Some greatest hits
Talking with Krista Tippett about art and work that matters.
The new ebook about placebos.
Stop Stealing Dreams, on what school is for. (Translations and more are here).
On critics.
Meandering toward nowhere special
Five behaviors that often come clumped together, each conspiring to lead you toward disappointment:
Big dreams: The goal isn't consistent impact or meaningful work, it's a huge hit, the star turn and the ability to change the world. It wouldn't be enough to have 1000 true fans, the big dreamer wants a stadiumful in every town.
Poor work habits: Flitting from project to project, waiting for inspiration to arrive, stalling, not taking lessons, repeating the same early steps over and over…
Shortcut seeking: Why bother with the long route when you can find a shorter, faster path? Get-rich-quick schemes, insider access and the quest to get it right now.
Lottery thinking: This is a variation of shortcut thinking, but it involves getting picked. One person, one organization, one Wizard of Oz who will magically make it all happen.
Lack of self-awareness: The self-delusion that your stuff is in fact world-class, and that the critics, all of them that you've managed to interrupt, are wrong.
Just for kicks, imagine someone who embraces the opposite of all five of these behaviors. Someone focused on doing the work, her work, relentlessly getting better, shipping it, racking up small wins and earning one fan at a time. And doing it all with a trained eye on what it means to do it better.
Hard to imagine a better shot at making a difference.
Looking for validation in all the wrong places
Which people do you look to for criticism? Which metrics are you relying on to tell you if you're doing a good job? Who tells you if you're on to something?
Alas, most of us usually look in the wrong place.
Here are a few you might want to avoid:
- easy-to-quantify and common metrics that lack granularity or insight (like pageviews, followers and heaven-forfend, likes)
- critics who are loud, snarky and/or jealous
- self-appointed gatekeepers looking for more power
- the mass market
- … the media they rely on for their opinion [including sportscasters and news anchors (in any field)]
- people who never understand or appreciate work that's important and new
- the cool kids
Change someone who cares.
Search vs. discovery
They're not the same, in fact, they couldn't be much more different.
Search is what we call the action of knowing what you want and questing until you ultimately find it. Duckduckgo is a search engine that is mostly invisible–tell it what you want, here it is.
Discovery, on the other hand, is what happens when the universe (or an organization, or a friend) helps you encounter something you didn't even know you were looking for. (I had originally typed find but then replaced it with encounter. Search is such a dominant paradigm that we use search-related words even when we don't intend to.)
Amazon and Google have done an incredible job of providing the answer to search. It's not obvious, though, that we've made nearly as much progress in helping people discover ideas, hidden gems, friends, opportunities, places, important issues or the truth (about anything).
Are you working to help your clients, patrons, customers and colleagues find what they already know what they want? Or teaching and encouraging them to find something they didn't know they needed?
Seems like a huge opportunity.
The smart CEO’s guide to social justice
It seems as though profit-maximizing business people ought to be speaking up loudly and often for three changes in our culture, changes that while making life better also have a dramatically positive impact on their organizations.
Minimum Wage: Three things worth noting:
- Most minimum wage jobs in the US can't easily be exported to lower wage places, because they're inherently local in nature.
- The percentage of the final price of a good or service due to minimum wage inputs is pretty low.
- Many businesses sell to consumers, and when they have more money, there's more demand for what they sell.
Given that for even the biggest organizations there are more potential customers than employees, the math of raising the minimum wage works in their favor. More confident and more stable markets mean more sales. Workers struggling to make ends meet are a tax on the economy.
(Consider the brilliant strategic move Henry Ford made in doubling the pay of thousands of his workers in 1914. The assembly line was so efficient that it created profits—but only when it was running, and high turnover made that difficult. By radically raising pay, Ford put pressure on all of his competitors (and on every industry that hired the sort of men he was hiring) at the same time that he created a gateway to the middle class, a middle class that could, of course, buy his cars, whether or not they happened to work for him). Also, consider this point of view…
Climate Change: The shift in our atmosphere causes countless taxes on organizations. Any business that struggled this winter due to storms understands that this a very real cost, a tax that goes nowhere useful and one that creates countless uncertainties. As sea levels rise, entire cities will be threatened, another tax that makes it less likely that people will be able to buy from you.
The climate upredictability tax is large, and it's going to get bigger, in erratic and unpredictable ways.
Decreasing carbon outputs and increasing energy efficiency are long-term investments in global wealth, wealth that translates into more revenue and more profit.
Anti-corruption movements: The only players who benefit from corruption in government are the actors willing to race to the bottom–the most corrupt organizations. Everyone else is forced to play along, but is unlikely to win. As a result, for most of us, efforts to create transparency and fairness in transactions are another step toward efficient and profitable engagements.
Historically, when cultures clean up their acts, get more efficient and take care of their people, businesses thrive. It's not an accident, one causes the other.
In all three cases, there's no political or left/right argument being made–instead, it's the basic economics of a stable business environment with a more secure, higher-income workforce where technological innovation leads to lower energy costs and higher efficiency.
Kanri Yakyu
Literally, "controlled baseball."
If you're playing this way, it's by the numbers. The manager tells you precisely what to do, and you do it. There are algorithms for when to bunt, for when to throw a ball. And there is no room for surprise. It is ground out (not a pun), controlled and predictable.
Kanri yakyu will often get you into the playoffs. It rarely means you're going to win the big games, though.
The secret is being able to play this way when you need to, but being brave enough to leap when it's least expected. Just like your career.
Cracking the pottery
For every post that makes it to this blog, I write at least three, sometimes more.
That means that on a regular basis, I delete some of my favorite (almost good) writing.
It turns out that this is an incredibly useful exercise. I know that there's going to be a post, every morning, right here. What I don't know, what I'm never sure of, is which post.
I find that it's almost essential to fall in love with an idea to invest the time it takes to make it good and worth sharing. And then, the hard part: deleting that idea when it's just not what it could be. Too often, organizations are good at the first part, but struggle with the second. And so we defend expired business models, support the status quo and have a knee-jerk inclination to preserve what we've got.
When you get in the habit of breaking your own pottery, it's a lot easier to ask, "what if?" If you know that it's okay to break it later, it's a lot easier to fall in love with it now.
Have you been to this meeting?
If there were evil people in the room, it would actually be easier to swallow. But everyone thinks they're doing their part, playing their role, doing their job…
My take is that the responsibility lies with the marketer who didn't say 'no' before the meeting was called. We owe it to our work and to the people who pay us to stand up (often) and say, "no, sorry, I won't do that."
Just because you have a budget doesn't mean you ought to be hiring people for the project.
Maximizing the value of worry: Snowden’s new project
At a recent conference, I was talking with Ed Snowden about the range of data that's now available, not just to the government, but by extension, to servers in the cloud. We got to thinking about just how much worry is wasted.
Combine this with Google's work on the self-driving car,
and with the increasing use of wearable computers,
and home monitors and videocams…
It turns out that we've been spending countless hours worrying about the wrong things.
It's pretty clear what the next opportunity is. Today, Ed has given me the okay to announce that he has received $15 million in funding to launch a new startup: Worry.com (not ready for sign ups yet, but he wanted to announce this at the beginning of April because the space is about to get crowded). He and his partners already have a spokesperson.
Worry is the very first technological solution that maximizes the benefit of mankind's oldest task: anxiety.
The Worry app is a front end to a sophisticated, cloud-based trouble-recognition system. Using Bayesian probability as well as advanced Fourier transforms and Markoff chains, the backend of Worry will monitor and calculate what really matters—the things you can't control that somehow are a better use of all the time you're spending trying to change things merely by thinking and worrying about them. (I didn't understand all of this at first either, but Snowden is pretty smart, and explained it to me).
Imagine taking everything the web knows about you, including the content of your web history, your emails, your reading habits and more… then integrating that with real-time video cameras and GPS tracking… then adding to that what your friends, rivals and colleagues are saying about you (not just in public, but behind your back).
Using this flow of data, the Worry app computes the things you ought to be worried about. For example, instead of needlessly wasting time worrying about a random event like being bitten by a brown recluse spider, the Worry GPS system can point out that based on where you are, you'd be better off worrying about a different, unpreventable event like being killed by a fire hydrant flying through the air or perhaps by an angry rooster wielding a knife. The Worry app will alert you to that, which dramatically increases the effectiveness of your worrying.
Even better, the new Worry watch (sorry, I should call it wearable tech) will alert you in case you stop worrying. During worrying downtime, the watch will vibrate, indicating the most likely uncontrollable scenario on your horizon, so you can begin cycling through your anxiousness.
Instead of spending time fruitlessly fretting about things that are extremely unlikely to happen, or worrying about whether your friend Sue was offended by what you said last night (he looked it up: she wasn't), now you can experience failure in advance on issues that are actually more likely to happen. Worry about the right stuff.
Your sleepless nights will now be more productive, because you can be sleepless about the right things.
In addition to Mr. Snowden, board members include pioneers Cory Doctorow, Stewart Brand and Pema Chodron. Matt Cutts has agreed to leave Google to run their SEO efforts. Stay tuned!
Look for them to launch in about a year…
The cure or the story?
The plumber, the roofer and the electrician sell us a cure. They come to our house, fix the problem, and leave.
The consultant, the doctor (often) and the politician sell us the narrative. They don't always change things, but they give us a story, a way to think about what's happening. Often, that story helps us fix our problems on our own.
The best parents, of course, are in the story business. Teachers and bosses, too.