There are two polar opposites: Staying still and Breaking. It's easy to visualize each end of the axis, whatever the activity.
In between is stretching.
Stretching is growth. Extending our reach. Becoming more resilient, limber and powerful. Stretching hurts a bit, and maybe leaves us just a little bit sore.
But then, tomorrow, we can stretch further than we could yesterday. Because stretching compounds.
If you're afraid of breaking, the answer isn't to stay still. No, if you're afraid of breaking, the answer is to dedicate yourself to stretching.
June 10, 2018
The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actually more efficient when more people use it.
That’s one of the reasons that people hesitate to pay for software. There isn’t a feeling of scarcity, that the store will run out if it’s free…
But of course, this overlooks the two-and-a-half essential missing factors:
- Businesses need money to make the software in the first place.
- Software is complicated, and it breaks. And when it does, you probably want to be the sort of user that gets focused, fast and useful help. And you want ongoing upgrades that make it better still.
- It costs money to market the software, to tell you about it (that’s only .5, but still)
I like paying for my software when I’m buying it from a company that’s responsive, fast and focused. I like being the customer (as opposed to a social network, where I’m the product). I spend most of my day working with tools that weren’t even in science fiction novels twenty-five years ago, and the money I spend on software is a bargain–doing this work without it is impossible.
To name a few, I’m glad to use and pay for: Overcast, Feedblitz, Discourse, Zapier, Dropbox, Roon, WavePad, Bench, Nisus, Zoom, Slack, SuperDuper, Mailchimp, Hover, TypeExpander, Tidal, and many others. I wish I could pay for and get great support and development for Keynote. And I’m sorry I ever encountered the one or two rare exceptions in an industry that generally does amazing work with care and responsibility.
In my experience, the great software companies are run by singleminded people who bend the physics of design to their will, creating powerful leverage for those that they serve. They are craftspeople, impatient with the status quo and eager to make things better.
In many ways, software development has plateaued, and part of the reason is that people hesitate to pay for software worth paying for. I’m looking forward to the next golden age of tools that open new doors for creators and organizations.
PS here’s a ten-year old talk on this topic. And a sequel a few years later.
June 9, 2018
Time zones are a recent invention. It used to be that local time was different everywhere. Each village had its own high noon.
Factories required synchronization, so that workers would all show up at the same time (which probably led to the alarm clock's invention as well).
Today, of course, two things have happened:
- Everyone knows what time it is, all the time. Precisely the same time, to the second.
- It matters less. More work is asynchronous. The work itself now tells you when to start working on it, as the project is passed from desk to desk, from account to account.
Work is no longer time-based. It's now project based.
Act accordingly.
June 8, 2018
Imagine a circle of ten kids, passing the ball from one to another.
What you do when you don't have the ball doesn't have much impact on how fast the ball moves around. But during the moments when the ball is yours, every second you spend is a second added to the route.
That route is called the critical path. It's the irreducible schedule, the sum total of all the required steps.
If you work on a team, part of your job is to know where the critical path is, and to know when you're on it. The rest of your day is devoted to helping those that are on the path or getting ready for your turn.
June 7, 2018
The story goes that James Cook brought fermented german cabbage with him on a long voyage, an innovative way to combat scurvy.
He knew that getting his sailors to eat this strange and stinky food was going to be difficult, particularly since scurvy is a long-term problem, not something you want to try to solve after you get it.
His answer was based on recognizing the power of status roles and is widely applicable:
For the first two weeks of the journey, only the captain and the officers were allowed to eat sauerkraut.
Demand creation through status roles has a long history, apparently.
June 6, 2018
“…but it might be for you.”
That’s a home run.
The stuff that’s for everyone, that’s easy to click, sniff, share, produce and learn–that stuff ends up having no character. It’s not memorable. Tater tots are for everyone.
But would you miss them if they were gone?
The goal isn’t to serve everyone. The goal is to serve the right people.
BIG PS: Today’s the first official post on my new blog, the first new blog platform for me in this century, give or take. If you’re getting this by email, click the title of the post to take a peek, or visit https://seths.blog if you’re curious.
Delighted that we’re now powered by WordPress. Special thanks to Alex Peck and Noah Grubb for tireless, thoughtful, careful work on this transition.
June 5, 2018
When we go looking for a co-worker, a freelancer, a vendor or even a boss, we’re hoping for something. It might be:
Perfect
Interesting
Accommodating
Productive
Challenging
and a host of other attributes that any of us are able to aspire to.
Of course, we never look for someone who is invisible, or brittle, or a bully.
The temptation is to take the lesson of a dozen years of compulsory education and choose to be the perfect one. The problem with perfect, though, is that it’s really difficult to pull off in the long run. The problem with perfect is that when you fail, you have none of the other more flexible human traits to fall back on. And the problem with perfect is that merely meeting spec means that the organization is soon going to be looking for someone cheaper and faster than you are.
June 4, 2018
It’s that time of year again… If you hear “Pomp & Circumstance” playing, you know you’re in the right place, and you also know you’re about to witness a pre-electrification (never mind pre-digital) event.
Who’s it for?
What’s it for?
I fear that tradition has gotten in the way of design thinking.
When we ask those two questions, great opportunities arrive.
A prime audience for graduation is the graduates. And what do they want? A moment in the spotlight. Official recognition. Digital media to prove it. Speed. Humor. Connection.
At the same time, expanding the amount of time spent parading each student on the stage for a photo and a handshake undermines most of that, and it alienates or numbs everyone else.
Consider: we have screens now. Our graduates believe in speed, screens and being seen.
I’d do the following things, simultaneously:
1. Instead of one team of two doing the handshake and photo dance, have three teams. I don’t think a student cares if it’s a dean or an associate dean (or even a department chair) who shakes their hand. With three processions at a time instead of one, we go from six people a minute to 20. That means, even if you change nothing else, you’ve cut the time by two-thirds.
Reading the names more quickly is easy if you have three people doing the reading instead of one. Read them with care, and respect, and honor them, but that’s no reason to dillydally.
2. You could add extra cameras and have all the photos instantly posted to Flickr or Instagram. This means that the pictures would be shared immediately and with more power.
3. But the real win is in using the iMax video displays. In the month before graduation, each student comes to an office at the school (you can have multiple offices that do this) and records themselves saying their name. Now, we have a video of their face, with their name in bold type below, saying their name with pride. Edited tightly, this would permit a fun, energetic video with each student in it. You could cut in, every few minutes, some singing groups, a on-campus charity event, etc. While the videos are rolling, when a student’s name comes up, she marches across the stage.
Tension.
Excitement.
Speed.
And it would look great.
Produced.
Energetic.
I think the students would take even more pride in that sort of celebration. We would eliminate almost all the last minute worries (if someone doesn’t march when their picture is up top, that’s okay).
Graduation is a milestone. We should make it feel like one again.
June 3, 2018
Ice skating requires two things: smooth ice and gravity. Without a reliable foundation, you can't move forward. And without the constraints and boundaries put on us by gravity, you can't move at all.
The free market, the holy grail of some capitalists, is similar.
In a completely unbounded environment, markets can't develop, investments won't get made, nothing moves forward. You need clean air and water, a civil society, an educated workforce, a confident and trusting market and more. The very taxes that some whine about are the gravity that makes the system work.
There's a reason that there are no libertarian utopias. Left to its own devices, the market will fall apart, as a few race to the bottom and the pain of incivility takes over.
Begin in the middle.
The first paragraph, where you lay out what's about to happen. The half-apology you use to preface your comments at the meeting. The email that takes a paragraph or two to get to the point…
You can skip those.
Throat clearing is a good way to make sure that people are looking at you. And an even better way to give yourself time to collect your thoughts, to indulge your fears or to get yourself warmed up.
But we're already looking at you. We've clicked through to your link, given you the microphone, read your note…
Say all that stuff in your head, but, we'd really like to hear the best part first.
Begin in the middle.
June 2, 2018
