We don’t notice that the tree we planted a few years ago thrives just a bit more each day. We don’t notice that the mail shows up when it’s supposed to, that our civilization persists in the face of chaos, and that the lights (usually) go on when we flip a switch.
Granted?
What would happen if we paid as much attention to these persistent delights as we pay to the annoying surprises that unfold each day?
The narrative of our time here becomes our lived experience. We’re the directors of this very long cinéma vérité documentary, deciding what gets focused on and what we skip over.
And it turns out that choosing our focus often leads to the plot changing as well.
And shiitake mushrooms, spaghetti squash, ginger and even packaged tofu?
In the 1960s, the culture changed, and so did the supermarket. Small markets with fifty or sixty kinds of fruits and vegetables transformed into supermarkets carrying hundreds of varieties. Cooking shows and cookbooks raced to teach home cooks about the new, interesting and exotic.
And Frieda Caplan showed up to orchestrate a connection between a desire for novelty and unknown international foods.
Frieda didn’t invent the kiwi. But she named it, told a story about it and brought it to the merchants who needed it. She saw that markets in flux often need narrators.
The metaphor is something we see all the time–when markets and culture change, there’s room for an agent of change to bring leverage and innovation to the world. The extraordinary thing about Frieda’s was the scale of it. One person, in the right place, the right moment, with the right attitude, transformed the diet of millions of people.
Is there any doubt that right now we’re seeing a similar shift in the culture all around us?
Ever since Viking took this photo fifty years ago, some people have been sure–certain–that it clearly shows a face on the planet’s surface. Of course, once we had a high resolution image from a later mission, all resemblance to a face went away.
Human beings need a story, especially when we’re trying to understand something we haven’t already classified. And so we see faces in clouds, in grilled cheese sandwiches and on other planets.
We do it with song lyrics that don’t make sense and with technology we don’t really understand as well.
Some of the drivers are:
Fear of the unknown.
Novelty and the arrival of something new.
Unpredictable inputs that seem to assert some sort of intentional action and agency.
It’s no wonder, then, that LLMs and other forms of AI lead to waves of pareidolia. We ascribe a gender, a tone of voice and most of all, intent to these computer programs that are doing nothing but math. We imagine that they are lying to us, manipulating us and getting ready to take over the world.
If imagining that there’s a little person inside helps you use the tool better, that’s fine.
But made up stories that we invented to deal with our fear often make it worse. They distract us from the hard work of understanding what’s actually happening.
When the details become more clear, we’ll then have to unlearn all the personification we insisted on learning.
The simple rule: Nine shortcuts take longer and are less productive than simply doing the work the right way the first time.
When we look for one-quick-tip and the lazy hack, we’re wasting time we could have spent on the direct path instead.
When a shortcut becomes the best way to do something, it ceases to be a shortcut. It’s simply the direct path. It’s easy to find satisfaction in finding the unexplored shortcut that gives us a temporary advantage. However, it won’t last long, and the time spent looking for it is a distraction.
Sit down and type. Stand up and lead. Simply begin.
If you are struggling to get the word out, if customer traction is elusive, if you are always hustling for a little bit of attention, if it feels like you need to spend more money on promotion…
It might be that you skipped the important part.
Marketing isn’t hype. Marketing is making a product or service that matters.
If you’re struggling selling the thing you made, it’s worth reconsidering the audience, the promise and the change you seek to make–and then be honest with your team about whether your offering is actually remarkable, or just the best you could do with what you had.
Because the market doesn’t care how hard you’re trying.
The announcement of the planned Netflix acquisition of Warner Bros, one of the last remaining major studios, is shedding light on a key issue we often overlook when thinking about culture, creativity and creation.
Carriage is the term for the method that books, movies, TV shows and other media get from the producers to the public. It’s about who controls user access to the medium.
Until recently, bookstores were a largely open system. Any publisher had a chance to get any book into any bookstore, sometimes with prime placement and promotion.
Radio stations offered carriage to record labels. When labels tried to bribe the program directors (‘payola’) the power of this carriage was clear and the practice was banned. Even so, major record labels had power because they, and they alone, had a chance to get a record heard and played.
Throughout the 1930s, film production in the US was controlled by about eight studios, and five of the studios had their own movie theaters. With this advantage, they could force the independent movie theaters to take a block of movies, exerting control over what got seen.
It’s this control of carriage that amplifies power. With just three major TV networks, an independent producer of shows had almost no chance to have their shown seen without their participation. Middlemen control carriage, and that gives them the key to the gate.
The internet was supposed to change the way creators dealt with carriage issues. If you wanted someone to visit your website, no one could step in the way. This was a breakthrough, the first in a century. Songs, books, videos–put them up and bring your own audience.
Of course, once Google gained traction, they offered to engage in thinly veiled payola–pay Google for search ads, and traffic would come to your site. Don’t pay, no play.
Amazon started out as an everything store, treating all books–and then everything else they sold–evenly. If an author or publisher could get the word out, Amazon ensured that the item would be found. Widespread and open carriage of ideas and products. Alas… if you’ve noticed that the Amazon shopping experience has gotten a lot worse, it’s because they’re maximizing their ad profits (payola) and burying (taking efficient carriage away from) those that won’t pay or partner.
And Netflix?
Hollywood is petrified. If Netflix further integrates into production, as well as buying another large library of previously produced content, they fear that there will only be one streaming platform, and, with control over carriage, one company will control what gets made and what gets seen. It doesn’t really matter how many studios there are–it’s not hard to start one–what matters for the future is that carriage, and the profits that go with it, are available to anyone with a studio.
The solution, one that Netflix would probably benefit from, is to offer to adopt more of a YouTube approach to carriage–allow anyone who produces video content to show it on Netflix. Pay them based on views. As we’ve seen with YouTube, creators don’t mind if there’s just one place to be seen, as long as carriage is available fairly.
Creators of everything–from Linkedin posts to podcasts to documentaries–need to think hard about carriage. Attention is one of our precious resources, and our culture benefits when it’s not centrally controlled.
Organizations and cultures are build on affiliation and organized by status. And that status never stays stable.
There’s a status loop in some suburbs in how the front lawn looks. A nicely kept yard gets a nod of approval from a neighbor and might be rewarded with a higher resale price. And so one nice lawn might become three or four, and then rakes come out and the cycle continues. The same could happen with Christmas lights.
But it also happens in some law firms, where working late or weekends gets you a promotion to partner, and then the race is on, with people sacrificing years of their personal lives to earn more status.
A toxic status loop goes further. Not only might it harm some participants, it also ends up belying the larger goals of the culture. Body shaming can lead to toxic eating disorders, or a focus on sales commissions can lead to eroding standards of ethics–all of which undermine the very point of the culture in the first place.
In certain political circles, status is gained by outdoing competitors in apparently being even more true to some of the party’s stated principles–focusing on performative or fringe elements of the platform at the expense of serving the public.
The first step is noticing the loop. The second is being clear about whether the steps taken to gain more status in this area are actually aligned with why you’re awarding status in the first place (is it helping you get the job done?). And finally, either changing the systems that award status or providing support and encouragement to people who refuse to create harm by single-mindedly pursuing metrics at the expense of the work to be done.
