A divo (or diva) is an opera singer with skill. Sometimes, though, that skill comes in a package that also includes imperiousness, skittishness and a fair amount of unpredictable drama.
It’s tempting to imagine that CEOs, painters or poets that bring the noise must also have skill.
But burning your guitar doesn’t make you Jimi Hendrix.
There are some film directors that have meltdowns, go over budget and fuel their creative work with feuds. And then there are the professionals that do great work. That’s it. Simply great work.
With few exceptions, we’re better off with just the skill part. The media loves the drama, but your co-workers and customers don’t.
I’ve never seen a resume that listed “low drama” under skills, but it might be a useful attribute.
The desire for 11 is proof that we often want to go all the way to ten.
While 11 is silly, there is a lot of pressure to give our all.
But there are problems.
The first is that if you try to sprint an entire marathon, you’ll hurt yourself. Systems can be stressed for short periods, but they burn out much more quickly if we overdo it.
The second is that a system running flat out needs constant attention.
This attention distracts us from all the alternatives, strategies and shortcuts that present themselves along the way.
When we’re at maximum all the time, there’s no acceleration or deceleration, both of which create opportunities for change and growth.
The hypervigilance required to go at full speed gives us no room to breathe or even improve.
And if we’re at a full sprint, we’ve robbed ourselves of the flexibility to turn it up, right at the moment when it’s most needed.
It turns out, it’s easier to remember questions than answers. And tools like Google Docs and photos in the cloud give us a chance to build our own personal search engine.
It takes 14 steps to construct the pages in one of my InDesign projects. Inevitably, when I return to the file after a few months, I forget some of them. I wrote myself a one-page manual in a Google Doc, and there it is, with links and screenshots, whenever I need it.
When you get a new electronic device, take photos of the manual before you toss it.
When a professional is showing you how to do something, take a video of it, label it and put it in the cloud for later.
Take pictures of all of your credit cards, IDs and important documents.
When you’re having a good day, go for a walk and record a ten minute audio sharing your optimism, confidence and possibility. You’ll want to listen to it again.
When a recurring event happens for the first time, put it in your calendar. The dog meds reminder will happen without you prompting it every month.
If the signal is very weak and the noise is large, it’s easy to imagine that there’s no signal at all.
AI and computers can be used as lenses now, which means we can strip away the noise and see things that we certainly didn’t expect.
Dina Katabi at MIT can point a radio antenna at you while you’re sleeping (even from across the room or through drywall) and determine whether you’re dreaming or not.
We can see patterns in how people type, surf the web or interact with others. We can sort through huge volumes of data and find connections that others were sure were invisible. Not just in whether we’re dreaming, but in how medicine works, the forces driving our culture and more.
Systems work because each element of the system sends a signal to the other elements. Sometimes those signals are obvious and the system works in predictable ways. Other times, we rely on false proxies because we simply can’t tell the signals from the noise. New diagnostics in every field are changing this.
Typical consumer AI is a clever trick that makes us think the computer is a pretty good writer. But machine learning aimed at patterns and signals shows us things that we never knew were there.
For a long time, we’ve assumed that complex systems (like the brain, or the weather) were a sort of magic. As we are able to decode the signals, though, we have a chance to understand how they work.
Netflix just released their first-ever detailed analysis of how many hours of engagement the top 15,000+ most watched shows on the network received over a six month period. Here’s the file.
Who won?
That question is actually the lesson here. The fact is, most organizations are pretty clueless about where real value lies. We’re all playing Moneyball, all the time.
The obvious answer: more hours watched = more value created is pretty easily dismissed. In fact, a lonely couch potato with no friends who watches for eighty hours a week is probably costing Netflix more than they’re paying.
A show that’s popular but easily replaced by another show that could find the good luck to be popular is a shiny trap.
Perhaps value is created by the creator of a show that is the one show that gets someone to keep paying their Netflix bill, even if they only watch an hour a week.
Perhaps it’s a show that a group finds worth talking about, so each hour of viewing translates into new customers for the network.
Maybe it’s a show that earns them a reputation as creator-friendly, so it brings them the next generation of story tellers.
Or it might be the show that costs not very much to license from abroad, but generates plenty of impact for a difficult to reach portion of the audience…
At the local car rental place, the most valuable employee might be the one who made sure, at the last moment, that the car didn’t smell like cigarettes, or found a defect that might have led to a breakdown. It’s easy to show that saving a good customer is worth far more than pushing for a fancy ad that only attracts some bargain-seeking short-term customers.
Whether you’re running a political campaign, a non-profit fundraiser or a network, it’s almost certain that your team is confused about where the value really lies.
Ever since O. Henry wrote about the Magi, it’s been pretty clear that gifts aren’t about the stuff as much as they are the intent. Holidays where gifts are expected undermine this, because it’s hard to tell where obligation begins and intent fades away.
One lightweight and quick alternative to traditional items are digital ones. Here are a bunch of free ebooks for you to share, or consider giving someone a subscription to this blog. There are also countless free ebook and audiobooks out there, as well as thousands of hours of Grateful Dead concerts. Consider spending an hour to teach someone you care about a new skill, or how to understand or streamline their digital day (including RSS, a gift that keeps on giving).
If you’re looking for physical items, I just discovered the best water bottle ever made. I contacted the company and volunteered to contribute a collab to support their mission. And of course, you can get one with my logo on it. It also comes with a ridiculous poem I asked chatGPT to write.
And in 2023, I published The Song of Significance. I hope you’ll get a chance to read or listen, in whatever form, with people you work with/care about.
My complete list of books, calendars and whatnot is right here.
