They sound the same but work in opposite directions. They both began as Latin terms for stiff and unyielding, but now, they’ve diverged.
A rigid approach is easy to describe, but it’s brittle. Being rigid takes little imagination and a fair amount of fear.
On the other hand, approaching our craft with rigor means that we’re able to eagerly shift in the face of reality. We have rules for ourselves, but one of the rules is to adapt.
Rigor is a combination of expertise, awareness and flexibility. And it’s often in short supply.
July 5, 2021
Freedom has a partner, and its name is responsibility.
It’s easy to insist on all the things we should be free from.
But then we realize that we also have the freedom to act, to lead and to confront our fear and our selfishness. Once we realize our own agency, freedom begins to feel like a responsibility.
The freedom to make a difference.
July 4, 2021
Working with a ruler is pretty straightforward. Just about anyone can extend a line, or fix something straight if it breaks. It’s on the line or it’s not.
But curves? Curves are complex and hard to get right.
It turns out that humans bring curves with them, wherever we go.
July 3, 2021
Why is type getting so bad?
Well, actually, the people who are noticing it, the ones who care about kerning or keming or serifs or the rest… we’re not the reason that it’s getting bad.
It’s all the people who don’t notice it.
For thousands of years, type was something you did with your hands. If you were a writer, you were also the person who was putting the words onto the paper.
It was only in the last few centuries that setting type was a craft, reserved for people with a printing press, or a set of Letraset rub-down letters or even a top-of-the-line Mac with the right software.
And so, into this specialty, principles developed. There was actually a difference between professional and amateur typesetting. There was style and craft and insight that was worth paying for. There were magazines and conferences about what looked good and right and professional and cutting edge.
Of course, social media changed that. Memes and the rest, built on a flimsy foundation of Comic Sans and Arial and Impact. Whatever’s handy. And then what was handy became popular, and what was popular became the new standard.
And this is always the way. When the public gets tools, they use them, without regard for the rules that might have come before.
But there’s still a desire for craft, and people, particularly over 30, are eager to judge a book, not by its cover but by its type. Even if they don’t know why.
There will be a new set of standards for type, just as the quality of every folk innovation has improved over time.
July 2, 2021
There’s almost no sport or physical activity where that advice isn’t useful.
Golf. Ping pong. Dancing.
The more likely it is that people are tempted to focus on their hands or feet, the more the hips really matter.
And you’ve already guessed the metaphor.
The work we do needs a solid foundation. The biggest muscles are around the hips, just as the biggest leverage comes from our approach to cash flow, market presence and hiring.
Instead of focusing on short-term wins or delighting the crowd with jazz hands in whatever form they take, it makes sense to get our hips right first.
July 1, 2021
It’s the most resilient, most granular technique available for us to figure out what people want.
When individuals have the freedom to choose, they often do.
At the same time that markets enable choice, large-scale industrial capitalism works overtime to remove it. The main job of most big company CEOs is to figure out how to lock in customers, because customers without choices stick around longer and pay more.
Some organizations exist to satisfy market demand.
Some work hard to create market demand.
And some are focused on capturing demand and then eliminating the market itself.
The internet has created changes in both directions. We have dramatically more choice when it comes to ways to spend/waste our time, but we also have to deal with the natural monopolies created by the network effect and the hidden levers that drive toward lock in.
If we’re not alert, many of the choice-driven markets we depend on will disappear.
June 30, 2021
Advice from people who have gotten lucky is a tricky thing.
Perhaps they did x, y and z, and then got lucky. As story telling creatures, it’s natural to assume that x, y or z had something to do with it. Which can lead to bad advice.
Consider the guy who smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and lived to be 100. It’s not clear that his habits helped him get lucky.
Luck might not be a strategy, but setting yourself up to be lucky might be.
Luck is a tactic. An unpredictable one, sure, but if it works, it works. A useful strategy might be: I’m going to establish a pattern of resilience and apply information and testing to discover what works. And one of the tactics to support that strategy could be showing up in places where luck can help me out. If I can persist long enough, I’ll get lucky.
But that’s very different than the false correlation of past behavior with lucky outcomes.
June 29, 2021
That’s a fun question, but not nearly as useful as, “what’s effective?”
Pick up a fifteen-year-old copy of Wired, or a business book from 1969 and see what’s still around.
The technology keeps changing, but connection and trust are what still work. Ideas that spread, win. Ideas that stick are worth even more. You can race to be first on a new platform, but it’s far better to be the voice that we would miss if you weren’t there.
June 28, 2021
Phrenology was discredited a long time ago. People who should have known better were sure that by studying the bumps on someone’s head, a trained expert could divine insights about their personality. It ended up being used to advance racist and class-based agendas, and was completely debunked. It faded away for decades. And it’s back.
New technology creates the appearance (and sometimes the actual fact) of new insights, new resolution, new certainty.
We might not know what an oscillation overthruster is, or why single photon imaging is better, but it sounds well studied and precise. A chart from Excel seems a lot more certain than one that’s hand drawn.
In our search for anecdotes, particularly about health, behavior or the economy, this apparent increase in accuracy opens the door for more hope, even if it’s not based on widespread results.
The charts used to describe the behavior of stocks and tokens keep getting more complex and refined, but they’re still unable to accurately predict what will happen next week.
The fancy readouts of horoscopes or biorhythms glow with many insignificant digits, but they still tell us nothing about someone’s future, any more than palm reading does.
And an x-ray can tell us with great certainty if your appendix has burst, but a SPECT scan is useless in determining someone’s personality without the aid of an in-person consultation, which is all we’ve ever needed. In fact, that’s precisely how phrenology used to work: meet with someone first, then find validation in the mysterious reading of their bumps.
The standard worth checking for is easy: From the chart or the bumps or the scan alone, without meeting the patient, tell me what you see and what’s going to happen next.
They put Einstein’s brain in a jar, but learned nothing from it.
The folks who ate green coffee beans or swallowed colloidal silver have plenty of anecdotes to support their placebos. And when they move on from pyramids to magnets, the anecdotes will follow them. But anecdotes aren’t science. Like coincidences, they’re by-products of our story-seeking minds, connections we make as we search for solace in a confusing world. And sometimes marketers use the anecdotes to make a sale and hurt the customer.
Very few interventions that involve humans are simple. We need more than a double-blind study, because humans aren’t double-blind. We know what’s on offer, and the story we tell ourselves changes how we behave.
Science is often not the right answer to every question–it often fails to deliver what we need. But hustles pretending to be science are almost always a bad idea.
In fact, stories are too important and worthwhile to need a babble of pseudoscience that some would like put on them.
Placebos are powerful, and if they’re cheap and benign, I’m all for them. My day is filled with placebos of all kinds, because they work. The problems happen when they stop being benign, when they keep us from appropriate treatment and when they’re used against us…
Somehow, we’ve persuaded ourselves that we need to pretend that our anecdotal interventions are actual scientific breakthroughs instead of embracing the fact that we’re humans, and that stories work on us. By wearing the mantle of science, hypesters are not only able to charge more, but they also degrade the reputation of the very methods they purport to use–when we see firsthand that pretend science doesn’t work, we’re tempted to imagine that the same is true for interventions that are actually studied and tested.
We wouldn’t fly on a plane or cross a bridge that was built with the same doublespeak that many folk medicines and soothsayers use. They have their place, they make us who we are, but anecdotes aren’t science.
June 27, 2021
They rhyme, but they have opposite meanings. It’s very difficult to feel both emotions at the same time, and one is far more productive than the other.
June 26, 2021
