The 16-foot canvas Prospector canoe made by the Chestnut Canoe Company is not the fastest or the lightest or the cheapest canoe but it is an elegant canoe.
Practical elegance is something that is available to all of us. If we choose, it can become the cornerstone of our work.
Some of us make a thing and many of us make a system. What makes something practically elegant is that it’s better, smoother, cleaner, more understandable, kinder, more efficient, friendlier or more approachable than it needs to be.
Microsoft Windows was never particularly elegant, as you could see the nuts and bolts underneath it. It was clunky, but it got the job done.
On the other hand, the Macintosh-for at least 20 years-was surprisingly elegant. When it broke, it broke in an elegant way. It knew things before it asked us to type them in, it had a smile on its face–it seemed to have a sense of humor.
When we create something with practical elegance, we are investing time and energy in a user experience that satisfies the user more than it helps the bottom line of the company that made it. Ironically, in the long run, satisfying the user is the single best way to help the bottom line of a company that doesn’t have monopoly power.
When a designer combines functionality with delight, we’re drawn to whatever she’s produced. That’s the elegance we’re searching for in our built world.
An enemy of practical elegance is persistent complexity, often caused by competing demands, network effects and the status quo. The latest operating system of the Mac is without elegance. When it crashes, and mine has been every few hours for the last week, it crashes poorly. The kernel panic reports are unreadable, by me and by their support folks. The dialogue boxes aren’t consistent, the information flow is uneven and nothing about the experience shows any commitment to polish, to delight or to the user.
Practical elegance doesn’t mean that the canoe will never capsize. It means that the thing we built was worth building, and it left the user feeling better, not worse, about their choice.
Too often, “customer service” has come to mean “answer the phone and give a refund.” But customer service begins long before something breaks. It’s about a commitment to the experience. Creating delight before it’s expected. Building empathy and insight into the interactions that people will choose to have with you.
Of course this takes effort. So do all the other things that go into a product or service. Apparently, though, this effort is perceived as optional by some.
As soon as a product or system creator starts acting like the user has no choice, elegance begins to disappear.
If you shipped it to the world (or even showed it to a colleague) it might be because you liked it. You made it for yourself.
But if your music, your graphic design, your website–whatever your work is–isn’t resonating with the market, it might be because you forgot to make it for them.
Empathy is at the heart of design.
What do people in this group think looks great? What do they need?
When each car is separate, they’re dumb, and they break one at a time.
When they are part of a networked system, one software glitch can break them all at once.
If we use power off the grid, each house creates its own heat.
If we benefit from an efficient system of distributed power, a rolling blackout can take them all offline at once.
Networks create significant efficiencies at the same time that they produce value that would be impossible without them. And so, relentlessly, we’re hooking everything together.
Along the way, it’s worth reminding ourselves just how valuable resilience is. The only kind of network breakdowns we notice are the cataclysmic ones.
The benefits of a network are immediately forgotten when the whole thing breaks.
Humans differentiated themselves 100,000 years ago by developing the ability to have a detailed memory. Not just “where did I hide the acorns” but rich and diverse memories about people and places.
Only a few thousand years ago, we amplified this by making those memories permanent. Telling a story to someone else dramatically increases our memory capacity.
Then we started making and saving our notes.
And then we developed a common language so we could share those notes with others. The library and the cloud meant that your memory could become my memory too.
And only recently we added search, so the memories and insights of a billion or more people could be easily accessed.
The sixth layer, now appearing, is an intelligence that prompts us and tells us what is out there before we even decide to search for it.
No wonder we’re a bit dizzy. We just multiplied our minds by many orders of magnitude. It’s easy to confuse someone else’s memory (or manipulation) with our hard-earned ability to remember things that actually happened to us.
And we’re now realizing that we have the power (and perhaps the obligation) to use shared knowledge to make better, more thoughtful decisions. And to intentionally edit out the manipulations and falsehoods that are designed to spread, not to improve our lives.
Like most traps, they’re mysterious and then appealing and then it’s too late.
An NFT is digital treasure chest, a status symbol and an apparent item of value.
Like a Pokemon card, or an original Picasso drawing or the actual frame of a Disney animated film from 1955, NFTs are designed to be the one and only, a shred of non-fungible reality in a world gone digital.
You either own this thing or you don’t.
To make it really clear, consider Honus Wagner. A Honus Wagner baseball card is quite rare (Wagner didn’t permit the card to be made because he wanted nothing to do with cigarettes, foreshadowing some of the stuff below) and so there were fewer than 200 all in before production shut down. One of the cards last sold for more than $3,000,000.
Owning a Honus Wagner card doesn’t mean you own Honus Wagner. Or a royalty stream or anything else but the card itself.
For years, this was part of the business model of the collectible card industry. Make billions of cards, most get thrown out, some rookies get famous, some cards go up in value.
Now, consider an oil painting. Perhaps it was stolen a long time ago, or became famous for other reasons. It’s the one and only. If you somehow owned the Mona Lisa, it wouldn’t mean that you own the woman who is portrayed in it, or any part of DaVinci, it would simply mean you own a canvas, one that others also want to own.
People can look at images of the Mona Lisa all day long without compensating you, because you simply own the original trophy, not the idea…
But having it on your wall gives you a feeling, and telling other people you own it gives you another, slightly different feeling.
It’s worth noting two things about the art example:
There’s a three-thousand-year cultural history of owning priceless works of art. Most people understand that an original Rothko is a high-status luxury good.
Almost all paintings are worthless (on a cash basis). They sell at garage sales for dollars, not millions, and original (and beautiful) works of art go unsold every day.
So what’s an NFT? It’s a digital token (the same way a Bitcoin is a digital token) except it’s a one and only, like a Honus Wagner, there’s just one. One of these tokens might refer to something else (a video of a basketball shot, an oil painting, even this blog post) but it isn’t that thing. It’s simply a token authorized by the person who made it to be the one and only one. (The NBA has already sold more than $200 million in video clip highlight NFTs)…
And so the trap:
CREATORS may rush to start minting NFTs as a way to get paid for what they’ve created. Unlike alternative digital currencies which are relatively complicated to invent and sell, it’s recently become super easy to ‘mint’ an NFT. I could, for example, turn each of the 8,500 posts on this blog into a token and sell them on the open market.
The more time and passion that creators devote to chasing the NFT, the more time they’ll spend trying to create the appearance of scarcity and hustling people to believe that the tokens will go up in value. They’ll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators. Because that’s the only reason that someone is likely to buy one–like a stock, they hope it will go up in value. Unlike some stocks, it doesn’t pay dividends or come with any other rights. And unlike actual works of art, NFTs aren’t usually aesthetically beautiful on their own, they simply represent something that is.
BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there’s no limit on the supply. In the case of baseball cards, there are only so many rookies a year. In the case of art, there’s a limited number of famous paintings and a limited amount of shelf space at Sotheby’s. NFTs are going to be more like Kindle books and YouTube videos. The vast majority are going to have ten views, not a billion. It’s an unregulated, non-transparent hustle with ‘bubble’ written all over it.
THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time. They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here. The short version is that for the foreseeable future, the method that’s used to verify the blockchain and to create new digital coins is deliberately energy-intensive and inefficient. That’s on purpose. And as they get more valuable, the energy used will go up, not down.
It’s an ongoing waste that creates little in ongoing value and gets less efficient and more expensive as time goes on. For most technological innovations the opposite is true.
The trap, then, is that creators can get hooked on creating these. Buyers with a sunk cost get hooked on making the prices go up, unable to walk away. And so creators and buyers are then hooked in a cycle, with all of us paying the lifetime of costs associated with an unregulated system that consumes vast amounts of precious energy for no other purpose than to create some scarce digital tokens.
I wrote a book about digital cash twenty years ago. This is precisely the sort of cool project and economic curiosity that I want to be excited about. But, alas, I can see the trap and I wanted to speak up with clarity. I would usually make this into an episode of my podcast, but Everest’s article deserved a link and more focus, so here you go.
We see it all the time, and not just in the store, with a catalog or on a website.
You can tell the committed students from the ones who are simply skating by.
You can figure out who’s reading the book because they’ve got something at stake and who’s simply wasting time.
When we adopt the posture of commitment, something extraordinary happens: The lessons get more profound and useful. The questions asked get more specific and urgent. The connections that are made get deeper.
The reason that most online videos and blog posts seem to come and go is because we use a browser to interact with them. “What’s next?” is asked too often. Perhaps it would be more useful to imagine that this is the very last thing we get to engage in before we have to commit to our work…
Who decides the rhythm of your day? When are you at your best, when do you drag?
In the old days, when we worked on the assembly line or even in sync at the office or at school, there were good reasons to adopt the timing that was assigned to us.
But perhaps it makes sense to take control and listen and notice and work with our patterns, not against them.
High school students perform better when the school day starts later. So let’s organize around that.
If a workout at noon makes your afternoon more effective, it’s hard to see why you need to do it at 5 am in a world that’s digital and more asynchronous than ever before.
If your day is better if your first interactions are positive ones, why not organize a daily call with peers with nothing but that in mind?
And even if your schedule isn’t completely up to you, you might get to decide when to tackle mindless chores and when to work on the creative elements of the new plan. When to read blog posts and when to write them. You may get to decide when to have meetings that challenge your intellect vs. those that require patience…
And yes, we even get to decide what to eat for breakfast. Tony the Tiger notwithstanding.
As I write this, they’re laying a brick wall outside of my window.
Each brick weighs about five pounds. There are a thousand bricks in this wall. And every brick is moved, one by one, from the truck to the cart to the wall. Over time, any inefficient move is costly indeed. Watching professionals do it gives me more admiration than ever for their commitment and grace.
If we’re lucky enough to work indoors, with free snacks and podcasts in the background, we might not get physically exhausted the way we would moving thousands of pounds of bricks. But the cognitive and emotional toll of repetitive tasks is real, even if doesn’t leave callouses.
The discipline is to invest one time in getting your workflow right instead of paying a penalty for poor digital hygiene every single day.
Hacking your way through something “for now” belies your commitment to your work and your posture as a professional. Get the flow right, as if you were hauling bricks.
Harvard, Dartmouth and Stanford are always full. The value of their degree is largely based on scarcity. There are always more people who want to get in than they will allow.
That’s intentional. Artificial scarcity to create a credential that appears valuable.
Harvard has enough endowment and tech to offer 50x as many degrees as they currently do.
Now, though, online learning is upending the equation of scarcity.
Do students invest all that time and all that money because they believe they’re going to learn something, or is it simply that they’re going to be awarded a scarce credential?
Because sooner or later, learning wins out. The paper fades, but what you know and who you become lasts.
It’s March (wow) and a year of uncertainty, pain and unrest may be beginning to recede. And over the years, the team at Akimbo has seen that the March sessions of their workshops are often the best attended and most powerful. Something about spring (up here) and autumn (south of here) seems to challenge people to take action and to make a difference.
The Marketing Seminar is back for its 11th session. It’s the most powerful and most popular marketing workshop in the world. More than 10,000 people have been through it (that’s more marketing wizards than Harvard, Wharton and Stanford graduate in any given year) and now it’s your turn. Enrollment opens today and the first lesson starts soon.
The altMBA deadline for First Priority applications is next week, March 9. The August session is your chance to level up, and early applications are given priority.
Writing in Communityis back as well. There’s plenty of room for your book in the world, but what you may need is a cohort to help you get it done. Kristin Hatcher leads a group that commits to writing together and publishing together. It opens for signups on March 16th and you can claim a spot on update list by visiting the site today.
And in just a few weeks, the fabled Story Skills Workshop returns. Bestselling author Bernadette Jiwa has taught the world about the magic of story–in branding, in leadership and in communications–and this workshop represents your best chance learn from her and from each other. It opens on March 23, but sign up today for updates.
There are tens of thousands of reasons that people just like you have decided to learn something. Akimbo (now an independent B Corp) is built to make it possible for people to lean into possibility, to connect and to learn.
These four workshops are the best way I know to make a difference. Each is different, each has a different pace, structure and purpose. But together, they represent a clear, powerful and proven vision for how each of us can level up and learn to contribute.
And there’s room for you.
PS here’s what a student posted just this morning as part of the 60th lesson in TMS10…
March 2, 2021
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