Robert Johnson is known as the king of the Delta blues. One reason is that his small output was brilliant. The other, bigger reason is that the recordings that remain of his short life are among the earliest that sound good… most audio recordings from before 1936 sound antique and scratchy.
The Wizard of Oz is one of our great movies, and one of the oldest that people regularly watch today. One reason is that the production values of 1939 were just good enough to still feel professional today. The movies from just a few years earlier are jumpy, faded relics.
People can happily read a first-edition Agatha Christie mystery, but a book from 1700 is rarely read in the same way.
No one wants to see websites that were built in Geocities or pages from Prodigy today. But a blog like this one is still readable and fresh, even though it has a design that’s nearly a decade old.
When a medium hits sufficient resolution, future advances are nice, but they’re not essential. And once an industry realizes this, future investments in resolution begin to slow down. Of course, it’s difficult to tell if the resolution is sufficient until after the fact.
Right here, right now, we’re discovering a wide range of content that has a resolution that is crossing the line to sufficient. That’s going to lock in new forms of interaction and culture for a long time to come.
If you go to a health food store and buy some pills with selenium, colloidal silver or other mysterious substances in them, it’s possible that they’ll make you feel a bit better. On the other hand, if you take a large dose, you’ll get sick or possibly die.
In very small doses, all you’re getting is the placebo. The way the story makes you feel. When there’s a substantial amount of cellular material, though, toxicity can result.
Small doses magnify powerful placebo effects.
Lowering your prices by 25% might make your customers happier. But spending 4% of your revenue on training, recruitment and giving your staff the freedom to act with humanity might make them far happier.
The brute force technique makes engineers happy. But giving humans a chance to tell themselves a positive story makes people happy.
A new business is complicated. It involves weaving together suppliers, partners, customers, processes, technology, leases, employees, logos, capital and more.
Along the way, it’s easy to get distracted, but focusing on the hard parts is a useful way to move forward.
You could work hard on the logo, or double your supplier roster or, as I did once, spend time with your corporate lawyers brainstorming the way to make your terms of service more interesting.
There are endless tasks to be done in starting a new venture. But most of the tasks are necessary but insufficient. You can’t begin without them, but by themselves, they won’t create enough impact for your work to make a change happen.
And every new project must create change, or else it fails.
We spend our time focusing on the tasks because the tasks are known and do-able.
It’s a form of hiding.
Worth noting:
The hard part isn’t the thing that costs you the most money. If you can outsource the work to an expert and get that work done effectively, it’s not hard. It’s just expensive. You don’t need to build your own email server, you can rent one. And if you want to become a book publisher, it turns out that printing, typesetting, copyediting, legal work and the rest aren’t actually hard. There are people who are eager to do that for you.
The hard part involves customer traction. Can you find enough customers who will pay you a fair price and also choose to spread the word? Because if customers bring you customers, and those customers all generate more income than expenses, you have a useful project.
Every minute the founder spends not working on this question might be misallocated.
While throwing shade might be more fun, it eventually runs out of energy. It’s designed to end conversations, not start them, to intimidate, not encourage.
Part of the challenge of hanging out with cannibals is that it’s very difficult to get a good night’s sleep.
The math of finding a group of people that cares about community is pretty compelling. While individual selfish choices might feel productive in the moment, if they undermine the health of the community, they’re ultimately self-defeating.
Culture is the antidote. The way things are around here. The focus on a longer-term connection, with mutual benefits.
As our world has gotten more crowded and more connected, it’s easier than ever to step on someone’s toes. Culture gives us the chance to create the conditions for people to embrace a longer-term view. And sleep better too.
There’s a high-end grocer in a very expensive neighborhood of New York–and they focus all of their energy on Italian food. Everything is imported, and they spend a lot of time and money earning the premium they charge for an authentic Italian shopping experience. And then a lazy brand manager decided to plaster “Sale-A-Bration” signs all over their windows. Is there anything less Italian than that?
Or perhaps it’s the front desk person who can’t be bothered to bring the extra energy that the architect, real estate professionals and builders brought to the hotel you just opened.
Or the paralyzed UI group in the software department who undermined the work of the new car’s designers.
Or the fearful security people at the bank who belie the hard work you’re doing on customer service by creating herculean barriers between your customers and the transactions they seek to execute.
In every case, people are just doing what the boss permits/encourages. Ultimately, the brand is the story we tell, and sooner or later, it’s up to the person who did something that touched the customer.
Most of our lives are filled with “or” decisions. You can have this or that. You can save money for the big party or you can go out for lunch. You can have exactly one thing for dessert–cake or fruit.
But the war for our attention has given us more than a million things to watch on YouTube, another million songs to listen to on Qobuz, and unlimited bingeing (which didn’t even use to be a word) on dozens of streaming channels.
No or. Simply and.
This means that choices have fewer consequences. It means that time counts for less, it simply fades away. And it turns the sharp relief of choice into the borderless fatigue of ‘whatever’.
Even when it’s possible to avoid a choice, it may make sense to make one.
For a certain cohort of high-performing students at famous colleges, graduate school feels irresistible.
If you’re good at school, the challenge and offer of law school, med school or a famous business school means you get to do more of what you’re good at. You’re offered a high-status badge, a path to a well-paid job and several years of more school instead of the scary freedom of choice of what happens next.
And so, literate and passionate young people talk about their dreams of helping people, running for office, fighting injustice or exploring their passions as entrepreneurs. And grad school is supposed to be the path.
The problem is that these graduate schools aren’t optimized for any of those things.
Leaving medical school with a pile of debt and your twenties mostly gone pushes you to sign up for the doctor track, which is increasingly about systems and forms, not actually engaging with patients. Law students who came in with dreams of social justice often postpone these dreams for decades as they work for big money at big firms for long hours… You get the idea.
If you want to sit with someone and help them, a career as an occupational or physical therapist is certainly more hands on and direct. If you want to make a difference by writing or arguing, three years of law school and a bar exam aren’t the most leveraged ways to do that. And entrepreneurs need to know a lot, but not what they teach in a typical MBA program.
The stratified work of big name investment banks, consultants, law firms and fancy doctoring is increasingly veering away from the actual contributions of people who have an impact that they can measure and be proud of.
If that sort of work is for you, go for it. But do it with intent.
If not, then perhaps it makes sense to start on the work right this minute. Not with a full certification or permit, but simply creating the sort of change you seek to make, in small steps, right now.
June 29, 2023
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