If you have a ten-mile commute to work, the difference between pushing yourself to drive 40 miles an hour and driving safely at 35 works out to about two minutes. In the first scenario, you're running yellow lights, passing bicyclists and rolling stop signs. In the second, you're not only dramatically safer, but you're also breathing.
Decades ago, when I had a Saab, I used to drive fast (95 mph fast) on trips home to Buffalo. The highway is straight and designed for speed, but it was an incredibly stupid, selfish and dangerous thing to do. The upside was that I ended my trip from Boston an hour or two faster than I would have otherwise. Of course, then I'd sit, nearly in a stupor, for at least two hours until the world was moving slowly enough for me to engage again.
The problem with setting the standard at super-fast, up to 11, is that you can't sustain it. You've extracted all the slack and safety out of the system and gotten very little in return.
Of course, this isn't true if you're actually in a race, if responding to the RFP first or getting around the track a nanosecond faster is actually the point. But for most of us, most of the time, it's not actually a race.
The other extreme is the one I rant about often, the extreme of not shipping, of going slowly because you're afraid, of stalling as a way of avoiding the fear of feedback and the need for vulnerability. That clearly doesn't work either.
Yes, ship. Do it with flair and guts and grace. But take two more minutes before you do, because slack pays dividends.
August 22, 2013
Until people realize they are obvious.
If you're not willing to live through the terrible stage, you'll never get to the obvious part.
August 21, 2013
Photography is a cheat, the death of painting
Photoshop is a hack, the death of photography
Instagram filters are crap, the death of Photoshop
Typing is mechanical, the deathknell for organic handwriting
Word processors are a cheat, the end of linear writing via the typewriter
eBooks are for losers, stealing the magic and majesty of the printed book
Blogging is impermanent, the end of thoughtful word processing
Tweeting is stupid, the end of intelligent blogging
Video is too easy, a cheap shortcut that destroys the essence of film
YouTube has no curators, the end of quality video
Wikipedia is an unproven shortcut, true scholarship is threatened
Selling by phone is for losers, closers show up in person…
Technology almost always democratizes art, because it gives us better tools, better access and a quicker route to mediocrity. It's significantly easier to be a mediocre (almost very good) setter of type today than it was to be a pretty good oil painter two hundred years ago.
And so, when technology shows up, it's easy to imagine that along with the old school becoming obsolete, the new school will be populated by nothing but lazy poseurs.
Don't tell that to Jill Greenberg, Sasha Dichter or Jenny Holzer.
… all this ending is leading to more and more beginnings, isn't it? It's not ruined, it's merely different.
August 20, 2013
As our series continues, Louisiana Mitch wrote in to ask for an update of the fourteen trends I wrote about eight years ago in Meatball Sundae.
Here they are:
• Direct communication and commerce between producers and consumers
• Amplification of the voice of the consumer and independent authorities
• The need for an authentic story as the number of sources increases
• Extremely short attention spans due to clutter
• The Long Tail
• Outsourcing
• Google and the dicing of everything
• Infinite channels of communication
• Direct communication and commerce between consumers and consumers
• The shifts in scarcity and abundance
• The triumph of big ideas
• The shift from “how many” to “who”
• Democratization of the wealthy
• New gatekeepers, no gatekeepers
Every one of these trends has either appeared up or been amplified dramatically in the last ten years. Two questions come to mind:
1. How many of these ideas have you and your organization made big bets on since 2005? (Think about all the disruptive organizations that have been founded or grown significantly because of one or more of these drivers…)
2. Do you think these trends have played out? If it's too late, then by all means go looking for someting new to take their place. In my experience, though, every single one of these is just getting started.
People often ask for a map, but maps are no good if you haven't decided to go somewhere new.
August 19, 2013
It's not the three minutes it will take to do this favor for you. Everyone has three minutes.
And it's not even the noise and the wear and tear of the mental clutch as we shift from one task to another.
For me, and for many people, it's the leakage of mental bandwidth.
Fear is the enemy of creativity and innovation and of starting things. The resistance hates those things—they are risky, they might not work, so the resistance pushes us not to do them.
On the other hand, it loves the notion of to-do lists and favors and multi-tasking and yes, continual partial attention, because those are perfect hiding places, perfect places to avoid the scary work but still be able to point to a day's work, well done.
But if you have nothing else due, nothing else to do, no other measurable output but that thing you've promised yourself, if all your mental bandwidth is focused on this one and this only, then yep, you can bet that you will get more brave.
Before internet connectivity poured from the sky, I was able to get on a train, plug in my Mac and have nothing to do for four hours but write. And so I wrote. I once bought a round trip ticket to nowhere just to eliminate every possible alternative… pure, unadulterated mental bandwidth.
Plenty of places to run, plenty of places to hide. None of them are as important as shipping your best work today.
It's safe to say that everyone reading this has seen an accurate reflection in a mirror. Everyone you know has seen their face in a mirror as well.
A thousand years ago (a nanosecond in evolutionary time) virtually no one had.
Mirrors are a big deal. Elephants and primates have been shown to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror, and the idea of self-image is one of the cornerstones of our culture. Hard to imagine walking through the world without knowing what you look like.
Fascinating aside: When we see a famous person in the mirror, our perception changes.
I hope we can agree that in 2013, anyone who gets uncomfortable around mirrors, who says mirrors aren't their thing, who tries to avoid a job where they might see a mirror–that person is a bit outside the mainstream.
Cameras are mirrors, but unlike the momentary glimpse of the traditional mirror, they are permanent, and now the web amplifies them. Do you see how many people pose for snapshots? The unnatural posture, the fake smile… there's anxiety here, and it's because unlike seeing ourselves in the mirror, we're being captured, forever. Multiply this fear by the million people who might see this photo on Instagram…
No one gets tense in front of mirrors any longer. Experienced professionals don't get tense in front of cameras, either.
It probably used to be okay to say, "mirrors freak me out," or to assert that they contained demons. No longer. It certainly wasn't uncommon for cultures to resist cameras at first, and to take the phrase, "take a picture," quite literally. This resistance is also dying out and almost gone.
And yet… And yet we still freeze up when someone takes a picture, we hold our breath before we go on stage, we give away our deepest insecurities when someone puts us on video…
Mirrors and cameras each took a generation or more to catch on as widespread foundations of our culture. It's not surprising, then, that so many people fear social media. It's about us, and when we're on the hook, in front of people we can't know or trust, we hold back.
For a while.
And then we don't.
August 18, 2013
Bullet points, step by step processes that are guaranteed to work overnight, proven shortcuts…
If it was easy, everyone would do it.
Worth noting that surgeons don't sign up for medical school because they're told that there is a simple, easy way to do open heart surgery.
It's not that we're unable to handle complicated problems, it's that we're afraid to try. The Dummies mindset, the get-rich-quick long sales letters, the mechanistic, industrial processes aren't on offer because they're the best we can handle. No, they sell because they promise to reduce our fear.
It will take you less time and less effort to do it the difficult way than it will to buy and try and discard all the shortcuts.
August 17, 2013
I was lucky enough to spend a fortnight with sixteen extraordinary people from around the world. I'll be sharing some of what we built in a few weeks, but in the meantime, you can see a short video they made along with the list of talented folks and their contact info here:
Also worth sharing from the last two months: A podcast on branding and making a ruckus.
Stop Stealing Dreams is now available in Chinese.
A short video on my part in the lineage of style canoeing.
And live, at Ford. The bell curve is melting.
Also, before it gets cold outside, you can get the entire text (every word!) of Poke the Box on a t-shirt. They donate a worthy book to charity for every shirt sold.
August 16, 2013
There is no greater indicator of future behavior than the answer to this question.
Fly-by, drive-by, anonymous, see-you-sucker interactions are easy to start, easy to be disappointed by, hard to count on when it comes to civility or a career.
We work to create the alternative. Masks off, snarkiness set aside, committed to long haul. That's the connection that the connection economy is built on.
Books, those bound paper documents, are part of an ecosystem, one that was perfect, and one that is dying, quickly.
Ideas aren’t going away soon, and neither are words. But, as the ecosystem dies, not only will the prevailing corporate systems around the paper book wither, but many of the treasured elements of its consumption will disappear as well.
THE BOOKSTORE as we know it is doomed, because many of these establishments are going to go from making a little bit of money every day to losing a little bit. And it’s hard to sustain daily losses for long, particularly when you’re poorly capitalized, can’t use the store as a loss leader and see no hope down the road.
The death of the bookstore is being caused by the migration to ebooks (it won't take all books to become ‘e’, just enough to tip the scale) as well as the superior alternative of purchase and selection of books online. If the function of a bookstore is to stock every book and sell it to you quickly and cheaply, the store has failed.
THE LIBRARY is limping, partly because many of them have succumbed to being a free alternative to Netflix or the boarded-up Blockbuster. As fewer people dive into a sea of printed books, libraries will have no choice but to stop stocking that sea with expensive items that few use.
THE TRADITIONAL PUBLISHER is culturally connected to the bookseller. That's their customer, not you, the reader (ever tried to call customer service at a book publisher?). As the bookseller disappears, and as the open nature of the ebook platform rewards individuals and quick-moving smaller entities, many in traditional book publishing will find their particular skills no longer valued the way they used to be.
SINGLE TASKING is an anachronism. As soon as ebooks moved from the Kindle to the iPad, the magic of reading was threatened by the opportunity (“for just a second”) to check on email, Words with Friends or an incoming text message.
READING FOR PLEASURE was largely extinguished by four generations of not-very-good teaching philosophies. By treating a book as homework and a punishment, we’ve raised people to not look forward to reading. More than once, friends have said, “you should be really pleased, I even finished your new book.” My guess is that no one says that to Laurence Fishburne about his new movie. There’s no real ebook piracy problem because most people don’t think books are worth stealing.
THE BELOVED SHELF (or wall) of books is less well-thumbed and less respected than it was. We’re less likely to judge someone on their ownership and knowledge of books than at any time in the last five hundred years. And that shelf created juxtapositions and possibilities and prompted you when you needed prompting. Ten generations ago, only the rich and the learned owned books. Today, they're free at the local recycling table.
THE PAVLOVIAN RESPONSE will fade. You go to a bookstore, a quiet, civilized, respected greenhouse of ideas. A person you connect with hands you a book, wraps it, charges you a surprisingly small amount of money and you go home, ready to curl up for five or six or thirty hours, to immerse yourself in a new world or a new set of ideas. And then you will take that volume, one that’s designed to last for a century with no technology necessary, and either share it with a friend or place it in just the right place on your wall. Your brain was wired to be taught to be open to these ideas, to be respectful of the volume itself, because all of the elements of the ecosystem, from the author who took a year to the editor who curated the book to the jacket designer and the printer and the store… they all aligned perfectly to create this method of consumption.
None of these changes, by themselves, are enough to kill a venerable information delivery and cultural touchstone like the book. But all of them together? I’m writing this on a train filled with educated, upper income suburban commuters of all genders and ethnicities (book buyers, until recently). I can see 40 people at a glance, and 34 are using electronic devices, two are asleep and exactly one person is reading a traditional book.
Yes, we're entering a new golden age for books, one with more books and ebooks being written and read today than ever before. No, books won’t be completely eliminated, just as vinyl records are still around (a new vinyl store is opening in my little town). But please don’t hold your breath for any element of the treasured ecosystem to return in force.
Is it traitorous to my tribe to write these words? I'm not arguing that we should push the ecosystem out the door, but I am encouraging us to not spend too much time trying to save it. First, it's a losing battle, but more important, we have bigger opportunities right in front of us.
Twenty years ago, I saw the web and wrote it off. I said it was a cheap imitation of Prodigy, but slower and with no business model. Partly, I just didn't see. But a big part of me wanted Prodigy (my client) to succeed, along with a business model I understood. As a result of my arrogance, I missed the opportunity to take advantage of a brand new medium.
I fear that our cultural and corporate connections to books as a delivery system may blind us to the alternatives.
I’m not as bitter as I might be, as we’ve traded in our books for some fabulous alternatives mixed in with the time-wasters. But yes, after 500 years, after building not one but several industries around the creation, publication, distribution and storage of books, I’m pretty nostalgic.
I called this post, "An end" as opposed to "the end." As always, we'll reinvent. We still need ideas, and ideas need containers. We've developed more and more ways for those ideas to travel and to have impact, and now it's up to us to figure out how to build an ecosystem around them.
August 15, 2013
