This is where empathy lies, and it’s an easy chasm to fall into.
“I can’t imagine eating durian ice cream,” is not the same as “no one likes durian ice cream.”
We fail as marketers, editors and project managers when we can’t find the empathy to bridge the gap. It’s a lovely shortcut to make things for yourself, to imagine that you are the client, the reader or the customer. But most of the time, you’re not.
“It’s not for me, but it might be for you.”
Popular is easy to measure. Good, not so much.
Setting out to make something popular requires only a focus on the crowd and on the moment. Most pop music is popular simply because that’s what it was built to do.
Good work can be good without being popular. And so the two goals aren’t easily aligned.
It helps to begin by becoming comfortable with what good feels like to you. Because conflating it with popular is a trap.
After playing 498 days in a row, my score today in Bongo was the second-highest in the world:
There’s a difference between casual online games that have a right answer, and those that are open-ended.
In crossword puzzles and most of the games from the Times (like Wordle and Connections) you’re trying to guess what the puzzle constructor had in mind. This can lead to frustration, because the idiosyncratic nature of inventing clues and answers means that you might not be in sync with the person at the other end. They’re inherently closed systems.
Bongo, on the other hand, is generative and combinatorial. There are bazillions of possible right answers, and your goal is to find a right answer that’s worth more points than anyone else’s. It doesn’t matter that I invented the game, I have no advantage over everyone else, because we all begin with the same tiles.
For me, open-ended games are time well spent. Have fun.
It’s not slop because it was created by an AI. It’s slop because it’s slop.
I just read the first two pages of a sci-fi novel on my Kindle. The author proudly proclaims that the 400-page book was created without any AI whatsoever. Alas, the book is slop. The writing is overwrought and the dialogue is banal. If a page isn’t worth writing, it’s unlikely a chapter is.
Slop happens when a marketer who should know better stops trying. It’s when we prioritize volume over impact. If we measure the cost of what we create instead of its value, it’s likely we’ll end up with slop.
AI makes this easier, no doubt. But it pays to focus on avoiding slop, not in worrying how the slop is made.
The question is now, “Who approved this?” not “who made this?”
Pundits are saying that Netflix “lost” the bidding for Warner.
Actually, they won. They didn’t just win because they got a nearly $3 billion breakup fee.
They won because in just about every contentious public auction, the winner is the one who is willing to overpay the most.
The best way to win a bidding war is to not bid.
Orson Welles may have said, “Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.”
I think it’s more productive to imagine that “Justice is how society deals with luck.”
Good and bad.
It’s nice if you do, but it’s not required.
You’re not them. You may have had different experiences, been exposed to different ideas or simply be prepared to make different choices.
That’s okay.
What’s useful: loving the change you’re able to make. Being proud of helping people get from here to there. Focusing on utility and being of service.
You don’t have to invite them to your birthday party, but it helps to care about impact and transformation.
There are two feet of snow blocking your car from the road. This is a problem.
Except it’s not a problem if you don’t need to leave the house for a few days—the snow will melt on its own.
And it’s not a problem if you had decided to move to the island of Saba a few years ago. It never snows there.
Traffic on the way to an important meeting is only a problem because we didn’t leave twenty minutes earlier. The rent that’s hard to cover after a vacation—same thing.
The real world feels like the source of our problems. But our decisions over time might be the actual culprits, hiding in the corner.
Instead of treating time as a given and the real world as an impediment, what happens if we accept the real world and make different decisions about time?
Sarcasm is an easy way to amplify feedback.
It has two hidden costs:
If you have confidence in your standing and your idea, then sarcasm is simply getting in the way, because it undermines both.
