Good pizza is rare, even though the method to create it is well known.
Any efforts to make it more convenient, cheaper or easier will almost always make it worse.
If you think this post is about pizza, I’m afraid that we’re already stuck.
It’s not for everyone, but it might be for you.
All the details are at purple.space
It’s for creatives, independents, brand managers, strategists, founders, non-profit leaders and lifelong learners.
It could have been way better. It could have been far worse. It’s easy to imagine that outcomes are inevitable, but they’re not.
Was it your fault, or was it luck (good or bad)?
If our story of the past is filled with second guesses, shame or blame, it can carry forward. Or perhaps we’ve over-sold ourselves on just how talented, hardworking and insightful we are, when in fact, we sort of got lucky.
When we rewrite our narrative of the past, we end up creating a different future.
We have more control over that narrative than we give ourselves credit for.
Forty years ago in engineering class, it wasn’t unusual to talk about GIGO or FUBAR. These weren’t technical terms, they were mild complaints that signaled insider status and cultural cohesion.
In a closed profession, like airplane pilots, the insider jargon lasts for generations.
Now, though, everyone in the world is no more than a handshake away from a computer. You either have one in your pocket or know someone who does. Everyone has access to a recording studio, grammar checker, drawing easel, publishing platform, typesetting tool, stats engine and AI front-end as a result.
A TikTok production team doesn’t have a key grip.
The jargon that was a symbol of insider-ness evolves far faster when becoming an insider only takes a bit of effort.
The original members of a circle find themselves missing the jargon. It’s hard to have insiders when there are no longer outsiders.
I spent time this week with two authors who are showing up to share their lives, their insights, and their generosity in the form of books. A good book will change the reader, but it makes an even bigger impact on the author.
Here’s a classic episode of Akimbo. Book publishing has changed more in the last ten years than in the previous 500, and we’re living in a moment where the benefits of writing a book are huge and the costs are surprisingly low.
Here are two posts to get you started.
and, the sequel, with the same name.
Also, a reminder that the AI bot on this site has plenty of answers if you have questions…
We can give instructions to a fellow human by:
Most people develop voiceboxes and limbs and facial expressions that make any of these usable. Computers, over the decades, have had to have them engineered.
In 1983, Dan Lovy built a parser for the adventure games I was marketing at Spinnaker. Suddenly, you could type instructions into the game instead of relying on the more emotional but crude joystick for input. So, “pick up the dragon’s pearl” was something the game could understand.
There’s a restaurant in the Bronx where the waiter asks, “what do you want?” There’s no menu. If you imagine something in a certain range, they’ll make it. This is stressful, because we’re used to the paradigm of multiple choice in this setting.
A smart doctor doesn’t ask, “what’s wrong?” Instead, she takes a few minutes to notice, converse and connect, because our fear of mortality gets in the way of a truthful analysis.
As the worlds of tech and humanity merge, it’s worth thinking hard about the right way to engage with a device. When a car invites you to talk with it, the car designer is betting our lives that the car will actually respond to the vagaries of speech in a specific way. Perhaps a steering wheel is a better user interface.
(And it’s not just a car–sometimes we fail to communicate with each other in a useful and specific way that matches the work to be done…)
Failing to acknowledge a favor or a courtesy is a triple mistake, and it’s becoming more common. ChatGPT is now promoting the idea that it can write a thank you note for you, and a text is a lot easier than a handwritten note, and yet, the level of ‘thank you’ seems to be falling.
It’s not that people don’t have the time to offer an honest ‘thank you’. It’s that they don’t want to acknowledge the obligation or connection.
Minimizing a favor is an easy way to stay focused on the noise in our own heads, as opposed to realizing that we’re surrounded by other people.
Hustle culture has discovered that ‘asking for a favor’ often triggers a positive response. This effort on the part of the other person happens because the favor-giver is seeking connection. When the recipient minimizes the favor or fails to say thank you, they create distance, not connection.
The fact that an expression of gratitude requires so little effort makes it even more striking.
To pick a tiny example, if someone lets you into the flow of traffic, a small nod or hand wave costs nothing. But sometimes it feels easier to assert that it was yours to take, as opposed to a kind gesture that you received.
Our failure to take a moment to acknowledge the favor also makes it harder for the next person. If connection isn’t on offer, why not be selfish?
Civility fades in the face of entitlement.
The magic of an honest expression of gratitude is that the person saying thank you might benefit from it as much as the recipient.
We have the chance to build something that creates connection and generates value. On the other hand, a system that diminishes agency and dignity is inherently unstable.
When we seek to create scarcity and control and optimize output at the expense of our humanity, it may pay off for a while, but it’s brittle and will ultimately fail. As it falters, it’s easy to see how the forces seeking control can double down and simply make the situation even worse.
The alternative is to realize that finding opportunities and seeking connection is the path worth following.
It takes compassion and confidence to offer resilience, responsibility and agency instead of insisting on power and control.
How unlikely is this?
The artist who paints a masterpiece, from scratch, without hesitation. The playwright who doesn’t need a workshop or a reading. The architect who designs a food hall that has a layout and vibe that works without one alteration…
Evolution is powerful. It gives us the chance to revise, edit and do what works while removing what doesn’t.
Once we realize that there is almost no chance we’ll get it right the first time, we can embrace the opportunity to sign up for better instead of perfect.
Get it wrong the first time.
Then make it better.
[Of course, it’s not stupidity. It’s fear and superstition, which often go together. First, the rant.]
It’s 2023. Major corporations should not be posting rules like this:
This is not just security theatre. It’s a waste of time, the math makes no sense and it leads people to create worse passwords, not better ones.
If the person who maintains your office sprayed water on the front walk just before the temperature dropped to freezing, you’d never stand for that. If the folks who filed your taxes simply made up numbers that felt like they made sense, you’d switch accountants.
If a company can’t get this simple system right, how can we trust them to make a refrigerator?
There is plenty of insightful, effective thinking about online security. Your organization embarrasses itself when it hassles customers to engage in silliness like this. Stupidity is easier to spot and fix than ever before.
PS if this is broken but looks fine to the boss, what else in your organization is similarly grounded in superstition or the status quo?
[The challenge with tech is that the person doing the work often has a boss who doesn’t understand the work and isn’t willing to put in the time to do so.
Twenty years ago, I ranted about the forms that have a pull-down for US citizens challenging them to choose which of fifty states they live in, and country pull-downs that begin with Andorra and put two of the biggest ecommerce countries in the world at the end of a list of more than a hundred. There’s no good technical reason for this. It’s simply the way someone created a template at the end of the last century, and it’s easier to simply go along.
Now that AI is about to rewrite just about every rule of our culture, perhaps it’s a good time for the boss to commit to understanding it.]
