All purchases involve a decision. Yes or no, this or that, now or later…
But it’s helpful to realize that all decisions involve a purchase.
When we decide to spend time or take a risk or make a commitment, our brains act in a way very similar to how we choose to make a purchase.
When you talk about a non-profit, introduce a new sort of behavior or invite someone to follow along, you’re actually selling. Finding the empathy to treat it like a purchase is worth the effort.
I just received copies of the new reprints of four of my books in the UK:
I’m really pleased at how the books have stayed relevant and also delighted at what a good job the publisher did with the reissues. Also, the Italian version of This is Marketing just went back for its 14th printing.
You can find all of my books here, and the most recent one is here.
There’s a new episode of Tim’s podcast out today, and that gave me an excuse to point to my podcast page. There are hundreds of hours of interviews and conversations to choose from.
A common shortcut to cultural divisiveness is to find the single worst person in a different group and highlight and attack their behavior.
By making it clear and obvious that this is what THEY (the plural) want and who THEY are, it’s easy to walk away from a larger we. Their worst troll becomes their mascot.
And in a media-fueled culture that thrives on division, this is a convenient shortcut.
What happens, though, if we find the worst person on our team and tell them to chill out a bit. That people like us don’t do things like that. That their trollish, extreme behavior is magnifying differences instead of making it more likely we end up with useful cultural cohesion…
It’s surprising how much the outlier is willing to listen to the very people they’re counting on for support. And the folks you seek to win over are much more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if you have a history of discouraging bad behavior.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about politicians, sports fans, entrepreneurs or activists. More extreme division is unlikely to sell our idea and gain the support we’re looking for.
It’s negative when we say that someone is out of control. They’ve lost their self-restraint, and they’re doing things that they’ll regret later.
And it’s honest when we acknowledge that just about everything is out of our control. We can work to influence it, we can practice accepting it, but any time we’re engaging with others or with the future, we’re not completely in charge.
Control is elusive. If we accept the parts that are out of our hands, we can focus on the elements where we have leverage and influence instead.
Access to information used to be scarce. We ranked college libraries on how many books they had, and time at the microfilm reader was booked in advance.
Today, if there’s something I don’t know, it’s almost certainly because I haven’t cared enough to find out.
I don’t understand molecular biology, the history of Sardinia or much of agronomy–but that’s my choice. Now that information is widely and freely available, our sense of agency around knowledge needs to change.
It pays to acknowledge that this is a choice, and to be responsible for it. What else have we chosen not to know?
Learning is about becoming incompetent on our way to getting better.
If you’re not open to the tension that is caused by knowing you could do better, it’s unlikely you’re willing to do the work to get better. As you’re doing that work, there’s the satisfaction it brings, but also the knowledge that just a moment ago, you weren’t any good.
In 1840, at the dawn of the information age, the king of Sardinia asked Charles Babbage what nearly instant messaging like the telegraph could possibly be good for.
Twenty years later, it was obvious.
When I first saw Prodigy in 1986, I saw that the consumer internet would have many possibilities, but I didn’t have the guts to ask what I was missing. “In 40 years, for what purposes will it be useful” would have been a productive way to think about the change that was happening.
AI is as big a change as the internet, perhaps more so. And in just a few years, people will wonder why we weren’t wondering better.
We need to begin with empathy and a useful story… useful to the people who want to believe it, spread it, and use it to accomplish their goals.
But then, the story needs firm footing and a way to stick with us. Patagonia is a great name because while most people have no idea where the place known as Patagonia is, they’re able to associate it with the story that the company has been telling for a long time. Nike is a great name, even though it’s not obvious how to pronounce it. Genghis Khan had a memorable, unique name–you don’t have to be beloved for the name to be useful.
The industry that’s the current world champ at bad naming is AI.
ChatGPT is a terrible name. And the trademark office in the US just denied them ownership in GPT, so even if they were a pioneer, that’s gone now. It’s hard to tell the story when you don’t know what to call it.
Claude.ai isn’t particularly distinctive (something about the phonemes make me keep forgetting it, and without a bookmark, I’d never find it again), and Gemini walks away from the huge value that Google has invested into the name of their search engine.
The independent bookstore down the street is carefully curated. Each book takes up the spot that a different book could inhabit, so the owner makes sure that there’s a great reason a title is included.
Amazon, on the other hand, has no shelf space problem, and the Kindle multiplies it. As a result, the average book on the Kindle is virtually worthless, because once it’s easy to include everything, everything gets included. Amazon doesn’t promise to curate, they insist the purchaser does.
Christopher Nolan hasn’t made many movies (and has carefully kept his first student film hidden from view). If he puts his name on it, people pay attention.
YouTube has countless (actually countless, because new ones arrive faster than you can count the old ones) videos. And a significant number of them have less than ten views, and they don’t even deserve that many. YouTube doesn’t curate, they encourage the crowd to do that for them.
The long tail is a business model and a way of bringing work to the world. More is better.
Curation, on the other hand, offers a different reward for the publisher/creator.
Either your motto is, “we don’t sell anything, we sell everything” or “we put our name on this one.”
Lately, there’s pressure to be somewhere in the middle. To be sort of proud of each choice and sort of have a lot of choices.
It’s a very difficult path to walk. Economic pressure pushes for more, now. But more now might be stealing from we stand for something.
March 13, 2024
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