of reasons: It’s not accurate. There are things that aren’t right in our world that don’t appear on the list. Our personal list tends to be organized around thing … | Continue reading
Overhead recently: To a 10-year-old on his way to a baseball game, “Come home with a win.” To a 9-year-old at the supermarket, “I don’t think you’ll like that.” It’s pretty clear what lessons are being taught. | Continue reading
It is found or it arrives. It is hosted many places or it has a single home. It earns and delivers on permission, or it’s spam. It changes over time or it’s static. It’s the work of an individual or the production of a community. It’s valuable because of network effects, or in sp … | Continue reading
We’ve been naming generations for a long time. Demographers use it to begin a conversation about the changes around us. While a birth range doesn’t guarantee an outlook, the demographics and cultural shifts that a group shares tell us a lot about how they might see the world. And … | Continue reading
Some folks build their work on the frontier of impossible. Breakthrough coding, an astonishing new magic trick, a concerto that takes your breath away. It’s so remarkable that we’re tempted to believe that this is our job as well. Not every once in a while, but daily. To do what … | Continue reading
The worst golfer in town came in last in the club tournament. Actually, that’s not true. The worst golfer didn’t even enter. Well, that’s not true either. The worst golfer doesn’t even play. | Continue reading
Do work and get paid once. Build an asset and get paid for as long as it lasts. A retailer or a restaurant owner might work 18 hours a day–but the landlord makes just as much money from that … | Continue reading
The last fifty years have seen a worldwide effort to maximize one and eliminate the other. Marketers and technologists work overtime to create convenience. We’ve gone from hunting and growing our food to pressing three buttons on a phone to get it… And the cost of that convenienc … | Continue reading
Hustle uses shortcuts and effort to bend the conventions of society to get more than the hustler’s fair share of attention. Hustle burns trust for awareness. Because it’s a shortcut, hu… | Continue reading
When your watch stops, it’s unlikely that you believe that time is now standing still. It’s obviously the watch that’s broken, not time. But when a metric on our culture or a complex machine is functioning poorly, it’s easy to get confused. Is this work actually unpopular, or is … | Continue reading
Our new project, The Carbon Almanac, is now inviting supporting partners to join us. We are all volunteers and we’re focused on offering institutions a chance to amplify the conversation about climate change. (Partner organizations don’t have to be large, simply committed to help … | Continue reading
To feel sufficient, to be satisfied with what we have: Chisoku in Japanese. Of course, by some measures, there’s never enough. We can always come up with a reason why more is better, or better is better, or new is better or different is better. Enough becomes a choice, not a meas … | Continue reading
Hustle uses shortcuts and effort to bend the conventions of society to get more than the hustler’s fair share of attention. Hustle burns trust for awareness. Because it’s a shortcut, hustle might deliver in the short-run, but hustle is notably non-consensual. Few people want to b … | Continue reading
When you meet expectations, when you make a promise and keep it, when your quality is on spec—we say “of course.” On the other hand, if you relentlessly raise expectations, if you overpromise and add a bit of hype, you’re almost certain to fail to meet our dreams and hopes. At th … | Continue reading
It’s not a word, but perhaps it should be. If a competitor goes after your customers by offering them faster service, all day and all night, you’ve been anytimed. And if your boss, fearing that event, or simply trying to boost output for free, pushes you to be available all hours … | Continue reading
Life’s a tragedy. It always surprises us, and eventually, we all die. But tragedies don’t have to lead to catastrophes. A catastrophe is a shared emergency that overwhelms our interactions and narratives. Lately, they’ve become a business model and a never-ending part of our days … | Continue reading
If you work with your hands and your back, avoiding a heavy lift is totally understandable. For many of us, though, we work with time or with trust. If someone asks you to endorse their new project, “it’ll only take a minute,” they’re offering to save you time, but at the risk of … | Continue reading
For many ailments, physical therapy shows some of the best results. We can learn a lot from this for our own projects, organizations and narratives. Physical therapy often works better than pills or surgery. Here’s why: –it’s self-produced. Even though we work with a professional … | Continue reading
What would a focus group have said about the title of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird? Is it easy to understand, did you know what it’s about before you pick up the book? What about the consumer testing on a name like Nike or Starbucks? Some objective measures of new names and … | Continue reading
What’s the variance in customer service at your organization? Even if there’s just one employee, the question is: If an issue is handled by a committed employee having a good attitude, vs a cranky one who is a bit off–can the customer tell? One philosophy is to make this gap as s … | Continue reading
When an entrepreneur gets funded, it’s often difficult for them to start spending money on assets–the old limits fade slowly. What used to be smart is now dumb. What used to too risky is now the safe thing to do. When someone gets older or is injured, one of the dangers is that t … | Continue reading
Bad drivers do this often, everywhere I’ve ever been in the world. Instead of gracefully and safely slowing for a light they know will be red by the time they get there, or even a stop sign, they hit the gas and then slam the brakes. One big reason is that the certainty of on-the … | Continue reading
The typical online job site lists millions of jobs. And just about every one of them is a cry for expertise. From the title to the requirements, companies hire for expertise. Logic helps us understand that only one out of ten people are in the top 10% when it comes to expertise. … | Continue reading
If the original Nike swoosh, on a sheet of paper in a filing cabinet somewhere, disappeared, what would happen to the value of Nike? Or to the way you feel about your sneakers? If the negative of a famous photo is burned in a fire, or a painting is stolen from a museum, what happ … | Continue reading