This page intentionally left blank has a long history.
I thought it was an IBM thing from the 1960s, but I was off by a thousand or more years.
There are good reasons for a page to be blank. Folding signatures, printing processes, having chapters start on the right or the left…
But there are even better reasons to let people know you did it on purpose. Particularly in a loosely bound book or a technical manual. Knowing that the page isn’t supposed to have something on it removes stress and lets the reader gain confidence that the text is complete.
Of course, as we race to fill in every moment with swiping, surfing and clicking, it’s easy to forget that we’re allowed to leave some blank spaces. In fact, not just allowed, but if we want to live well, required.
And it gets even easier if we announce (to ourselves and perhaps to others), that we’ve done it on purpose.
[HT to Andy for the prompt]
[unrelated: Here is a fascinating essay from an insider at Google about the shift in the AI universe. It’s happening very fast. There’s a ton of organizational turbulence, and this might be a moment open source has been waiting for.]
They are probably the last huge company where hundreds of thousands of people will be surveilled, measured and ordered to follow the rule book.
The pandemic didn’t create distributed work, the laptop did. Human interaction is critical, but the office isn’t actually the most effective way to create that.
David Risher might be mistaken.
The new CEO of Lyft just ordered all the workers at HQ to “come back to work.” Of course, they’ve been at work all along, they just haven’t been at the office.
It takes a different set of leadership and management skills to create the conditions for effective distributed work. But it’s incredibly powerful when you get it right.
The method is not to count keystrokes or other false proxies of productivity.
Instead, the opportunity is to offer significance.
Salt is essentially free. A bag of salted nuts is the same price (or less) as an unsalted one.
But salt used to be expensive. Truly expensive, like gold.
We keep seeing the deflation of things we were sure would remain expensive. Computer chips, disk storage and now, content.
Once computers start illustrating, writing and composing, the opportunity is to have them work for you, not compete with you.
[NOTE! Along those lines, check out my new augmented chatbot. It’s a world premiere, but I’m expecting that countless other WordPress blogs will have it one day. While it’s slow, it’s also pretty smart… it can point you to the relevant blog posts and podcasts, and often comes up with a great answer to your questions. You can even ask it, “what is the best kind of chocolate?”]
Or cast the movie until the screenplay is complete.
The house painter has an important job, but it makes no sense to plan for the painting before the house is designed.
This makes a lot of sense because some parts of a project have high variability which can lead to very different outcomes.
There are more than a billion ways to write a book, but fewer than 100 distinct categories of interior book design.
We desperately need house painters, gaffers and book designers. If they don’t deliver on their work, the entire project falls apart. But they don’t go first.
The job of the house painter is to amplify the architect’s vision, not vice versa.
So there are a few questions worth asking:
First, which one of the tasks is the dominant variable, the one where simply doing ‘a pretty good job’ is going to be insufficient (no one talks about the roofer on a Frank Lloyd Wright house–until it leaks).
Second, which job do you want? We need both, but we should choose the path that suits our goals.
[To be clear, it’s a role, not a job title. There are plenty of designers and painters who act as architects, and some architects that are not the pivot point for the project.]
In order to go onto the next thing, which we all do (unless you’re still wearing pajamas with feet and taking ballet lessons), we need to walk away from the last thing.
Wrap it up, learn from it, leave it in good hands.
And we also need to have an idea of what the next thing is. But if we spend too much time focusing on the next thing, we’ll neglect the thing we’re currently doing, to ill effect.
Trapeze artists spend all of their time focusing on transitions, as they’re a matter of life and death.
If we begin by acknowledging that there’s going to be a next thing, perhaps we can learn to develop the skills and focus we need to get there.
Pop culture depends on scarcity. When there are only a few TV stations or a dozen radio stations, it’s likely that many of us watch or hear the same thing at the same time.
And so a popular TV show or song from fifty years ago probably reached twenty times as many people as a popular hit today.
But the long tail brings other benefits. More choices, more innovation.
Not just a long tail of consumption, but also a spectacular decrease in the cost of production. Innovations in computers, cameras and AI mean that people can make content without permission from a gatekeeper.
In the latest AI breakthrough, here’s a recent Paul McCartney song ‘updated’ to use the voice of a young Paul McCartney.
You can hear a quick snippet here:
While this is technically amazing, what it highlights is that within a few weeks, we’re going to see thousands (or millions) of new songs created by AI and available on YouTube and streaming channels. Some of them will be mediocre. Some will be breakthroughs. And a few will be hits.
Creating music (or writing) is an inherently human activity, and it doesn’t go away. What does go away, though, is the commercial dynamic of thousands of someones in Nashville or Hollywood hitting it big big big with nothing but a typewriter or a guitar.
The end of pop and the rise of the long tail and AI brings us back a century. Just like it used to be–small circles of people, not mass markets. But this time with endless choice and a business model that is hard to visualize.
PS my friend Paige has a new book out. You can read the digital edition for free with password friend.
That’s what we usually try to do. When technology, comfort, convenience, efficiency and price line up, the market takes care of itself.
On the other hand, seatbelts would never have happened if they weren’t required.
But pizza grew to dominate our diets with no centralized action.
They sell a lot of Tide laundry detergent. Billions of dollars a year, that’s enough pods to reach the moon and back.
Even though Tide usually comes in a big plastic container and weighs many pounds, we keep buying it. That’s because it’s convenient, easy to find and not particularly expensive.
One of the challenges of changing a culture that’s driven by consumption is that people voluntarily choose what to buy next.
And so we get stuck. Stuck with products and systems that we’re not happy with, simply because it’s easier to stick with what we already have. The status quo is the status quo because it’s good at sticking around.
And yet, sometimes we get lucky. Consider this simple product for washing your clothes.
It’s super convenient, even more so than Tide. It’s almost as cheap. It’s dramatically more sustainable. It has a jillion 5-star reviews. And yet, it has a tiny fraction of Tide’s market share (so far).
We can’t buy out way out of the climate crisis, we’ll need to compromise, to invest and to rethink the systems that we depend on.
But every once in a while, you can simply change what you buy, and even better, tell someone else when it works.
A placebo is a force beyond understanding, one that is capable of disappearing when we do the appropriate double-blind tests and has mechanisms that defy our knowledge of the laws of physics.
Or…
A placebo is a prompt for our subconscious to do the hard work of healing our body, increasing our satisfaction or maximizing our performance.
I think the second is way more likely, and ultimately serves us better.
When someone says, “that’s just a placebo” they’re undervaluing the magic of culture and the power of our minds to actually influence how our bodies perform. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, “we’re fortunate that a powerful placebo is available.”
Purveyors of fancy sneakers, designer handbags, rare wines, acupuncture and herbal remedies can proudly lean into the work of producing the conditions where placebos have their maximum impact.
If it’s not helping us believe, then it’s not properly designed.
There are three strands, present for most everyone:
Power (sometimes seen as status, or the appearance of status)
Safety (survival and peace of mind)
Meaning (hope and the path forward)
The changes in our media structure, public health and economy have pushed some people to overdo one or the other and perhaps ignore a third. When a social network finds your button and presses it over and over, it’s hard to resist.
New cultural forces catch on because they hit on one or more of these. And politics is understood through this lens as well.
See the braid and it’s a lot easier to figure out why we might be stressed.
April 27, 2023
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