It’s a great book, it has no typos!
And you really have to check out this hotel, it's dark in your room at night. And quiet, too.
Quality is now a given. Quality alone is not remarkable.
Surprise and delight and connection are remarkable.
Turning passion on its head
Instead of, "do what you love," perhaps the more effective mantra for the entrepreneur, the linchpin and maker of change might be, "love what you do."
If we can fall in love with serving people, creating value, solving problems, building valuable connections and doing work that matters, it makes it far more likely we're going to do important work.
Why don’t authors compete?
There's an apocryphal story of a guy who went for his final interview for a senior post at Coca-Cola. At dinner, he ordered a Pepsi. He didn't get the job.
And most packaged goods companies would kill to be the only product on the shelf, to own the category in a given store.
Yet, not only do authors get along, they spend time and energy blurbing each other's books. Authors don't try to eliminate others from the shelf, in fact, they seek out the most crowded shelves they can find to place their books. They eagerly pay to read what everyone else is writing…
Can you imagine Tim Cook at Apple giving a generous, positive blurb to an Android phone?
And yet authors do it all the time.
It's one of the things I've always liked best about being a professional writer. The universal recognition that there's plenty of room for more authors, and that more reading is better than less reading, even if what's getting read isn't ours.
It's not a zero-sum game. It's an infinite game, one where we each seek to help ideas spread and lives change.
It turns out that in most industries in the connection economy, that's precisely what works. People happily tweet each other's handles to their followers and give references to others that are looking for jobs. When a business that's comfortable not having 100% market share happily recommends a competitor, they're sending a signal about trust and confidence and most of all, about feeding the community first.
The competition isn't the person next to you on the web, or the store. The competition is none-of-the-above.
Along those lines: Here's an End-of-summer book roundup
The best thriller of the summer, juicy all the way through, is Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. I'm relishing the audio version, forcing myself to go slowly, a chapter at a time…
Brian and Dharmesh are back with a new edition of their classic on Inbound Marketing.
David Meerman Scott delivers with a book that challenges a whole new industry: selling.
Shane Snow does a regression analysis to find out how some organizations (and people) manage to breakthrough in less time and make a big ruckus. He calls them Smartcuts.
As always, Sam Harris will make you think hard, about thinking.
Jenny Rosenstrach is back with more on creating a family dinner for those who don't believe they can. And my cookbook of the summer is from Oleana in Boston…
Steve Almond's football book will make fans angry. The question is: can you listen to an argument when you don't like where it's leading? And here's one about famous colleges.
Michael Schrage has written a book about innovation via 5×5, one that people will be referring to a decade now. Recommended for urgent pre-order.
Announcing a fall internship
I'm hiring one or two paid interns. It's a great opportunity to learn, to experiment and to get some hands on experience.
Find all the details right here. If you know someone who might be interested, I'd appreciate it if you would forward this to them.
The end of everyone
I'm not sure if it was ever possible to say, "everyone loves ___," "everyone respects ___" or even, "everyone really doesn't like ___", but there's no doubt at all that this isn't true any more.
There is no more everyone. Instead, there are many pockets of someones.
“I made it my mission…”
These are the people you want to hire, the people who will become linchpins, the people who will change your organization for the better. Not people who merely accept a mission, or grudgingly grind through a mission, but people who voluntarily choose to make something important their mission.
This post from Scott on iOS battery life is what I'm talking about.
Mission-driven beats compliant, every time.
The best lesson from Fantasy Football’s success
When people say, "my team," they mean it.
In the top-down world of industrial marketing, the San Francisco 49ers say, "we built this team, buy a ticket if you want to come."
Then, a few years later, it broadened to, "you should buy a jersey so you can be part of it."
In the sideways, modern world of peer-to-peer connection, people say, "my team has this player, that player and this defense." It belongs to them, because they built it. Everyone has their own team.
In neither case is the fan on the field, getting concussed or making the big decisions. It doesn't matter. What matters is that our feeling of ownership, of us-ness, is shifting. We want celebrities and brands and teams that do more than merely put on a show. In addition to the show, people want to believe that they own part of it.
The idea is not the (only) hard part
In 1989, I created and launched a new idea: videotapes of people playing video games. It was ridiculed by the hipsters of the day, and my publisher later admitted that they hadn't even bothered to bring it to market beyond a few stores. A copycat product went on to sell a few million copies.
Today, Amazon paid a billion dollars for Twitch, which is precisely the same idea, used by millions of people every day. More than a billion hours have been spent/wasted on Twitch to date, I'm guessing.
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for a commission check.
No, the hard part isn't merely thinking of an idea. Yes, it's hard to sit with a bunch of pre-teens while they record the underlying video, and hard to get it made and hard to get the first one published, the first time.
But the truly hard part is, 25 years later, sticking with it long enough for it to actually work.
You could wreck this (if you want to)
Which is more satisfying: Breaking something or watching someone else break it?
When we sense a job is going wrong, it's easy to act out and make things worse… in the moment, it might feel like it's better to get fired for something we did than to get laid off.
When a partnership hits some bumps, it might be tempting to keep score, push back on everything and get ready to fight… actually causing the change that you fear.
A challenging project, employee or situation sometimes is easier to avoid than it is to work on.
Leaning in is really difficult when you sense that there's nothing to catch you, nothing to work toward. It's a lot easier to act out, sabotage and take control of something that feels out of our control.
Agency is precious, the feeling that we're in control. Where agency backfires is when we get caught in the death spiral of bad actions leading to negative reactions, which cause us to take more bad actions.
Sure, it might break. Anything might. But that doesn't mean you have to be the one to break it.
Why drafting works
The other day, a speedster on a bike passed me as I rode along the bike path. For the next ten minutes, I rode right behind him, drafting his progress.
Sure, there's an aerodynamic reason that this works–there's less wind resistance when you ride closely.
But the real reason is mental, not based on physics. Drafting works because, right in front of you is proof that you can go faster.
Without knowing it, you do this at work every day. We set our pace based on what competitors or co-workers are doing. One secret to making more of an impact, then, is figuring out who you intend to follow. Don't 'pace yourself,' instead, find someone to unknowningly pace you.