I came across this (ironically) anonymous quote recently: “The offline world is full of sticks, but the internet only has carrots.”
When we come together in groups, it can bring out the best in people.
When those groups are anonymous, porous and transient, though, the opposite can happen.
And mobs never helped anyone, ever.
Nobody asks you to design a bridge, write a sonnet or do open heart surgery. We leave these essential tasks to trained professionals.
But many job descriptions carry the unstated addendum, “and write.” Write memos, proposals, and even instruction manuals.
The local supermarket is reducing its hours for the summer (well deserved). The sign they put on the door to announce this is 100 words long.
The folks who manage the building where I work regularly send complicated and off-putting emails and texts to residents, when simple and powerful language is just a few keystrokes away.
There are two options:
The first used to be the only one. Get better at writing. You might not think you’re a professional writer (you’re a doctor! you’re a manager! you’re a teacher!) but if it’s an important part of your job, you are a professional, or at least we expect you to be.
Now there’s a second option. If the writing you’re doing doesn’t need to be in an idiosyncratic voice, take your memo, paste it into claude.ai and say, “please rewrite this to make it clear, cogent, positive and concise.”
And now you can go back to work.
It doesn’t matter how hard you try, you’re not going to change the direction of the wind. That doesn’t mean you can’t get good at sailing, though.
And yes, if we do try, we can change the conditions in our household, community or workplace. It might feel like wind, but it’s caused by us and can be influenced by us. Not easily, and not right away, but knowing it’s possible is the first step.
The conflict is real.
“Jean-Michel [Basquiat] called,” Mr. Warhol wrote in his diary on Sept. 5, 1983. “He’s afraid he’s just going to be a flash in the pan. And I told him not to worry, that he wouldn’t be. But then I got scared because he’s rented our building on Great Jones and what if he is a flash in the pan and doesn’t have the money to pay his rent?”
Every publisher, promoter, impresario, and family member worries about this, at least a bit. The good ones acknowledge the conflict and dance with it.
Conflict of interest is real. And as Fred Wilson says, if there is no conflict, there is no interest.
Yesterday’s post was a little glib. Without a doubt, we add more value when we focus on the emotional labor of important work, leaving others the chance to create commodities.
But the repetitive, difficult nature of leaning into commodity production can give us insight, humility and skill. It helps us understand just how hard the hard parts are, and creates an opportunity to bring innovation to the work to be done.
Learning the skill and caring enough to show up to implement it, again and again, can give us the foundation to see what others might miss.
The hard parts of what you do all day can feel fraught. It’s heavy lifting. Emergencies. Dangerous labor. The stakes are high and the work can be difficult.
The important parts of what you do all day are valuable to someone else. This is what you’re getting paid for–solving a customer’s problems.
A simple example:
The important part of running a successful condiments business is getting shelf space for your ketchup, promoting it so that people are eager to buy it, and keeping the promises you make the distributors and customers.
The hard part might involve actually making ketchup. Steam, heat, heavy objects, supply chains…
We can’t run this business without the hard parts, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it ourselves.
The thing is, there are other people you can buy the ketchup from. And you can also expand what you offer to include things that are easier to make but just as valuable to your customers. The important part feels risky. We might be afraid of it. It could require emotional labor. But it’s not the same as the hard part.
A trusted brand is important. Commodity products are hard.
When we persuade ourselves that the hard part is also the important part, there’s a small chance we have found the truth, but it’s likely we’re setting a trap that will keep us stuck.
If you’ve figured out how to do something important, don’t muddy it up by signing up to do things that are hard.
Tim Brownson points us to this recent poll of people in Great Britain. About one out of four people surveyed (of all ages) believe that they could qualify for the Olympics if they trained for the next four years.
This is absurd. It’s the very absurdity of it that makes it common. “I could do that,” is easier to say when we’re sure we can’t. Even if we had the talent, the resources and the time, the odds are so slim that it’s essentially a lottery. We’re off the hook, so it’s easy to pretend.
What could we do if we spent the next four years on it? We could write and publish a symphony, start a reasonably successful small business, make a substantial contribution to our community, improve our physical health, engage more deeply with family and friends, learn to juggle or play the piano.
Someone is going to win the lottery, but it probably won’t be us.
Everyone is selfish. We do things that increase our chances of survival, help us achieve our goals and give us a story we can tell ourselves about our role in the community.
But short-term selfish is something we try to grow out of.
Short-term selfish runs a red light because we’re in a hurry. It dumps waste into the river because it’s cheaper than disposing of it properly. It cheats in order to win.
But none of these things help us reach our long-term goals. None of them are resilient or reliable, because when others also play the short-term game, we all lose.
Short-term selfish is against the minimum wage, while long-term leaders understand how much value it creates over time. And long-term selfish seeks an environment where we’re most likely to thrive.
“None of the above” is often the best option.
We’re regularly confronted with multiple-choice questions. The foundation is already established, the options are already limited, do you want this or that?
But the real questions lie in the assumptions that happened before you were even asked.
When a developer brings you six website options, they’re skipping over critical questions about structure, upkeep, user experience and whether or not a site is the answer to your problem.
When the bank offers you three choices on how to borrow money, they’ve almost certainly found three that benefit the bank.
It’s impossible to have a productive day when every challenge and question leads to a full-on brainstorming session. But it might be worth rejecting the multiple-choice options when the outcomes really matter.
It’s surprising to realize that they’re the same.
They are both places to hide.
When we ship average work, it’s not our fault. We’re simply doing what the manual says, and if you don’t like it, blame the culture and the system.
And when we hold back on shipping because it isn’t perfect, we’re also hiding. Who can blame us for refusing to sign off on something if we can find something (anything) that could still be discussed or improved?
If it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t count.
The work is to establish a standard and then meet it. To ship it when it’s good enough (which we get to define in advance). Don’t ship junk, but ship.
