Among the top 500 grossing Hollywood movies of all time, this movie is the most profitable in return on investment.
And among all Hollywood movies in the top 1,500 at the box office, Paranormal Activity is far and away the highest return, outperforming almost any investment the stock market has ever offered. The return on investment was over a million percent.
The lesson is simple, but ignored by most investors and entrepreneurs: The goal might not be to be the biggest. The goal might be to achieve your goals.
It’s easier than ever. Solvents, power tools, market research, AI, committee meetings, online reviews and ennui are all aligned in one direction. To fit all the way in.
Of course, once you sand off all the edges, it’s hard to get traction. Hard to find the texture or anything worth talking about.
Thanks to everyone who has read, talked about and taken action around my new book, The Song of Signficance. If you have a chance to post a review, that would be great. And you can find the podcasts here.
The first step in making things better is talking about it.
The hard part isn’t good ideas. It never has been.
The hard part is choosing.
Ask GPT for ten subtitles for your book, or sixteen ways to hold a surprise party, and you’ll be delighted at how useful they are. Ask Dreamstudio or Kittl for some logo designs, same thing.
There is creativity in discernment.
AI and templates have made it easier than ever to find pretty good ideas.
It doesn’t matter so much.
The hard parts have always been the guts to choose and the will to put in the effort to bring your choice to the people who need it.
Robert Johnson is known as the king of the Delta blues. One reason is that his small output was brilliant. The other, bigger reason is that the recordings that remain of his short life are among the earliest that sound good… most audio recordings from before 1936 sound antique and scratchy.
The Wizard of Oz is one of our great movies, and one of the oldest that people regularly watch today. One reason is that the production values of 1939 were just good enough to still feel professional today. The movies from just a few years earlier are jumpy, faded relics.
People can happily read a first-edition Agatha Christie mystery, but a book from 1700 is rarely read in the same way.
No one wants to see websites that were built in Geocities or pages from Prodigy today. But a blog like this one is still readable and fresh, even though it has a design that’s nearly a decade old.
When a medium hits sufficient resolution, future advances are nice, but they’re not essential. And once an industry realizes this, future investments in resolution begin to slow down. Of course, it’s difficult to tell if the resolution is sufficient until after the fact.
Right here, right now, we’re discovering a wide range of content that has a resolution that is crossing the line to sufficient. That’s going to lock in new forms of interaction and culture for a long time to come.
If you go to a health food store and buy some pills with selenium, colloidal silver or other mysterious substances in them, it’s possible that they’ll make you feel a bit better. On the other hand, if you take a large dose, you’ll get sick or possibly die.
In very small doses, all you’re getting is the placebo. The way the story makes you feel. When there’s a substantial amount of cellular material, though, toxicity can result.
Small doses magnify powerful placebo effects.
Lowering your prices by 25% might make your customers happier. But spending 4% of your revenue on training, recruitment and giving your staff the freedom to act with humanity might make them far happier.
The brute force technique makes engineers happy. But giving humans a chance to tell themselves a positive story makes people happy.
A new business is complicated. It involves weaving together suppliers, partners, customers, processes, technology, leases, employees, logos, capital and more.
Along the way, it’s easy to get distracted, but focusing on the hard parts is a useful way to move forward.
You could work hard on the logo, or double your supplier roster or, as I did once, spend time with your corporate lawyers brainstorming the way to make your terms of service more interesting.
There are endless tasks to be done in starting a new venture. But most of the tasks are necessary but insufficient. You can’t begin without them, but by themselves, they won’t create enough impact for your work to make a change happen.
And every new project must create change, or else it fails.
We spend our time focusing on the tasks because the tasks are known and do-able.
It’s a form of hiding.
Worth noting:
The hard part isn’t the thing that costs you the most money. If you can outsource the work to an expert and get that work done effectively, it’s not hard. It’s just expensive. You don’t need to build your own email server, you can rent one. And if you want to become a book publisher, it turns out that printing, typesetting, copyediting, legal work and the rest aren’t actually hard. There are people who are eager to do that for you.
The hard part involves customer traction. Can you find enough customers who will pay you a fair price and also choose to spread the word? Because if customers bring you customers, and those customers all generate more income than expenses, you have a useful project.
Every minute the founder spends not working on this question might be misallocated.
While throwing shade might be more fun, it eventually runs out of energy. It’s designed to end conversations, not start them, to intimidate, not encourage.
Part of the challenge of hanging out with cannibals is that it’s very difficult to get a good night’s sleep.
The math of finding a group of people that cares about community is pretty compelling. While individual selfish choices might feel productive in the moment, if they undermine the health of the community, they’re ultimately self-defeating.
Culture is the antidote. The way things are around here. The focus on a longer-term connection, with mutual benefits.
As our world has gotten more crowded and more connected, it’s easier than ever to step on someone’s toes. Culture gives us the chance to create the conditions for people to embrace a longer-term view. And sleep better too.
Everyone is downstream from someone else.
July 4, 2023
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