When things get difficult, is your instinct to invest the effort to make it better, or to set a trap so it all gets worse?
Because if things get worse, well, then you won’t have to deal with them much longer.
And if things get worse, then you’re off the hook.
No longer your problem.
If we don’t trust ourselves with making it better, if it’s too fraught with risk or emotionally painful, it might feel easier and simpler to simply make it worse and walk away.
Investing in a system, a place, a relationship, a project–that’s a commitment. It puts you even more on the hook. That person who is right in front of you becomes more real and the problem becomes even more urgent.
And it might even be worth it.
[Grateful for you and for everything you do to make things better. Thank you.]
November 28, 2019
The gap between mobile and desktop is:
[shift] ENTER
When one is typing on a laptop, the assumption is that you’ll keep going with your thought until you push ‘send’ or ‘publish’.
But on a smart phone, the enter key is your publish button. So your text, your Slack message, or your tweet happens as soon as you type a single sentence.
That’s good for platforms that want to deliver the endorphin hit of a mic drop, but not particularly helpful in sharing complex ideas. And the ideas that are worth sharing are the complex ones.
PS Today’s the last day to sign up for the Story Skills Workshop. Hope to see you there.
November 27, 2019
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Of course it is.
But that simple sentence becomes more urgent when we realize that nothing (and no one) is perfect. How could it be?
And so, if your hero, your cause, your holiday, your background, your relationship… if it’s not perfect, does that mean you should hide it? Be ashamed of it? Be afraid of it?
We’re surrounded by injustice, and yesterday was even worse. It’s so easy to find things that are imperfect and criticize them or worse, shame them.
Better, I think, to find glimmers of good and seek to amplify them. Mistakes can be seen, errors can be improved upon, progress can be made. But only if we embrace the chance for good.
The imperfect is an opportunity for better.
November 26, 2019
It’s my favorite holiday for a good reason: It doesn’t matter what country, what culture or what background you come from…
Gratitude works.
Gratitude scales.
Gratitude creates a positive cycle of more gratitude.
When in doubt, default to gratitude.
[And, for the fourth year in a row, we’re offering the free Thanksgiving Reader. You can print it out at home and have it ready for the holiday, wherever and whenever you choose to celebrate. It’s a modern tradition.]
November 25, 2019
We have the opportunity to expend the maximum effort on behalf of a worthy goal.
And we also have the choice to mindfully accept whatever happens next.
Acceptance is a choice in the service of our happiness and the ability to try again tomorrow.
When we detach our emotional state from the results of our effort, we maximize the chances that our effort will be focused and effective. We’re not trying to control the outcome, simply putting our best effort into creating the conditions that lead to the desired outcome.
The opportunity is:
- to go all in, and
- to be okay with what happens after that.
November 24, 2019
The first rule of cross-examination at trial is that you never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer to.
Inquiry has a place. Inquiry in the pursuit of science, of discovery and of learning is essential. But inquiry almost never belongs in a presentation. That’s because the presentation exists to communicate what you already know, not to discover something new.
That’s why comedians try out their new material in small clubs.
That’s why you should try out your job interview answers long before you go on a job interview.
And that’s why you shouldn’t throw a steel ball at the window of the new truck you’re launching unless you’re really, really sure it’s not going to break.
[Either that, or know that what you’re selling is live magic, the possibility of ‘it might not work,’ the generosity of art in the moment. But they rarely belong in the same interaction.]
November 23, 2019
Every golf scorecard has a map of the course on the back. Moving the hole placement is a big deal, accompanied by meetings and oversight. A big shift is whether or not it rained last week.
On the other hand, every wave is the first and last of its kind. It has never happened before and will never happen again.
Golf is an endless asymptotic journey toward elusive perfection.
Surfing, on the other hand, is about wayfinding. A surf park with a repeated wave might be useful for training, but it’s not surfing.
Metaphor over, the question is: what’s your job like?
It gets a lot easier if you bring the appropriate mindset. It’s hard to surf with a putter.
November 22, 2019
A friend reached out because she’s thinking of using Kickstarter to fund her new book. That conversation led to a discussion about what Kickstarter is actually good at and how to use it. It turns out that there are many options (and some misunderstanding as well).
The uses of Kickstarter:
To raise money you don’t have for a project that you’ll be able to build and then ship to your supporters and people who already know you and trust you.
To create a community for an art project that isn’t designed to be a profitable business.
To have a temporary online store (instead of something more permanent, like Shopify), where you can run a pop-up and then be done (and move on to the next thing). It’s an effective way to highlight the tension of go/no go.
To capture the energy and attention of large numbers of people who don’t know your work (this almost never ever works and is the worst of these reasons).*
To give your existing fans and followers an organized way to support you and to see it unfold in real-time.
To have a simple, structured place to put your idea. By limiting your options and giving you deniability, it makes it easier for some to move forward.
To give you a safe place to succeed as well as to not-succeed. There’s a limit on the time and money you can invest because of the structure of the platform.
Most of the time, for most projects, Kickstarter isn’t the answer to the question you’re asking. That’s because it could more accurately be called Kickfinisher–you build a following first, over time, and then Kickstarter is the moment in time that those followers show up for your work.
More here.
*Kickstarter is powerful when used as intended. But it’s not very good at creating ‘hits’. It turns out that while 17,000,000 users have, in total, funded 173,000 projects, that’s only about a third of the total. 290,000 projects haven’t succeeded in being funded at all. And only 400 projects raised more than a million dollars each. That means your chances of creating a viral hit that reaches strangers who will engage with your work is about one in a thousand.
November 21, 2019
We have far more than five senses, and people communicate with us using many of them.
You can receive a message via visual inputs, sound, text, smell, taste, touch, temperature, pheromones, sub-sonic rumbling and/or subtle facial gestures. You can feel comforted or jostled, part of a trusted circle or all alone. You can absorb the confidence radiated by a professional or feel the insecurity in someone who is overwhelmed.
You don’t have to know how to read Finnish to be able to make a judgment about the quality of a product or its instructions–all you need to do is glance at it. And you decide if you’re going to like a restaurant long before the food arrives.
Words on paper were a magical interregnum, a low-cost, editable, permanent way to tell a story as completely as we could while limiting ourselves to nothing but a keyboard. But people have always been hungry for more inputs than this, hence the race to deliver content that moves on its own accord, that spreads more quickly and that activates more visceral reactions than a static book or blog post can.
Some overlooked factors to consider when crafting and delivering your message:
- How much effort does the recipient have to put into engagement in order to receive this message?
- Which overlooked senses are out of sync with the change I’m trying to make?
- What would make this easier to share?
Bonus: Check out thisten.co. They’re doing groundbreaking work in turning audio into text in real-time, a boon for conferences, as well as for people who have difficulty hearing. We’re experimenting with transcribing my podcast, Akimbo, and you can check out some recent episodes in text with their free app.
November 20, 2019
Actually, there are two.
The first is the tax we each pay so that companies can bid against each other to buy traffic from Google. Because their revenue model is (cleverly) built on both direct marketing and an auction, they are able to keep a significant portion of the margin from many industries. They’ve become the internet’s landlord.
The difference between a successful business in New York and an unsuccessful one is just a few percentage points–the successful ones pay 95% of their profit to landlords, while the unsuccessful ones pay 105%.
It doesn’t matter if there are competitors to Google in search: the model of bidding for attention is so economically compelling (because attention is so scarce), that companies are going to be paying ever more to reach people in this way–or allow their competitors to do so.
The second is harder to see: Because Google has made it ever more difficult for sites to be found, previously successful businesses like Groupon, Travelocity and Hipmunk suffer. As a result, new web companies are significantly harder to fund and build. If you’re dependent on being found in a Google search, it’s probably worth rethinking your plan.
The open web (and search… particularly Google) has created huge benefits in access, competitiveness and selection for so many markets. At the same time, there are structural challenges that are making the future less commercially interesting in many ways.
Capitalism is an efficient system for surfacing and addressing the needs of consumers. But once it veers toward control over markets by a single entity, those benefits disappear.
The existence of DuckDuckGo doesn’t significantly change Google’s position as a monopoly able to dictate how most people experience everything on the web.
November 19, 2019
