Articles43
For hundreds of years, nostalgia was seen as a serious disease, with doctors across Europe scrambling for a cure. Hundreds of thousands of people died from it. In the original understanding of the term, it was a sort of homesickness. Soldiers from Switzerland were the first to get the official diagnosis–separated from their friends, family […]
The creators of the Blackberry were sure that customers loved the keyboard. That’s what they heard all day from their users, and it must have been right since they had a huge share of the mobile phone market. When the iPhone came out, it wasn’t seen as a threat because it had no keyboard. Blackberry […]
Multi-tasking is mostly an illusion. What we’re actually doing is slicing our focus, jumping from one thing to another and then back again. All that jumping decreases our productivity and worse, erodes our peace of mind. You’re only doing one thing at a time anyway. Might as well embrace that instead of spending so much […]
I bought a snack food the other day, and was disappointed to discover that the thing inside the container had little in common with the picture on the front. It was pallid, lifeless and drab. The marketer who decided to improve the picture was making a choice, one with consequences. When you choose to disappoint […]
When there is motion, it creates an impact of the environment. First, the path is barely noticeable. But then, others see the hint of a path and walk on it, making it more clear. Finally, the path becomes the route. Sometimes there’s a small rut. But a rut shifts gravity and wheels or feet land […]
In terms of cost, serving a small ramekin of toasted pistachio nuts is a tiny portion of what an airline spends in transporting someone first class. In fact, it’s such a relatively small expense that it’s easy to simply avoid it. Send the money to the bottom line and focus on the parts that are […]
The expression “bad money crowds out the good” refers to Gresham’s Law. It means that once lesser-quality and counterfeit currency begins to be traded, people hoard the good stuff and only trade the poor substitutes. Social media platforms fall into a trap like this when they seek to grow. For example, at the beginning, Substack […]
[Off topic, but I hope it might be useful] Mindfulness can improve your life. So can stillness and spiritual grounding. This is not a post about that. Breathing is an architectural challenge and a chemical necessity. We breathe about 20 pounds of air a day (and if you’ve ever tried to weigh air, you can […]
There are more available excuses now than ever before. In just two letters, “AI” is a simple, brand-new, all-purpose excuse for laying people off, averaging things down, closing things up and generally finding an easier/quicker path. Courage, on the other hand, is the commitment to take risks and work hard to make something better than […]
New technology often upends the careers of experienced professionals. When the Mac offered typesetting to the masses, typographers were incensed. They had grown up with lead or photo composition, they understood why it was called a ‘case’ and they knew how to kern. The typographers warned us that we’d soon be inundated by ugly, careless […]
Technology changes things. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. When a powerful new technology arrives, it offers us wishes. Too often, we waste them, asking it to take on simple chores or offer us trivial conveniences. We’re in the biggest moment of technical change of our lifetimes. What are you using your wishes for?
If we remove impediments that are in the way of where our customers seek to go, they support us. But when we remove the friction that gives people traction on their journey, they flounder. Remove the hassles that people don’t care about, but celebrate the hassles that make it worth the effort.
Sometimes, back pain is felt in the thighs or even the ankles. But treating the part that hurts does nothing to address the real problem. Most business challenges have a similar pattern–it might feel like the problem is your customer’s attitude or how busy a location is–but it’s probably a different problem, something more systemic, […]
80 years ago, the most important person in the music business was James Petrillo. It’s difficult to imagine the head of the musician’s union on the cover of Time magazine, but there he was. Petrillo saw how technology was changing an industry and pushed for changes in the flow of credit and royalties. The story […]
“Wait a second.” That’s difficult advice. In a world that moves faster with each cycle, where urgencies are prioritized and last-minute saves are celebrated, it’s not always welcome advice. And so we’ve ended up concerned. Fretting. Worried. Looking for the next thing to drop everything for. The book of concern is more than a conceptual […]
What do your supporters tell their friends? That’s the unseen force behind every successful brand, movement or idea. Most people don’t care about you. They’re not listening to you, not wondering what you’re up to, and certainly not taking the time to seek you out. All you have is a small circle, your supporters. And […]
That’s the appeal of it, of course. There isn’t a definitive study. There can’t be. Even if we created a forty-year-long, double-blind twin study, there’d be room for someone to ask “what about?…” It doesn’t matter that the peer-reviewed and consistent results we have are clear to those who read them with an open mind. […]
What does it mean for us to own something? If we own a piece of land and the rain washes the topsoil downstream, do we go and get the topsoil back? Do we own our reputation? We have influence over it, but some of it was gifted to us without our knowledge, and other parts […]
Some vegans don’t eat avocados. They’re concerned that the bees that are trucked in to pollinate the trees are mistreated, and so they choose to not support this practice. But we live in community, and someone running a vegan restaurant or serving a meal to vegan friends, concerned that they might offend, doesn’t serve avocado. […]
Sometimes it pays to accept and celebrate what we get. And sometimes, we only get something because we settled for it. It helps to be able to discern the difference between the two.
There’s a difference between telling someone their work can become better and saying it can become even better. When we say even better, we lock in a foundation — we’re affirming that something good already exists — at the same time we create the conditions for improvement. Ennui and disappointment, on the other hand, are […]
If you’re hoping for this meeting or this performance or this engagement to produce something extraordinary, why are you setting it up as if it’s ordinary? The hard work of a brainstorming session, a pitch collaboration or a negotiation happens long before most people begin. We hire architects to design expensive buildings, but we design […]
The door-to-door salesperson had no leverage. If he was at your door, he wasn’t at anyone else’s door. Every minute you spent with him was a minute he had to spend with you. While it was a tough gig, no one doubted that something was motivating this person enough to put at least as much […]
Three of my friends got hacked this week. You get an ecard and click. It asks you to log in to your email. Boom, done. It hacks your email account, steals all of your contacts and then sends itself to the whole address book. And while they’re at it, they could be scraping and misusing […]
Engineers, scientists, and most of all, businesses are looking for the right answer. It’s such a common quest that we take it for granted, but it’s new, and it continues to cause stress. The right answer is productive. It’s resilient. And it’s a powerful ranking tool. The right play wins the game, the right production […]
Every writer has all of them. 26 in most Western languages. But no writer knows all the words. That’s the gap where creativity, effort and possibility lie–between the universal letters and the unlimited words. This is an analogy for arenas as diverse as sports and commerce. Sometimes, we work on a project where our competitors […]
If it’s just the right amount of necessary kindness, it’s not really kindness. It’s pleasantness. If the people in our circle begin to experience behavior that’s kinder than necessary, the expectations for what’s necessary will ratchet forward, making everything more pleasant. And… being kind is a lovely way to spend your day. [Compare this to […]
If you want to drink more herbal tea, get a hot water dispenser that keeps it handy and on tap. On the other hand, if you want to watch less television, disconnect the TV after every viewing session. Convenience leads to consumption.
We all make them from time to time. You might not know what you need to know. This is where experience is created. You might have an identity that pushes you to make those choices. If you’re determined to act like the person you have assumed you are, the choices come with the role. Or, […]
TINA! This is what Margaret Thatcher said about her draconian free market policies. It’s an easy thing to tell ourselves about compliance to any dominant system. But it’s incomplete. The complete sentence is, “There is no alternative unless we’re prepared to endure short-term discomfort as we push back against the dominant system.” So the real […]
It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it. Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are settings where time, tools, and options are severely limited. But even in these settings, we have more choice than we realize. And for the […]
Word salad is actually nutritious when consumed in small amounts. Placebos are real, they’re effective and they often help us find solace or perhaps to heal. If they do no harm, there’s no problem. “Placebo” isn’t an insult. It’s a category, one to live up to and improve. Here’s one to consider: VAEL SOMA A […]
Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism. Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even making a comment about? Our narrative of reality often becomes our reality.
If it’s important, don’t ask the team to try harder. Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises. If quality is a problem, look at the system, not the people.
“The odds of winning the lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not.” This seems nonsensical at first. Obviously, there are lottery winners. Therefore, the odds aren’t the same. Except we’re not mathematicians doing a math problem (at least most of us). Odds are how we navigate the world. When they’re sufficiently […]
Joseph Brandlin is a scofflaw. After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate, professional job that cost more than $1,000. As he was finishing the job at 1:30 am, he was arrested […]
It’s often mislabeled. Sometimes the contents can make us ill, especially if we drink too much. Status is easy to sell. But despite how often people buy the promise, it rarely delivers.
You can be fashionable without reading Vogue. You can be informed without watching the nightly news. You can be smart about science without going to MIT. It’s possible to be a great chef without buying a cookbook. In fact, you can probably thrive without reading this blog. There are millions of songs on Spotify that […]
That’s a great reason to dumb things down. It’s also a trap that leads us to stasis and mediocrity. Let’s break it down: People: Which people? All people? The majority of voters? Day traders or institutional long term investors? Every VC or just this one? Pick your people, pick your future. Complicated: If it can […]
If you tell me your ID number, your phone number or the wiring instructions for your bank account, not only will I forget them, I’ll need you to repeat it a few times so I write it down without making a transcription error. When we first started using serial numbers (the Roman Legion did this […]
How does the ball know? In tennis, golf or just about all ball sports, the follow-through determines the flight of the ball. Great players always have a complete and confident follow-through. But the ball is long gone before that happens. So, what’s the point? It turns out that the ball can tell that you intend […]
This is the slogan of so many industrial behemoths and existing bureaucracies. It’s in quotation marks for a reason: it’s not true. Not in the long run, not even in the medium run. One way to highlight the hollowness of this edict is to say it out loud. For a while, it might make the […]