Maximize total score: Exactly the same rules as regular Scrabble, but focus on increasing the total score of all players instead of defeating the others. It’s subtle, it can be challenging for a good player, and it creates more magic and opportunity for everyone.
Keep it closer: A simple rule change changes the dynamics. If you’re behind in the score, you’re allowed to turn any of your tiles over and play it as a blank instead. This self-corrects as the game advances.
Points for bluffing: If you get away with playing a word that’s not in the dictionary, you get 100 bonus points. Now the game has social and risk elements as well.
Make it fast: My friend Joanna pioneered a version where you work to place all the tiles as fast as you can. The more you play from the shared pile, the more points you get. There are lots of variations, but you get the idea.
PS I get an enormous amount of pleasure playing this app. By playing against the computer instead of other humans, it’s calming instead of enervating. There’s also a button you can press to see what would have been your best move, which will really help your game going forward.
They apply to jobs, relationships, art projects and everything in between:
The top right is the rare one–a car that goes fast but doesn’t feel like it’s on the edge.
The hot rod is a car that is actually pretty safe, precisely because it doesn’t feel that way. You don’t have to drive very fast or take many risks to feel like you’re on the verge.
The joy ride is dangerous because you don’t feel like you’re having fun until you push it really hard.
And cars that go really slow and feel that way aren’t sports cars at all.
When you need to turn something up to 11 and risk your hearing, your bank account or your sanity to actually feel anything, you’re on the road to an unhappy ending.
I’m in favor of hot rod projects. You can go all in without risking everything.
The learning curve is familiar to many people. It might be steep, but it’s continuous. Organizations (and people) work their way up it, one step at a time (it’s the black line in the graph below).
But there’s rarely a continuous learning curve.
Instead, it’s often interrupted by leaps. The moments when both feet need to leave the ground in order to get from here to there. These red boxes feel like brick walls (until we realize that they are our chance to leap.)
The alphabet is a miracle, one that is compounded by books. And the lessons we learn from this cornerstone of modern culture apply to organizations, meetings, tech, politics and almost everything we do together.
Your copy of To Kill a Mockingbird contains every single word that Harper Lee had in the edition she signed off on. Even if the paper, the page count and the typography change, it’s a high-fidelity duplicate of the original.
She wrote the book using the same 26 letters that every author in the English language uses, and when you read it, it will reveal itself in precisely the same format as she intended.
The fidelity is high. Every duplicate is the same.
And the work isn’t compressed. It unfolds precisely as the creator intended–26 letters, all available to each author.
This is different than AM radio or a song copy on a cassette. AM radio is compressed, and by the time it gets to you across the city, it’s also low fidelity. MP3s are compressed, but every copy is a high-fidelity duplicate of the first one. On the other hand, with cassettes, each copy loses something. Eventually the copies become nothing like the original. 800 copies later and you have nothing but static.
Lossy compression is forever. Information was intentionally removed. What you hear isn’t what the artist heard in the studio, and all the equipment in the world can’t restore it. On the other hand, math and computers can now often give us reversible compression, but that’s a different discussion. We compress information because smaller files give us a chance for higher fidelity and cheaper networking.
High fidelity means that each copy is what we expect.
Lossless compression (or no compression) means that we haven’t left anything out in order to get the fidelity or sharing to work.
Packaged food companies and makers of cheap chocolate prize the consistency of high fidelity (every bar is the same, if lousy) over the magic of something special. So they blend ingredients and dumb down the recipes so it’s always the same. This compression isn’t done in error, it’s something they work hard on.
A Broadway show is high fidelity when you see it, but that disappears if you try to save it. You have to be there live, a reference recording on video isn’t the same. Telling someone about the show is not the same as seeing it.
And the script is not lossy compression. In fact, the script is exactly what the playwright intended, but the director and the actors embellish the script in each production and performance. That’s part of their job. Sort of the opposite of compression.
Gossip is compressed and low fidelity news of the community, and both get worse as it spreads.
One of the miracles of email and the internet was how high the fidelity is (instant perfect copies, forever) and the ability for text and certain forms of other media to be uncompressed as they spread. Of course an MP3 can’t be turned back into the original reel to reel master recording, and a Wikipedia article changes over time.
Language translations are lossy and also low fidelity. Nuance disappears as we swap one language for another, which is why a talented translator is so much more valuable than a computer doing the same work.
And meetings? Meetings at work are largely low fidelity and ultimately quite compressed. Unlike a memo that can be in and of itself, a meeting is a performance, and then it’s summarized, and summarized again, until it becomes a story that’s a shadow of what the person who started the whole thing had in mind. Nuance disappears.
Democracy is probably best served by high resolution and the non-lossy compression of ideas and arguments. Alas, the internet and TV, while adding speed and impact, probably lower the resolution and increase compression at the same time.
As Jeff Jarvis points out in response to a great piece by Ted Chiang, GPT and other AI chatbots are essentially lossy compression mechanisms for the web. They read the entire web and compress it on demand into a few paragraphs. Like Cliffs Notes, one of the problems of this convenience is that it can’t be uncompressed. The nuance disappears and is difficult to reconstruct.
Our lifetimes have seen this pendulum go back and forth, over and over. From black and white TV to color (this offers way less compression of the original image). From film in the theater to low quality streaming on a phone. From a landline phone conversation to a bad connection on a cell to a few characters in a text message. CDs sounded worse than a good LP, but SACDs and MQA can sound better in the right circumstances. Companies go from handbooks and memos to hallway conversations to Slack checkins.
Lossy compression is forever. Fidelity is a powerful delight. Stories spread and resonate, but by their nature compress the truth of what we just encountered. A novel is the author’s complete telling of the story the way they chose to tell it, while history books and journalism always compress what actually happened.
If you want to change the culture, or understand a technology in media, or do history, mess with fidelity and look for compression. Robert Caro is a low-compression biographer…
And now, AI redefines fidelity altogether, sometimes embellishing what was there before and presenting something that might mistakenly be seen as a high fidelity original.
And still, the alphabet is a miracle. High fidelity, low compression, resilient and widely distributed.
If you’re watching a YouTube clip or a talking head, you can probably tell whether or not you disagree with someone even with the sound off.
And we judge a book or an article on the layout and appearance long before we’ve read all the words.
Human beings invented symbolic logic to make complex arguments based solely on the concepts in evidence. It’s a particularly advanced form of discussion, one that no other species is particularly good at.
And we’re not good at it either.
Bloviation, genre, anger, cultural identity and the transference of emotion all show up in our brands long before we’ve processed the rational truth of what’s being discussed.
This is worth keeping in mind when you’re trying to persuade someone of your point of view. And even more important when someone is trying to persuade you.
Ben Zander is bringing the Boston Philharmonic and Beethoven to New York in a few weeks. I’m excited to see them in person, but it’s also streaming live. I hope you’re able to come.
While his impact on the musical canon is legendary, Ben’s ruckus extends far into how we lead, how we live and how we teach. The book he wrote with Roz Zander is rightly celebrated as a classic among business/motivation books, and I listen to it at least once a year. His TED talk is brilliant and I could go on…
For me, the biggest lessons come from his passion as a teacher. He views his musical practice as a chance to enroll others in a journey, and the volunteers in his orchestras find that this journey–the chance to lean into possibility, to fail, to connect, to hear and to be heard–changes their lives.
At the heart of possibility is change. The passion for change is available to everyone:
The title of this post comes from one of Ben’s students. Each is asked to write about the music they’re working on, their approach and the change they felt. Of course, any 14 year old could easily use GPT to compose a more professional essay, but these letters are far from the banal homework of a middle school student. Instead, the letters open the door to growth, to learning and to the humanity that we all seek.
In 1979, the page-a-day calendar was born. It’s basically a book on its side, but the user rips off a page each day.
My friend Michael Cader took this concept and ran with it, creating calendars that sold millions of copies.
Of course, everyone knows what day it is, and if you really need to know the date, well, that’s pretty easy to find as well.
So why spend $20 on a block of pulped wood that tells you something you already know?
It’s the combination of presence and tension.
The presence of holding today’s message in your hand. “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal!” It’s today’s insight, and it’s real, right here and right now.
And the tension of not knowing what tomorrow’s will be, and realizing that looking ahead isn’t part of the deal.
I’ve always treated this blog as aspiring to a bit of page a day magic. The process of writing it gradually and having people read it that way is part of the appeal.
So, when Michael asked me to (finally, forty + years later) make my very own calendar, it was thrilling. And this is the first printed one I know of that includes videos.
