For many, the imagined cost of speaking up is almost always higher than the actual cost.
And we live with the cost in our imagination daily, dying a little bit over time as we keep our insights to ourselves.
Speaking up is a skill, and we can only improve it with practice.
Placebos work and placebos spread.
We’re wired to believe something, but the specifics of what we believe often come from other people.
When there were a limited number of channels, mainstream ideas were the focus of our conversations, because the mainstream was all that was widely amplified. Someone might believe that the world was flat, or that the moon landings were faked, but that lived on the fringe. Pockets of odd beliefs.
One of the reasons that Mehmet Oz’s snake oil nostrums were so disturbing was that he took his mainstream reputation, added mass TV and legitimized fringe placebos to make a profit.
Now, thanks to the billion-channel universe, the mainstream has gone out with the tide and every belief can feel mainstream if you immerse yourself in it. You can surround yourself with people who are sure that birds aren’t real, or find a community to reinforce that the patent medicine you’re taking works. And that will increase its positive placebo effect.
Belief increases the efficacy of our practice, but touting an idea can also generate a profit for the touter. Sometimes those two things align, but often, the profit motive pushes them to where they are out of sync.
Our choice of media and cultural inputs matter, now more than ever. When we choose what to see and who to hang out with, we’re actually choosing our future.
Childlike involves wonder. It’s the ability to see the world with fresh eyes and create magic.
Childish, on the other hand, is living as if there are no consequences.
Over time, we’ve gotten very good at measuring the long and short-term consequences of our actions. And good at ignoring them.
Adults do well when they seek to be childlike, and that’s possible without being childish.
The Carbon Almanac is now available in Spanish. For free. Free to download, free to share and free to print a copy at home.
While the book has been traditionally published around the world (in Italian, Czech, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Dutch), no Spanish-language publisher was willing to do the work. So we purchased the rights from our publisher and did it ourselves.
It joins about twenty international editions of the free Generation Carbon, a Carbon Almanac book for Kids. Together, they’ve been downloaded and shared millions of times.
A worldwide network of volunteers managed to create a foundational text for the urgent conversation around our climate. It’s not too late, but we need to begin, and that can only happen if we talk about it and understand what’s really happening.
You can find the award-winning English edition here.
Special thanks to the indefatigable Anna Kohler Smith and her team of volunteers who led the Spanish translation at every step of the way, from ideation to rights to publication.
In the life of every enterprise, the moment arises when a choice has to be made: Are you here for your customers, to give them what they seek, or are you trying to do something to your customers, to squeeze out extra income?
This doesn’t mean that the only path is to keep lowering your prices. It’s entirely possible your customers want to pay a lot but get more than they paid for.
What it does mean is that you use your brand and your interface and your software and your network effect to come up with ways to serve people that they would miss if you were gone.
It’s not surprising that many companies are putting software and dark patterns and AI to work on things that improve their profit. But I’m not seeing as many instances of them doing the same thing to improve the experience and delight that their customers experience.
Amazon is testing a different way to show reviews on the products they sell.
It looks like this:
instead of like this:
It’s subtle, but it can make a very big impact on merchants, on their profits, and on what we buy.
In the new format, your brain sees the image of a star, but then it has to do the mental math of turning the number 4.6 into something with weight and emotional heft–a bunch of stars.
In the old format, that work was done already. Our brains are much better at drawing emotional conclusions from this more concrete visualization. If you look at the two illustrations above, it certainly seems at first glance as though the second one is higher rated.
This new format means that higher-rated items won’t have as much of an advantage–which will push other vendors to buy ads and run coupons (which Amazon makes a profit on) instead of either gaming the reviews or actually making a better product.
When a company makes it hard to unsubscribe, or pushes needless options (“362 people are currently signing up for the insurance…”) or hustles people, they’ve forgotten the lesson that got them here in the first place.
Eventually, organizations that serve themselves lose the ability to continue serving others.
Hardy came home from school and proudly showed his mom the cheap plastic trinkets he had earned that day.
“I stood quietly on the dot and so I got some tickets. And if I stand on the dot quietly tomorrow, I can get some more prizes!”
First grade! That’s one way to indoctrinate kids in both obedience and consumption.
It’s rare we see it so brazenly and vividly executed.
Is standing on a dot the thing we need to train kids to do? Has each of us spent too much time standing on dots already?
at sticking around.
In fact, that’s what it’s best at.
New research shows that computers and robots are now better at solving CAPTCHA puzzles than humans.
This was inevitable. The interesting question is, “how long before they go away?”
First, someone has to decide that it’s their job to worry about this. Then they have to assemble a quorum to approve the radical shift away from something that was always there and didn’t seem broken. Then they have to take responsibility for what happens next. Then they have to manage a tech intervention with others that find it easier to leave things as they are as they worry about other priorities…
It’s easier to be a bystander than to be a leader.
A car cut me off on the highway the other day. The car was going nearly 100 mph.
Was the car a new Porsche 911 GT3 or a used Toyota Camry?
The thing is, there are more than 1,000 times as many Camrys on the road. But our instinct is to pick the vivid and distinctive answer.
The per capita crime rate in rural areas is often dramatically (sometimes five or ten times) higher than it is in most cities.
On the other hand, Alaska has far more millionaires per capita than most people would guess. That’s because we underestimate the population, not because there’s a particularly large number of millionaires.
More people might lead to more instances, but what matters isn’t the absolute number, it’s the percentage. New York is an incredibly safe place to live.
We’re simply not naturally attuned to dividing what we notice by the chances we’ll see it… stories resonate without regard for the denominator.
Flying across the country is dramatically safer than driving there, but intuitively, it feels like the opposite must be true. And peer-reviewed medicine is far more likely to cure an illness than an anecdote will.
The average TikTok or Facebook post is seen by just a few people, even though it feels like the ones we’re seeing are seen by a lot of people.
Reality is lumpy, and taking a moment to think about the source of our story helps us get clear about what’s actually happening.
Does it need defending?
The sign on some bushes near a park in my town says, Beware: Bee’s.
A local merchant adds a note to some receipts that says, Your awesome.
It’s tempting to speak up and point out that the sky comma is showing up where it shouldn’t. And missing when it might be helpful.
But language shifts, changing over time, and as we become ever more post-literate, it’s not hard to imagine that the apostrophe’s assigned role is ending. Greengrocers and others with pens have taken possession.
Sometimes, people throw in an extra apostrophe to sound smart. And sometimes, they simply give up because it’s not worth the trouble to figure out when or when not to use one.
Pedants will always pedant and try to defend the language, but the language changes whether we want it to or not.
This cycle of the informal becoming formal, then a badge of honor and then fading away has always been with us. It’s only going to accelerate, one more shift due to technology.
PS so far, it seems like AI is really good with apostrophes.
I was happily pedaling along on the rail trail when three spandex speedsters blew by me on their handmade carbon bikes.
For a moment, I was disheartened. What’s the point–they’re speedy, I’m not.
Then I realize that it’s not a bike race, it’s a bike ride. There is no winning, just the riding.
