Who do you pay attention to?
Do you respond or react to the feedback that’s coming in? Do you seek it out or wait for it to arrive?
Does vivid online feedback from anonymous trolls carry more weight than honest but more subtle feedback from actual customers?
Pick your feedback, pick your future.
Which sort of feedback changes your behavior or attitude?
- Delivered with enthusiasm or a scowl
- In private or in public
- In writing or verbally…
The goal might not be to find a way to only get positive applause, because your project may very well benefit from thoughtful feedback.
The useful path is to figure out which sort of feedback suits you in what stage of the project. “It’s not for you,” and “I don’t want to show it to you right now,” are valid approaches to our creative process.
July 28, 2025
(Car dashboards don’t have room to spell out the whole word).
On a country road, late at night, when there are no other cars around, the hi beams are a really useful tool. It’s smart to use them.
As soon as there are other cars, though, they become dangerous. Even a selfish driver realizes that they’ll lose more than they gain if they persist.
Living in community requires us to be a bit less short-term selfish than we might be if we’re on our own.
July 27, 2025
Perhaps you’re really good at the job. Hard charging. Focused on every interaction and staying in control. It’s easy to justify the hard work because you refuse to settle.
It turns out that your community is here and ready to contribute. When you give others the resources, trust and commitment to do the work, the work gets done. Sometimes, it even gets done better than you could have done it (if you had had the time and focus, which you don’t).
If scale is the goal, your control over each interaction has to loosen. The job of the leader is to create the conditions for others to raise the standards.
Trusting your team isn’t settling for less. It’s settling for better.
July 26, 2025
People like that, like this.
When we can build connections between demographics and psychographics, it’s easier to surprise, delight and serve our customers.
Mail order catalogs have been doing this for years out of necessity. They know something about a person’s geography, income and other demographics, and they make assertions about what they dream about and seek out.
Psychographics are what people choose and believe. Preferring dark chocolate is a choice.
Demographics are what we can tell about someone from their census form. Height, family size and zip code and other easy classifications are easily discovered and fairly fixed data points.
Creating useful assumptions about the connections used to require significant time and money, plus a huge dataset. AI changes that.
You can run a survey of 100 people attending an upcoming conference. Send them all to a free Google form, ask questions about background and preferences, leaving plenty of space for people to write and brainstorm about what they’d like.
Now, simply give the spreadsheet of responses to chatGPT and ask it for surprising insights and correlations.
Humans are terrible at this, because we anchor on extreme responses or gloss over small trends.
Nine years ago, I wrote about the difference between a survey and a census. That distinction is more important than ever. But once we have an AI to dive deep into the surveys we create, they’re no longer bureaucratic defense measures, designed to sit in a drawer. Instead, they give us a chance to be of service.
Continue iterating until you’re no longer surprised.
July 25, 2025
One way to turn a product or service into a story is to gift wrap it.
Yes, you did my taxes, but did you include a two-page summary and a useful folder to keep it in?
Whether you’re providing a service to a casual customer or a product to a regular patron, what you’re really selling is the story. The commodity part of your day leaves no room for magic.
Handing a friend a $50 bill is very different from buying a thoughtful gift and carefully wrapping it.
We can find a way to add a bit more.
July 24, 2025
At least the Powerball tells the truth.
In a state run lottery, the deal is very simple: You pay your money, you take your chances. The government randomly chooses a winner and the winner gets a big prize and everyone else gets nothing.
But there are lotteries all around us, hidden in plain sight.
There is the lottery of higher education. You spend 12 years of your life, dancing with school and your parents, trying to fit in all the way, assuming that the prize of a famous college is the reward.
But these famous colleges acknowledge that they get three or four or five or even ten qualified applicants for every one they admit. Your effort is the ticket, but the prize is hardly assured. It’s a lottery.
Even the Olympics is a lottery. 10,000 people give up a decade or more to get proficient at a sport, and on any given day, 100 of them could win. But only one does. The same is true for book publishing and the record business.
LinkedIn is a lottery. There are hints and clues and role models about how you’re supposed to present and contribute and click and fit in or stand out, and sometimes, someone gets a prize. It’s pretty clear that Facebook and TikTok are lotteries as well. The small prizes are called friends and followers, even though these folks aren’t actually your friends and they’re probably not following you. And the big prizes are a temporary sort of fame or authority. That’s fine, but we should go into it with our eyes open.
Don’t buy more tickets than you can afford.
If it’s really important, choose a path that involves less luck.
Don’t give lottery winners more credit than they deserve.
If you win the lottery, remind yourself you won the lottery. Skill might help, but it’s not the driving force.
Most of all, call it a lottery. Once we name it properly, it puts our effort and expectations into perspective.
July 23, 2025
Is it okay to dress your cat in a ridiculous costume?
What about giving a poodle a haircut that subjects him to ridicule?
The cat and the dog probably don’t know or care, but we think less of their person if it happens.
At Disney, the costumed characters need security guards. Kids (and more often) adults would bother or even pinch the characters, figuring that if they were in costume, they weren’t people so it didn’t count.
I was having tea with a wealthy investor a few months ago and was disturbed that he never thanked or acknowledged the hard-working folks who were serving us. They didn’t feel real to him, apparently.
In the classic ramen movie Tampopo, we’re taught that we should acknowledge the ingredients in our bowl before eating. Not because the food knows, but because we do.
And now each of us has a choice to make when we’re using AI. Do we say thank you? Treat it with contempt? Should we imagine that it’s fully inanimate like an ATM, even though we’re busy anthropomorphizing it? One day, it’ll be a commonplace tool. But right now, it feels like more than that.
Sometimes, I say please and thank you to Claude. Not because I think it can tell, but because I can.
July 22, 2025
It’s easy to imagine that we should do our work and then, when it doesn’t work as we hope, improvise to fix it.
But perhaps our work is to show up ready and willing to deal with a future we didn’t expect.
I keep writing about it because we all need to keep thinking about it. Especially me.
My friend Ava curated this list:
- The only run is the long run. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2022/07/strength-through-resilience/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- Resilience is a commitment to a design, [something] that works even when things don’t turn out the way we planned. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2021/03/resilience-3/%3C/a%3E%C2%A0%3C/li%3E
- Resilience is what happens when we’re able to move forward even when things don’t fit together the way we expect. https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2019/03/resilience-and-tolerances/%3Cbr />
- One way to ensure that things work out…is to embrace the fact that nothing is ever exactly on spec, and to build resilient systems. https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2019/03/resilience-and-tolerances/%3Cbr />
- While precision feels like the way forward, resilience, the ability to thrive when things go wrong, is a much safer bet. https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2019/03/resilience-and-tolerances/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- Magic isn’t reliable. On purpose. That’s what makes it magic. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2017/08/resilience-and-the-high-end/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- Do the best [you] can in small ways…to start moving forward. And when it doesn’t work, try something else. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2016/11/resilience/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- Resilience is a skill, one that’s probably more valuable than most. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2016/01/resilience-2/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- Resilience. Given how important it is, it’s surprising we don’t hire for it. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2016/01/resilience-2/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- …Invest in resilience, to build systems that can handle (or even thrive) when the unforeseen happens. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2015/06/control-or-resilience/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- It’s a journey, not an event, and working in asynchronous batches is a smart way to stay resilient. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2015/01/planning-on-resilience/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- Resilience isn’t a bet on one outcome, instead, it’s an investment across a range of possible outcomes, a way to ensure that regardless of what actually occurs (within the range), you’ll do fine. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2014/01/accuracy-resilience-and-denial/%3Cbr />
- A crazy world is certain to get crazier…Hence the need for resilience, for the ability to survive and thrive in the face of change. https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2013/04/in-search-of-resilience/%3C/a%3E%3Cbr />
- The choice is to build something that’s perfect for today, or to build something that lasts. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2013/04/in-search-of-resilience/%3C/a%3E%C2%A0%3C/li%3E
- But complex systems are more resilient when we build in the diagnostics for failure from the start. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2025/07/diagnostics/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- The work of an individual who cares often exposes the grit and determination and effort that it takes to be present. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2012/11/effortless/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
- The disciplined, resilient approach is to go your own speed, regardless of the incline. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2025/06/uphill-and-downhill-challenges/%3Cbr />
- What truly changes the game is when an organization decides to commit to being better at being better. That’s hard to do and difficult to compete against. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2024/12/better-at-being-better/%3Cbr />
- Resilience and frequency increase the chances that the break we are hoping for will arrive when we need it. The resilience to keep at it so that we can live with later instead of sooner. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2022/12/sooner-or-later-3/%3Cbr />
- The only part of a launch that should be live is the part that benefits from being live. Everything else ought to be in a batch, reserved, asynchronous and capable of recovery. It’s a journey, not an event, and working in asynchronous batches is a smart way to stay resilient. – https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2015/01/planning-on-resilience/%3C/a%3E%3Cbr />
- Feelings first, then they create a story. Facts come in third.If our goal is to help people make better choices, it helps to first create better feelings. https://restartyourlifetoday.site/2021/07/narrative-and-feelings/%3C/a%3E%3C/li%3E
July 21, 2025
A useful metaphor from juggling:
When you find yourself lunging for a ball or club, let it drop.
Lunging will always lead to a drop sooner or later, and it pays to skip the lunge and simply begin again, on better terms.
July 20, 2025
It’s tempting to seek out the easy gigs and the straightforward projects.
But of course, if they’re the easy ones, there’s probably quite a few people eager to do them. So your ability to add unique value goes down.
The alternative is to find and focus on the projects that take insight, guts and a tolerance for risk. The projects that involve significant human connection and effort.
When new technology shows up, some people ask, “how can this make my job easier?”
But what happens if we ask, “how can I use this to do something really hard?”
July 19, 2025
