The essence of baroque art and craft is its complexity. Difficult to create, overloaded with ornamentation, filled with grandeur and color and surprise, the focus is on the effort expended.
And that dramatic display of effort has a place. It communicates a sort of emotional labor, and creates an imbalance of status. You don’t expect a scoop of rice and some dal at a very fancy restaurant, no matter how delicious it is. You paid for the effort, not just the sustenance.
Baroque is often at odds with utility. I don’t want a hammer with a baroque design, I want one that does precisely what I need it to when it comes to driving a nail. On the other hand, much of what we buy and use isn’t about utility at all… it’s an expression of the story we tell ourselves about value, status and our place in the world.
If you’re going to offer something baroque, the key is to go all out. Halfway is worth very little.
May 5, 2022
It’s thrilling.
Nothing held in reserve. All in, leaving nothing behind.
It’s easy to get hooked on this.
And it’s easy to never experience it.
The internet has made each path more attractive.
It can put us into always-on mode, in a worldwide competition against infinite competitors and inputs in which the goal always seems within reach and also never arrives.
But it can also lull us into a stupor of clicks, likes, home deliveries and spectatorship.
Neither is ultimately productive or healthy.
The opportunity is in finding places that are finite enough for your full-court press to matter, and then, after you’ve shipped the work, to walk away. Not in defeat, but with the satisfaction that you produced something of value.
We didn’t evolve for a life of all-in or one of hibernation. It’s the transitions and the variations that contribute to our health, well-being and ability to contribute.
May 4, 2022
The original expression implies that preaching to the converted is a waste of time. After all, why bother marketing to people who are already on the team?
The reality is that the people who aren’t enrolled in the journey are going to ignore you. They’re simply not open to being marketed to, taught, talked at or lectured.
On the other hand, the folks who are in on it have a chance to become members of the choir.
And they are the ones that spread the word. It’s peer-to-peer interaction that shapes our culture, and culture that shapes our world.
The opportunity for anyone seeking to make a change happen is to enlist people who are on a similar path and give them the tools and the motivation to engage with the people around them.
If your work is worth doing, it’s worth preaching to the choir.
May 3, 2022
For skilled information workers, job mobility has never been easier or more profitable.
And yet, countless people stay where they are, without ever considering why.
For example, there are hundreds of senior leaders and contributors at Twitter who haven’t quit their jobs in the last week. Even though they have a financial cushion, a technical reputation and are facing the prospect of working for a new boss who has little respect for what they’ve worked on for years.
Sunk costs are powerful.
Some people stay where they are because they value unearned options in ways that undervalue their upside potential at a different gig.
Some people stay where they are because they’ve worked hard to get where they are and don’t want to risk it.
And some people stay because thinking about alternative options feels risky, and feelings of risk are tempting to avoid.
But with work-from-home, transferable networks and valuable tech skills, there are now millions of people who might benefit from thinking hard about what they hope to contribute in the future.
You don’t get tomorrow over again. The chance to build something you’re proud of with a team you are eager to work with is a privilege, and ignoring it would be a shame.
Quitting is underrated.
May 2, 2022
Launching today, a free ebook: Generation Carbon: A Carbon Almanac for Kids.
A worldwide team of volunteers wrote, designed and illustrated this free PDF. The hope is that you’ll grab a copy and share it with ten people. That you’ll read it to your parents or to your kids.
There are all sorts of bonuses and certificates, podcasts and experiments using chocolate.
I’m gobsmacked by how powerful and beautiful their work is. I hope you’ll share it.
PS our free daily email newsletter goes live tomorrow.
May 1, 2022
For trivial matters, it’s efficient and perhaps useful to simply follow a crowd or whatever leader we’ve chosen.
But when it matters, we need to make (and own) our own decisions.
To do that effectively, consider:
- Do the reading
- Show your work
- Avoid voices with a long track record of being wrong
- Ask, “and then what happens?”
- Ask, “how would that work?”
- Ignore people who make a living saying stupid things to attract attention
- Follow a path you’re eager and happy to take responsibility for
- Be prepared to change your mind when new data arrives
- Think hard about who profits and why they want you to believe something
- Consider the long-term impact of short-term thinking
None of these steps are easy. This could be why we so often outsource them to someone else.
April 30, 2022
Why would someone buy a share of stock for $945?
One reason might be that they think they can sell it tomorrow for $950.
A more common reason is that someone bought it an hour ago for $940.
Of course, this applies to more than equities. Why buy a Birkin bag for more than $25,000? Because someone else did.
The only thing worse than losing an auction by a few dollars is winning one by a lot.
All of this makes sense until it doesn’t. The “market” is very smart about any given moment in time, but not always particularly smart about the future.
April 29, 2022
Most of all, we’re experts in our own narrative, our feelings, our lived experience. No one has had that but us, and while it might be unexamined or instinctive, we’re the experts. Experts in who we associate with and what we choose to believe.
And many of us are experts in what we do all day. Our craft and our profession. We’ve been doing it for a long time.
Suddenly, as a spiral of media, world events and science all come together, we’re confronted with a range of things we might not be experts in. Statistics, long-term thinking, epidemiology, semiotics, constitutional law, technology, the scientific method, history and environmental science.
One option is to get smart about each of these things, just as we’ve learned other important skills in the past. That requires the energy to pay attention and the humility to encounter new ideas and realize that we’re not an expert yet.
Another is to simply pretend we’re experts, conflating our (well-earned) feelings with actual expertise.
And the third is to simply shrug and ignore it all.
It’s never been easier to learn what we need to learn. And it’s never been more urgent that we do so.
April 28, 2022
The first kind, the common kind, is when someone helps you with advice or labor to accomplish what you’ve already set out to do.
The second kind, more rare and more useful, is when someone helps you realize that your original plan wasn’t as good as you thought it was, and helps you come up with a better one.
Which kind are you looking for?
April 27, 2022
With the possible exception of hockey games, there have been few places in our modern lives where public interactions are supposed to be coarse. If (back when we could, and soon when we can again) you go to the theater, a museum, the mall, a restaurant, the library, school, the supermarket, the park, or yes, even to a movie theater, the management does not tolerate or encourage acting like a jerk.
And then social media arrived.
Social media is a place where the business model depends on some percentage of the crowd acting in unpleasant ways. It draws a crowd. And crowds generate profit.
We’ve created a new default, a default where it’s somehow defensible to be a selfish, short-sighted, anonymous troll. At scale.
Civility has always been enforced by culture, and for the last hundred years, amplified by commerce. We shouldn’t accept anything less than kindness, even if the stock price is at stake. DMS has a great point about the algorithm. Once you start prioritizing some voices, you become responsible for the tone and noise and disconnection (or possibility, connection and peace of mind) you’ve caused.
April 26, 2022
