New technology often upends the careers of experienced professionals.
When the Mac offered typesetting to the masses, typographers were incensed. They had grown up with lead or photo composition, they understood why it was called a ‘case’ and they knew how to kern. The typographers warned us that we’d soon be inundated by ugly, careless or even unreadable type, and everything would get worse. They were half right.
There was a lot of bad typography, but some great innovations as well. And the typographers who stuck it out ended up with far more opportunities (and more creative outlets) than they originally had.
When digital photography arrived, the skilled craftspeople who understood Bokeh and f-stops warned us about the same thing. People took their own pictures anyway. Many were lousy. Some changed the art form. And there are still professional photographers, even if the workaday gigs have mostly faded away.
And many doctors don’t want you to google your symptoms. Because it can lead to bad outcomes, and because it undermines their status and authority… but it has also saved countless lives. There are more patients than doctors, and so we go ahead and do what feels good to us, not to them.
A copywriter might say that it’s never okay to have an AI do your writing, but that same person uses AI to retouch photos or do the first pass on their spreadsheets… They even use a spellchecker instead of a human editor. You’re a producer some of the time, but also a consumer, and the consumer in you wants the best available option, regardless of how it was made.
These technological changes often have negative side effects. They don’t always make things better. But they happen when consumers insist. Mass production, factory farming, frozen food–they replace craft with accessibility and efficiency.
The market doesn’t care that much about the hard-won expertise of those that came before. And the shifts create muck and slop and then, over time, quality and taste and expertise often find their footing again.
The best way to complain is to make good stuff.
April 23, 2026
Technology changes things. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.
When a powerful new technology arrives, it offers us wishes. Too often, we waste them, asking it to take on simple chores or offer us trivial conveniences.
We’re in the biggest moment of technical change of our lifetimes. What are you using your wishes for?
April 22, 2026
If we remove impediments that are in the way of where our customers seek to go, they support us.
But when we remove the friction that gives people traction on their journey, they flounder.
Remove the hassles that people don’t care about, but celebrate the hassles that make it worth the effort.
April 21, 2026
Sometimes, back pain is felt in the thighs or even the ankles.
But treating the part that hurts does nothing to address the real problem.
Most business challenges have a similar pattern–it might feel like the problem is your customer’s attitude or how busy a location is–but it’s probably a different problem, something more systemic, well-concealed and highly leveraged.
Find the system and you’re halfway to fixing it.
April 20, 2026
80 years ago, the most important person in the music business was James Petrillo. It’s difficult to imagine the head of the musician’s union on the cover of Time magazine, but there he was.
Petrillo saw how technology was changing an industry and pushed for changes in the flow of credit and royalties. The story of how recorded music, movies and then streaming turned into a mess is illustrative as we think about AI and creativity. Multiply all of this by a very large number and you’ll get the idea…
The change in tech created new winners, and threatened the status quo for those that were already succeeding. The union already existed, the ability to track contributions and cash flows existed, and the issues seemed clear.
Petrillo said that musicians performing on records was a bit like asking the iceman to produce refrigerators. The fridge destroyed the market for home delivery of ice, but at least the iceman didn’t have to actively participate in his demise. He asserted that once people had a record player, there’d be no demand for live music. (History has shown that the opposite was largely true).
He called two union strikes. During the first, the record labels had no musicians to cut records–but vocalists weren’t part of the union. This opened the door for singers like Frank Sinatra to build careers, and it was the beginning of the end of the big band era.
The strikes ended with a royalty stream designed to compensate session musicians–but it was paid to the union, not to the musicians. Petrillo used the money as patronage, spending money to organize live concerts outside of the major cities, meaning that the musicians who played on the records didn’t get the money… part-time performers in smaller towns did. And so did the bureaucracy.
As millions of dollars flowed into various organizations (some more well-run than others) the paperwork and litigation expanded. As recently as ten years ago, tens of thousands of musicians found their royalty checks held up by a complex bottleneck of conflicting claims and battling organizations–something that’s still being ironed out.
Along the way, every country in the world (except China, North Korea and the US) became part of a treaty that pays musicians on recordings a royalty for broadcast music. The US opted out because of lobbying by the radio industry. This costs labels and musicians about $200 million a year.
One particular story makes it clear just how messy this all is. Lee Oskar is one of the greatest harmonica players of our time. Originally from Denmark, he joined Eric Burdon (from the Animals) and joined WAR, which had a ton of hits in the 1970s. His distinctive tone and approach were a foundational element of their music.
Years later, the musician Pitbull hired a little-known harmonica player to perform an intro on his song Timber. Paul Harrington was asked to play just like Lee Oskar…
That song has more than 1.5 billion views on YouTube and has sold a lot of copies.
When Harrington mentioned to a fellow musician that he’d only gotten a $1,000 buyout for his performance, his friend (who was also a lawyer) encouraged him to file a claim, because the royalty agreement supersedes a buyout…
That class-action lawsuit led to a change in the royalty accounting system. At around the same time, involving the very same song, Lee Oskar sued Sony. The lawsuit against Sony in the US was dismissed because of complications in the rat’s nest of co-owners and licenses, but was able to go ahead on the international rights to the song.
Sony settled, Oskar is now officially listed as a co-songwriter on Timber, and he gets paid every time the song is played on the radio. And of course, every agency, union and lawyer along the way gets paid too.
Because of James Petrillo.
April 19, 2026
“Wait a second.”
That’s difficult advice. In a world that moves faster with each cycle, where urgencies are prioritized and last-minute saves are celebrated, it’s not always welcome advice.
And so we’ve ended up concerned. Fretting. Worried. Looking for the next thing to drop everything for.
The book of concern is more than a conceptual hack. It’s an actual physical intervention, and it might be worth trying for a week.
Write down the emergency of this moment. The one that’s taking your gaze away from your strategy and the long-term work you set out to do. Write it down.
If it’s still important in two days, go ahead and focus on it.
What you’ll probably discover is that almost all of the concerns go away on their own. The ones that don’t are definitely worthy of your scarce attention.
It might be an issue with the neighbor, a competitor or a customer. It might be a fashion concern or a social challenge. (If the building is on fire, please go ahead and put it out). Anything else, write it down. Affixing our concern to paper keeps it safely in one place, and the record we create becomes a useful reminder for next time.
April 18, 2026
What do your supporters tell their friends?
That’s the unseen force behind every successful brand, movement or idea.
Most people don’t care about you. They’re not listening to you, not wondering what you’re up to, and certainly not taking the time to seek you out. All you have is a small circle, your supporters.
And yet, we spend most of our time treating people like customers, not supporters. We try to turn strangers into people who do business with us, taking the friends and supporters we’ve earned for granted.
Instead, with planning and focus, you can create the conditions where your efforts strike a chord. When your customers become fans, they spread the word. When your story is true, relevant, focused, and sticky, new fans arrive. Not because it matters to you, but because it matters to them.
The second circle is out of your direct control, and it’s tempting to ignore it. But the second circle unlocks the change you seek to make.
April 17, 2026
That’s the appeal of it, of course. There isn’t a definitive study. There can’t be.
Even if we created a forty-year-long, double-blind twin study, there’d be room for someone to ask “what about?…”
It doesn’t matter that the peer-reviewed and consistent results we have are clear to those who read them with an open mind.
The attraction of simple stories about complex phenomena is that we get to make them up and imbue them with whatever reassurance, solace or threat we choose. Human beings didn’t evolve to be rational decision makers. We’re creators and consumers of stories, seeking status and affiliation, and prioritizing short-term feelings over long-term evidence.
It’s nice when a story that’s precious to us is reinforced by evidence, but it’s rarely essential. Belief isn’t dependent on facts, that’s why we call it belief instead of facts.
It’s helpful to wonder who benefits from sharing a particular story with us, and what it costs us to believe it.
April 16, 2026
What does it mean for us to own something?
If we own a piece of land and the rain washes the topsoil downstream, do we go and get the topsoil back?
Do we own our reputation? We have influence over it, but some of it was gifted to us without our knowledge, and other parts are influenced by forces out of our control.
Do we own responsibility? Is it something we take or acquire or accept?
We can try to own our past, but the best we can do is influence our future.
Ownership is a shared understanding, a construct that can shift depending on where we stand. It’s not always up to us, but it often works better if we acknowledge it.
April 15, 2026
- Pricing is an exchange of value. This for that.
But price is also a story.
- When you have competition, your story doesn’t have to justify the absolute price, simply the difference between you and the next-best option.
- Price is based on value, not on the cost of production.
- Thanks to Baumol’s cost disease, productivity doesn’t always correlate with the price of labor.
- Luxury goods are worth more because they cost more. If you sell a luxury item, raise your price and then improve the story to make it a bargain.
- It’s better to explain your fair price once than to apologize for low quality over and over.
- Asking, “what’s your budget?” is lazy and selfish. Your job is to figure out what your client wants, what they’re afraid of, and what sort of story they are eager to buy.
- When everything else is equal, we always want the cheapest option. But everything else is rarely equal.
- When someone says, “that’s too expensive,” what they mean is that the story you’ve told them so far (and the reputation you’ve earned) doesn’t match the price you’re charging. You probably don’t need a lower price, but you might need to earn a better story.
- “It might not be for you,” is almost always part of “we make the best (for someone).”
- Bargains, sales and coupons are a sport and a narrative. They’re not just a discount, they create their own sort of value and expectation.
- Convenience is often underappreciated as a component of value.
- The customers you get because you are the cheapest are the first ones to leave when someone else is even cheaper.
- The problem with racing to the bottom is that you might win.
- The most resilient slogan you can earn is, “you’ll pay a bit more, but you’ll get more than you paid for.”
April 14, 2026
