Ever since there has been high school, there has been the instinct to read the Cliffs Notes. The internet took this idea, added a gratuitous semicolon and perfected Too Long; Didn’t Read. This is the mistakenly proud assertion that we are far too busy and too important to read the whole thing, we skimmed a summary instead.
At first glance, it seems as though AI is good at this.
Why read four pages when you can read a few bullet points instead?
Or why bother sitting through Waiting for Godot, when the summary gives away the plot: “Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for the enigmatic Godot. They engage in meandering conversations and encounter other characters, but Godot never arrives, underscoring the absurdity and futility of existence.”
TL;DR is defensive. Not simply because it defends our time, but because it defends us from change and from lived experience. A joke isn’t funny because it has a punchline. It’s funny because something happens to us as the joke unfolds, and the punch line is simply a punctuation of that experience.
“Orange you glad I didn’t say banana,” isn’t funny by itself.
Ask someone who finished running a marathon–for many, the moment they crossed the finish line is not the most memorable part of the experience, and for those that find that it is, it only matters because of the tens of thousands of steps that came before.
When we lean into exploration, we’re far more likely to find something that matters. Because we worked for it.
[Ted Gioia has coined a great term: Dopamine Culture. Here’s the chart that goes with it]:
It’s easy to miss the point.
The graph and the data underlying it seem to indicate that if you’re a creator or consumer of any of the above, the righthand column is the place to be.
Cavitation happens here. We’re at a rolling boil, and there’s a lot of pressure to turn our work and the work we consume to steam.
The steam analogy is worthwhile: a thirsty person can’t subsist on steam. And while there’s a lot of it, you’re unlikely to collect enough as a creator to produce much value.
Back in the old days of ‘slow traditional culture’ there were plenty of conversations, music in the parlor and even daydreams about dating. But we didn’t count those. The real stuff was the solid stuff, the informal didn’t truly matter.
And now we live in a time where the previously informal is easy to measure.
But just because it’s measured doesn’t mean it matters.
The creators and consumers that have the guts to ignore the steam still have a chance to make an impact.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke
Try to imagine the you of twenty years ago holding a Rabbit R1, or using a cell phone or being able to listen to every song, ever recorded, for just a few dollars a month.
We don’t just take these once magic items for granted, now we express frustration that they’re not better or cheaper or faster. The fade is real and the half-life continues to get shorter.
It’s a sort of hedonic treadmill of tech, where we not only take a breakthrough for granted in just a short time, but we also raise the bar for what counts as magic next time.
If we depend on outside forces to find wonder and awe, we’re going to end up disappointed.
We don’t have to wait for a new technology to feel the magic. Instead, we have the chance to erase our expectations and simply notice it wherever we look.
Some restaurants keep a photo of the local reviewer in the kitchen. The thinking is that if someone notices she’s in the building, everyone can up their game.
And some musicians wait eagerly for A&R person to be in the crowd. If they really kill it tonight, a record deal might ensue.
The most resilient approach, of course, is to act as if.
What if this is your most important post, or your last one? What if the email you’re sending is going to be forwarded to your boss? What if…
We can’t know for sure. But we can act as if it’s going to happen.
Many marketers spend time with their CRM systems. Expensive cloud-based tools that automate Customer Relationship Management.
Maybe customers don’t want to be managed. They probably don’t.
It might be more useful to think of our most important work as customer relationship leadership.
CRL is voluntary. It’s done with customers and for them, not to them.
It’s not an app, it’s a point of view.
The new price-fixing scandal in the oil business helps us see what happens when industry leadership spends most of its creative time thinking about doing things to customers. This is a symptom of collusion, of stagnation and of false proxies about what’s important. The lazy path is rarely generative and often lurks in the shadows.
The intentional, noticed choices are obvious. “Vanilla or chocolate?”
But most of the choices we live with are unseen. They’re expensive, challenging and invisible.
When we plan an event with an outdoor component, we’re choosing to be anxious about the weather in the week leading up to the big day.
When we buy something with a credit card, we’re choosing the long-term cost of paying the ongoing debt.
When we stick with a deadend job instead of quitting today, tomorrow’s angst was a choice.
These invisible choices are all around us, often hidden by forces that would rather we didn’t think about them. And it’s usually easier to simply look the other way.
For the last thirty years, the easiest shortcut has been convenience.
If a marketer or a politician or an institution wants to gain acceptance, make it convenient. Tim Wu has pointed out that we’ll trade almost anything to save a few moments of hassle or thought.
But that doesn’t mean we’ve been spending our time and money on comfort.
They’re not the same.
Convenience in the short run often comes at the expense of comfort. The comfort of resilience, of kindness, of long-term satisfaction. The comfort of offering someone dignity, a hand up or knowing that we put our effort into something useful.
Perhaps the next cycle of our cultural development will be to find the courage to walk away from convenience and find comfort instead.
Not what we see when we’re present, but what do we see when we imagine we’re present?
In the early days of photography, the world was black and white, and sort of flat. It’s worth noting that no one who saw these pictures complained about the fact that they didn’t exactly match what the world was like… it was normal.
Color changed our perception of what normal looked like.
Movies and then Technicolor made the world seem more vivid when it was normal.
But then we took a big step backward. YouTube, compressed MP3 files and grunge typography made the world a bit compressed and janky. When we’re surrounded by this all day, our tiny screens start to get under our skin and shift our perception of the world, the same way a pair of eyeglasses with a slightly incorrect prescription give us an ongoing headache.
Then AI comes along. First, it polishes our writing. Not just your writing, but the writing all around us. It gets more even and consistent. You may have noticed that there are far fewer spelling mistakes to annoy us than there used to be.
The last century’s worth of video and film is about to snap into clarity and focus, challenging our memories of what it was like, and establishing a new reality.
The thing that’s vexing you: is it a situation or a problem?
Problems have solutions. If we care enough, we can find a way to solve a problem, but it might cost more money, require more effort or involve more risk than we’d prefer. If we’re ready to ease some of the constraints, that problem might go away.
Situations don’t have solutions. That’s why we don’t call them problems. There might be constraints we are not prepared to confront, or the structure of the situation may simply make it impossible to change.
If a problem is vexing us, we can use that irritation as fuel, finding the energy to deal with it. We can turn the moment into curiosity and forward motion.
And if it’s a situation? Then being vexed is a choice. If it’s helping you to be irritated, enjoy it. If not, then why bother?
Hunger and exhaustion are physically based. But being annoyed is a concoction based on expectations and the stories we tell ourselves. We can change the story if we try.
More than two-thirds of the companies surveyed said that they used NPS methodology with their customers. Some are using it to measure employee satisfaction as well.
The P stands for ‘promoter’, but of course, it doesn’t actually measure promotion.
If that many of your customers are actually promoting and recommending your business to others, you would be so busy you wouldn’t have time for a survey. “Would you recommend” is not the same question as, “how many people have you told?”
What the respondent is actually saying is whether or not they like you.
Being liked is important. Trust, comfort and delight are useful things to strive for.
Liked doesn’t get you promoted, though. People promote a brand or activity when it increases their status or the affiliation they have with others, not because they owe you something.
Smart marketers understand that peer-to-peer recommendations are scarce and precious, and we shouldn’t be distracted by an NPS that doesn’t actually measure that.
April 29, 2024
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