"Do you know the head of FIFA?"
"I have come up with a way to speed up airport security dramatically…"
"How come the people in script development at Warner won't get back to me about my Matrix idea?"
If you're intent on making an impact by developing and marketing a big idea, two things to keep in mind:
a. avoid trying to contribute solutions to a popular problem. It's too crowded and the people you're trying to help are almost certainly not open or eager to hear from you. Their attitude is the most important factor in whether or not your idea gains traction, so if the door is closed, you're better off solving a different problem, a problem that's a lot less sexy but far more important and profitable for all concerned.
b. avoid seeking out the figurehead, the Richard Branson/Marissa Mayer person who appears to be in charge, just waiting for you to raise your hand with your great idea. You'll just waste everyone's time and get frustrated as well.
Popular problems and figureheads represent shortcuts. Shortcuts in how you think about your project and shortcuts about finding acceptance. But all the work worth doing is about taking the long way.
October 28, 2014
MBP is a particularly tragic form of child abuse. Parents or caregivers induce illness in their kids to get more attention.
The thing is, the media does this to us all the time. (Actually, we've been doing it to ourselves, by rewarding the media for making us panic.)
It started a century ago with the Spanish American War. Disasters sell newspapers. And a moment-by-moment crisis gooses cable ratings, and horrible surprises are reliable clickbait. The media rarely seeks out people or incidents that encourage us to be calm, rational or optimistic.
Even when they're not actually causing unfortunate events, they're working to get us to believe that things are on the brink of disaster. People who are confident, happy and secure rarely stay glued to the news.
The media is one of the most powerful changes we've made to our culture/our lives (I'd argue that the industrial revolution and advances in medicine are the other two biggest contenders). And yet because we're all soaking in it, all the time, we don't notice it, don't consider it actively and succumb to what it wants, daily.
Steven Pinker's brilliant book makes it clear that the world is safer than it's ever been. A large reason his thesis feels wrong to so many is that the media wants us to think that we're on a precipice, every day. Paradoxically, the cultural-connection power of the media is one reason why things are actually safer. [Check out Matt Ridley's optimistic take as well].
I'm fascinated by this paradox. By connecting us, by integrating cultures and by focusing attention on injustice, the media has dramatically improved the quality of life for everyone on the planet. At the same time, by amplifying the perception of danger and disaster, the media has persuaded us that things are actually getting worse. It creates a reason for optimism and then makes a profit by selling pessimism.
I don't think the media-industrial complex has earned the pass we give it. They built what we wanted, they built what worked, but the race for attention often is conflated with a race to the bottom. It takes guts to say, "no, we're not going to go there, even if the audience is itching for it."
We're the media now, and we can do better.
October 27, 2014
When you present to a board, to potential investors, they ask themselves some questions about your new project:
Is there a problem?
Do I like the solution—is it free, instant and certain, or at least close enough to be interesting?
Are you the one to take this problem on and create this solution?
Is the way you’re doing it the way I would do it?
And, is it urgent, or can I wait?
Note that the order of the questions matters a lot. If you bring me a solution for a problem I haven't been sold on, you lose. And if your solution is risky and difficult, I'm almost certainly going to work hard to begin diminishing the problem in my mind, because no one finds it easy to walk around with a difficult problem.
October 26, 2014
"Selling enough records to make another record."
Rick Rubin started DefJam in his NYU dorm. Steve and I built TSR in Curtis Hall, and I went on to build my publishing business in my wife's dorm at NYU. It happens more than you might guess, and the reason it works is something you can use, even if you're not in college or living in a dorm…
You sell enough records to make another record.
You're not trying to sell the company or to make a huge payroll or to make sure the stock options are in place. You're building something.
The only way to build something when you don't have money to invest is to make something so great that people will pay for it in advance, that they'll eagerly sign up to use what you're making. Now not later. Now when it's new. When it's useful and fresh and interesting.
Too often, we look at the serious nature of starting a business (and worse, our imagined serious implications of failing when we do so) and we forget about useful, fresh or interesting. We forget to do that thing that might not work, to expose ourselves to things that are generous and new and fun.
You don't have to quit your day job to start something, just as you don't have to drop out of college to do so. You have weekends and evenings and all that time you're online…
Make another record.
October 25, 2014
They are tribal symbols. They're a beacon, a way we know where to assemble and where to hang out.
But they are not us. They are not real. Just symbols.
Don't win the game for the wolverine, don't root for one side because of the orange stripes on their flag. That's obvious. But sometimes, a human being is a stand-in for a mascot, and when he misbehaves or disappoints, we confuse his role with what we stand for. We defend him as if we're defending ourselves, because he's a symbol.
Symbols don't do anything. People do. We do.
October 24, 2014
If you lease a car, borrow money for school or engage in some other complex transaction, there's a contract to sign. It's filled with rules and obligations, and the profit-maximizing finance organization does everything it can to do as little as it can (and make you responsible for as much as it can). This sort of contract has evolved into a battle, an effort to get something now and deliver as little as possible later. Loopholes and fine print are there for a reason, and it's not to make you happy. Contracts like this are about the past. "We agreed on this, go read your copy, we don't care so much that you're annoyed, goodbye."
A handshake deal, on the other hand, is about the future. Either side can claim loopholes or wriggle out of a commitment, but the consequence is clear—if you disappoint us, we won't be back for more. The participant in a handshake deal is investing in the future, doing more now in exchange for the benefits that trust and delight and consistency bring going forward.
It might pay to write your handshake deal down, to memorialize the key promises in an email. If your goal is to delight and to exceed expectations, the more clear you are about the expectations, the more likely it is you'll exceed them.
But it also pays to hesitate when you (or your advisors) start pushing to transform the handshake about the future into a contract about the past. "I'm hoping to do this again with you," evokes a very different reaction than, "but you said…"
October 23, 2014
Maybe that's the problem.
Perhaps it's better to commit to wading instead.
Ship, sure. Not the giant life-changing, risk-it-all-venture, but the small.
When you do a small thing, when you finish it, polish it, put it into the world, you've made something. You've committed and you've finished.
And then you can do it again, but louder. And larger.
It's easy to be afraid of taking a plunge, because, after all, plunging is dangerous. And the fear is a safe way to do nothing at all.
Wading, on the other hand, gets under the radar. It gives you a chance to begin.
October 22, 2014
There's not much overlap.
Regardless of how you measure 'best' (elegance, deluxeness, impact, profitability, ROI, meaningfulness, memorability), it's almost never present in the thing that is the most popular.
The best restaurant, Seinfeld episode, political candidate, brand of beer, ski slope, NASDAQ stock, you name it. Compare them to the most popular.
Big is a choice. So is best.
October 21, 2014
Just one more level on this game, she says. Once I get to level 68, I'll be done.
Just one more tweak to the car, they beg. Once we bump up the mileage, we'll be done.
Just one more lotion, she asks. Once I put that on, my skin will be perfect and I'll be done.
Of course, the result isn't the point. The mileage or the ranking or slightly more alabaster or ebony isn't the point. The point is the longing.
Desire can't be sated, because if it is, the longing disappears and then we've failed, because desire is the state we seek.
We've expanded our desire for ever more human connection into a never-ceasing parade of physical and social desires as well. Amplified by marketers and enabled by commerce, we race down the endless road faster and faster, at greater and greater expense. The worst thing of all would be if we actually arrived at perfect, because if we did, we would extinguish the very thing that drives us.
We want the wanting.
[HT Robert Hass]
October 20, 2014
The job is no longer to recite facts, to read the bio out loud, to explain something better found or watched online.
No, the job is to personally and passionately make us care enough to look up the facts for ourselves.
When you introduce a concept, or a speaker, or an opportunity, skip the reading of facts. Instead, make a passionate pitch that drives inquiry. In the audience, in your employees, in your customers…
The only reason people don't look it up is that they don't care, not that they're unable. So, your job is to get them to care enough.
[You can even send them to DuckDuckGo, if you can handle three syllables.]
October 19, 2014
