When culture pushes us to measure things that don’t matter to us, our values are captured.
Once the metrics turn a profit for corporations and those in power, they are amplified, and almost overnight, begin to matter to us, even if they run contrary to what we originally set out to do or become.
We’re easily seduced by scoreboards, competition and dark patterns.
Professor C. Thi Nguyen has written a brilliant book on the philosophy of games—big and small. The Score helps us understand that dominant industrial and cultural systems push to deskill us as we become fungible, replaceable parts in an easily measurable enterprise. His book is wide, deep, and unforgettable. (It also includes riffs on yoyos and fly fishing.)
Measurements are sticky, contagious, and relentless. Once a competitor begins to move ahead on a metric, it gives them an advantage, and that pushes us to focus on the same metric or fall behind. The Red Queen races ahead, simply because racing ahead is what they’ve been trained to do.
Perhaps, though, falling behind on a metric we don’t care about might be exactly the right thing to do.
In a game like Scrabble or chess, the values capture is right there in the rules. It’s explicit, agreed upon, and the whole point. You feel good about landing a seven-letter word because that’s what scores, and you don’t mind trading your rook for a better position—that’s the game you signed up for. But when we carry that same instinct into how we spend our working hours (and months, and decades), we might end up sacrificing far more than a rook.
Once we see values capture unfolding, we have a shot at making a choice. Measure what matters.
June 11, 2026
What’s the structure of your project? Here are three paradigms to consider:
Video game development is expensive and risky because you’re on two frontiers at once. The tech frontier, trying to do something with hardware that hasn’t been done before, and the game mechanics frontier, perfecting and polishing new forms of interaction that last. So Myst and Tetris and Doom… classics we talk about decades later. A teenager could build a knockoff of any of these in a few weeks now, but back then, they represented risky leaps.
Movies use a technology that’s over a hundred years old, with incremental improvements added all the time. But being the first with the new tech doesn’t win many prizes. Instead, successful movies are a combination of one creator’s vision and the coordinated work of hundreds or thousands of professionals using proven tools and techniques.
And books, five hundred years into the genre, still remain the work of one voice. The partnership with a largely unseen editor and publisher matters, but sooner or later, the author puts the words on paper.
[There are analogies here that go far beyond the strict adherence to the three final products of course. Slack is a videogame, developing real estate, making a record or performing surgery is a movie, and the work of a freelancer is closest to writing a book…]
I’ve done all three, and each is thrilling in its own way. As the available tech advances, each type of project is more accessible than ever. But each still comes with its own rules, risks and upsides.
We get to choose.
June 10, 2026
Steinbeck points out that the stars shine in the sky, regardless of the drama here on Earth.
Perspective fools us into believing that our point of view is primary, but it’s not difficult to imagine a more distant (or closer) one that would change everything.
The service at table 7 might not matter much to the waiter, but it matters a great deal to the elderly couple celebrating a positive medical diagnosis. The greeting you offer to a stranger might seem trivial to you, but it could change the arc of that stranger’s day. And the drama that consumes us in this moment might be forgotten in just a few days…
“Important” always requires a modifier. Important to whom? Compared to what? In what time frame?
It’s all important. And none of it is.
June 9, 2026
If a machine makes a painting that no one ever sees, it might be well-crafted or match some objective form of beauty, but it’s not art.
Art changes the creator and the viewer. Art requires participation. Art is a verb.
Decoration is important. Beauty matters. But decoration and beauty are insufficient to create art. Music, images, tastes and words become art when a transformation happens.
“What is the change you seek to make?” The answer to that question can inform our work.
No change, no art.
June 8, 2026
Bookkeepers do important work. But a bookkeeper is not the head of accounting.
Marketers are responsible for anything the organization does that touches the market. But many people with ‘marketer’ in their title simply go to meetings and do tasks after the real work of marketing is already done.
Some tech companies have hundreds of people in their marketing department. Most of them are simply playing catch up, because the engineers are making all the powerful and leveraged marketing decisions.
Who is making the difficult decisions on your team? That’s the person who’s actually in charge of marketing.
June 7, 2026
Real artists do all the painting themselves, not like Rembrandt
Real artists use brushes, not technology like Cartier-Bresson
Real writers write it out by hand, not like Jack Kerouac
Real musicians record it live, not like Steely Dan
Real singers sing without processing, not like Kanye West and Daft Punk
Real directors do the prep without AI, not like Martin Scorsese
It turns out that real artists have always used technology. What they have in common is intent, responsibility, and the ability to create a feeling in the audience.
“Here, I made this.”
June 6, 2026
Trick title. There are at least three kinds of “marketing” we ought to be teaching:
- Marketing from the point of view of the consumer. This is something every student should be taught, beginning at a young age. How do marketers manipulate customers? What desires do they amplify? What is surveillance capitalism and how does our quest for convenience get in the way of our happiness? What do we need to understand about debt, status and affiliation to become mindful in a market-ized world?
- Marketing as a job in an organization. Going to meetings, creating decks, understanding spreadsheets. Terms of art like lifetime value and market share. The difference between a brand and a logo. Non-profits and corporations spend billions on marketing, and working in that system requires insight and competence.
- Marketing as a craft. Strategic marketing. Telling stories that spread. Building an asset. Marketing as a service on behalf of your customers. Owning the responsibility that goes with the leverage that marketers have.
Most organized marketing instruction is about the first or second, with some online courses teaching hustle and hype, which I don’t count as marketing. My best work is about the third kind, the one where it all began.
More here.
June 5, 2026
In simple situations with obvious metrics, transparency earns trust. Voting, for example, benefits from audit trails and inspectability.
But transparency can also undermine trust. Walking through the typical restaurant kitchen on the way to dinner probably won’t increase the typical diner’s trust in the experience. The restaurant isn’t hiding anything; it’s just that they know things we don’t about hygiene, production, and how to present a finished dish.
You can trust your employees or your freelancers to deliver a worthwhile result, but demanding transparency about how they spend all of their time isn’t going to make you trust them more… the effort they put into the work isn’t related to the value of the work you’re asking for.
Part of the problem is that we measure what’s easy, not what’s relevant. And part of the problem is that we have trouble explaining trust, while it’s easy to pursue ever more transparency.
Once we’re coherent about what we expect and the promises that are being made, we have a chance to engage with what actually matters.
June 4, 2026
We evolved words on top of our primordial ability to have feelings.
Words allow us to be specific, to understand a situation more completely and to teach.
Our hunches and feelings still matter, but professionals choose to be able to talk about their work.
Learn the words and then make the choice to use them.
June 3, 2026
Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it.
To expand: Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.
Curiosity isn’t simply what’s left after a complete education. It’s still there if the system doesn’t ruin it.
Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
And one last one: Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
June 2, 2026
