A Hard Day’s Night took less than 15 hours from idea to finished record. More Than a Feeling, from Tom Scholz and Boston, took five years. Each pleased their audiences. One is not 1,500 times more valuable than the other.
Sometimes, work that requires effort leads to scarcity, and that scarcity can increase its value. But not always.
And just because we put in effort does not mean we deserve the audience to reciprocate with a similar amount. Seven years to write a Ph.D. thesis but a professor on the committee might spend an hour reading it. The student’s effort is not related to the committee’s.
The mythology of creation seems to beg us to calculate the effort when computing the value. But in practice, buyers rarely do.
If the creation is what the audience needs or wants, it actually doesn’t matter how hard it was to create, or who or what created it.
This creates an interesting challenge when it comes to education or fitness. Is the point of assigning an essay to demonstrate that a student can work hard, or to challenge them to have the good taste and judgment to hand in something of quality? Is the trainer at the gym pushing you to go fast/lift a lot, or simply creating the conditions for you to do just a bit more than you did last time?
Focusing on absolute outcomes when we’re trying to improve relative effort is a trap. “A for effort” is a legitimate grade, but even in school, the system rarely chooses to actually do this–the natural writer or athlete gets accolades, not the person who tried harder or overcame obstacles.
When developing our skills, effort is essential. But when engaging in the marketplace, I’m not sure it matters. We should be consistent about which we’re seeking to reward.
They lie in focus groups, they lie on surveys and they lie to themselves.
Culture can be seen as an organized lying function. Be aware of what other people are thinking and make choices about your preferences so you can fit in.
Without this effect, we wouldn’t have trends, fads or hits.
Part of our work as marketers is to create the conditions for people to happily do what they were hoping they could do all along.
It doesn’t have to be well-crafted, historically important or aesthetically unique. It simply needs to be famous.
Celebrity art is famous, with a story and thus emotional resonance. It’s a souvenir for our eyes, a chance to have proximity without ownership. It conflates familiarity with scarcity, the power of in-person experience with the context of our culture. It’s simultaneously a statement of status and a signifier of connection.
It shows up in more places than we realize. Once an egg cream joint is Instagram famous, the line out the door is yet another example of how much we want to be near something that others have noticed.
Plenty of art is good enough to qualify for celebrity. But celebrity only happens after the network has kicked in. It’s more random than we’d like to admit.
What would it take to make your art, in whatever form, worthy of celebrity?
We transferred an idea from engineering to culture, but it’s incomplete.
If you build a watch that doesn’t tell time, it’s fair to say it doesn’t work.
But when a critic says, “that joke didn’t work,” after seeing a comic perform to a raucous audience, what they probably mean is, “that didn’t work for me.”
The problem might not be the comic. It might be the critic.
“It’s not for you,” is a useful, almost essential way to navigate the creation of our cultural work. If you say it too often to the people you were seeking to serve, your work needs improvement. But when you say it to a critic you never intended to please, you’re opening the door to serving the people you do care about.
“How few people can we get away with?” That’s a question many bosses think hard about. Automate. Streamline. Improve productivity and take humans out of as many tasks as possible. It’s a time-tested way to create profits and to increase a certain kind of reliability. Claude Code is popular with many organizations for precisely this reason.
“How can we include more people into this process?” is a less popular but often more valid way to create value. In an organization that is in the business of bringing insights, humanity and care to problems, more involvement from people creates better outcomes. The challenges make it far more valuable.
Which sort of organization would you like to work for?
When new creation technologies arrive, they make the best a little worse and the bad a lot better.
Desktop publishing made every local garage sale sign a lot more legible, but can’t quite replace the hand-kerned and tweaked typography of the era before.
A smartphone in your pocket takes far better video of the family cookout than a super 8 camera ever could, but it’s no match for Hitchcock shooting in 35mm.
Autotune makes an average singer much better, but a world fueled by autotune might not have room for Tom Waits.
Of course, all of this matters more than ever, because AI is the great smush.
Most forms of human expression are smushed by a decent AI. None of it is as good as genius-level human work, and much of it is better than what was average a generation ago.
The smush creates volume, volume that often redefines our understanding of quality. And that volume establishes a new standard, until it gets smushed again.
You would think that the smush creates more demand for distinctive, handmade, human work. And that’s true–remarkable works of genius and originality have a chance to do better than ever. But the smush harms the market for pretty-good or even very-good human work. Because there’s less of that, less genius slips in as well.
Avoiding the tools is optional. Pushing harder than ever for the top tier isn’t.
