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The wrong answer is, “it won’t.”
If you buy a piece of tech, it will break.
If you buy an asset of some sort, it’s likely to go down in value one day.
If you start a project, you will one day walk away from it.
And everything that is alive will die.
Refusing to answer the question doesn’t make it more likely that it won’t fail. All it does is make the failure more painful.
Toddlers don’t get afforded a lot of respect. They whine all the time about how unfair things are, and it’s difficult to take them seriously.
Lately, in our quest for victory, we’ve established that some winners get there via whining, and perhaps this is a useful strategy. It seems as though working the refs, blaming the conditions and questioning the score is all good as long as it helps you come out on top.
In fact, whining isn’t resilient or scalable.
People with confidence, power and reserves are able to admit when they are wrong, when things aren’t working and when it doesn’t turn out the way they hoped.
If you’re hoping to demonstrate power, confidence or status, taking responsibility is a better signal than whining.
Few branches of medicine have created as much comfort, solace and relief.
When we realize that traditional Western medicine is not going to be able to cure a life-threatening illness, the palliative care team is able to help. Instead of torturing and bankrupting patients, they can offer connection, humanity and closure.
Too often, we view the fight as an unalloyed virtue. Instead of sharing our preferences and desires before we get ill (as though it’s some sort of bad luck charm), we simply hope for the best and then wait far too long (and create too much family stress) before embracing the next step in our journey.
And, since I often look for metaphors, it’s probably worth noting that the same approach works for projects, companies and even relationships. We might all come out ahead if we focus on a productive and comfortable way to wrap things up, instead of fighting to the last moment.
A placebo is a human intervention that changes the story we tell ourselves. And those stories are powerful. They can alleviate pain, make wine taste better, improve our golf swing and even grow hair.
Because the placebo is so powerful, we spend a lot of time and money on it. Entire industries (like fashion) are built on bringing people something that changes the way they interact with themselves and the world. If you think that copper bracelet is going to relieve your arthritis, it might.
But in the last few generations, we’ve built more and more of our world on a foundation of measured, consistent engineering. There’s nothing you can add to your gas tank that will make your car mileage go up. It doesn’t matter whether you believe the car is running more efficiently–it either is or it isn’t, and it isn’t.
If you’re a maker of placebos, then, it helps to recognize that what you do is change the story. The more a market is based on mutually agreed upon measurements, the less appealing it is to the maker of a placebo.
It’s autumn in North America, and that means that homeowners and contractors are busy removing suburban leaves. It’s almost impossible to avoid the deafening roar of gas-powered leaf blowers.
Here’s what we know, without doubt:
We also know that:
The solution, if we’re serious, is to ban gas leaf blowers. The replacements will pay for themselves in a few weeks. Once the competitive playing field is re-set, gardeners will come out ahead. Employee well-being will increase, and the leaves will still get blown.
So what’s the problem?
We’re not serious enough about making change happen. If we cared enough to get two dozen friends and neighbors to show up at the village hall, the regulations could be changed in a few meetings.
But sometimes it’s easier to do nothing.
_______ is [Always/Never] the solution to a problem.
In my experience, “always” and “never” are rarely useful ways to approach a problem. “Sometimes” requires nuance and insight and discovery. It might not be the lazy response, but if you’ve got a problem, it might be worth thinking about how to solve it.
Digital advertising has turned millions of people and organizations into not just the target of ads, but the advertisers as well.
But it doesn’t easily answer the obvious question: Did that ad work?
Long before digital ads were invented, my late friend Lester Wunderman coined the term “Direct Marketing.” This is measured, active advertising. Spend $10 on an ad and you’ll know by tomorrow if you made $20 or lost five.
Lester helped invent the American Express card and grew the Columbia Record Club, among other direct marketing heroics. The secret is simple: Measure an ad, and if it ‘works’, do it more.
And so, Google. Google makes billions of dollars selling direct marketing to organizations that aren’t being particularly brave, insightful or clever. They’re simply testing, measuring and repeating.
On the other hand, ads on podcasts or Twitter almost never measure well. They rarely seem to ‘work’ in the P&L sense, because they’re brand ads, not direct ads.
The purpose of a brand ad is to deliver a hard-to-measure but important feeling to the potential consumer. The brand ad tells a story, builds trust and most of all, helps a customer decide that this brand makes them feel good enough (hard to define) that they’ll pay extra for it.
If you try to measure brand ads, like quarks and other quantum phenomena, the benefits disappear. The very things you would do to make them measure better cause them to be pretty lousy brand ads.
Running brand ads in a medium that is counter to what the brand is trying to accomplish makes very little sense, regardless of how much it costs. On the other hand, sponsoring interactions that build trust and connection is hard to overpay for.
All a long way of saying that advertisers in the digital space are finally spending more time and energy thinking about the places they’re advertising and wondering about whether they’re simply making more noise or actually making a difference.
While it’s tempting to view our days as an amusement park with unlimited rides, that’s not really true. It might not maximize our impact or enjoyment either.
In fact, we each have a limited number of tickets to trade in. Limited time, limited opportunities, limited money and other resources.
How will you spend today’s tickets?
“As soon as possible” is a trap if you focus on soon instead of possible.
