It’s easy to imagine that talent is a magical gift, and that we’ll know it when we see it (and that you have it or you don’t).
And yet, over the years, Star Search has rejected each of these musicians, picking someone else to win the competition:
Aaliyah
Britney Spears
Christina Aguilera
Justin Timberlake
Usher
Alanis Morissette
Beyonce
One could argue that they’re simply incompetent at judging talent. Perhaps, though, it’s a lesson about the futility of getting picked and the hard-won process of developing a skill and learning a craft.
A star might simply be someone who persisted long enough to combine skill and luck in a way that others celebrate. Persistence, skill and luck, over time.
A step change in speed changes the market entirely.
Fedex was faster mail. It allowed them to grow and profit.
Email, on the other hand, completely changed communication.
In the discussions of AI, most people are failing to consider the step change in speed. A logo made in Kittl might not be as magical as one made by Milton Glaser, but it can be created 1,000 times faster. That means that the number of polished graphics being created will grow exponentially.
When an AI can give you a pretty good diagnosis in real time, it changes the way you deal with the medical system.
Just as email isn’t as humane or thoughtful or memorable as a hand-written letter, these faster alternatives aren’t better… they’re simply different. And, as the market often does, it prizes convenience and speed.
And so, good, fast and inexpensive is now possible.
This opens the door to two opportunities:
We can start building real-time insight into more and more components of our daily life.
We can start doing human-constructed creative work that’s worth waiting for. Great, not good.
Once again, it’s the mediocre middle that’s going to be devalued.
Since I was born, the planet has invented 6 billion jobs.
Technology is said to threaten the replacement of human labor, yet, somehow we’ve found useful activities for a rapidly growing population.
Coordinated without a coordinator, people go to work each day, often doing something that’s only vaguely related to their own sustenance. We show up and create value for strangers we might never meet. And somehow, all that effort comes together in just the right way. And then we do it all again tomorrow.
And, once someone achieves success and probably doesn’t have to do a job to feed their family, they not only show up to work some more, they often put in even more time and emotional energy than we’d expect.
It’s a system, a largely invisible one. Sometimes, we notice it when it creates inequities, unwelcome side effects and dead ends. But we often fail to notice that it has rebuilt our culture from the ground up, redefining how we spend our days and where we might find meaning.
We shouldn’t take it for granted, not if we want to make it better.
They’re a gift that lasts forever, because your friend will remember what they learned and how they felt… and they can keep it on their bookshelf or hard drive as a reminder in case they forget…
Amazon chose This is Strategy for a Kindle deal today. It’s only $4.
Also, the Strategy Deck continues to surprise people with its elegant effectiveness. And it fits in your pocket.
Hank Green has written a two-book series about social media, alien intelligence and peer dynamics. I listened to the second book without realizing it was a sequel, and that’s the way I recommend you try it out. The audio is brilliantly performed, by the way.
Helen Philips delivers a near-future AI novel that will give you a new way way to think about what we’re building and who we are becoming.
Cathy Heller‘s new book is out in a week or so, and like Cathy, it’s honest, moving and generous.
David Meerman Scott continually raises the bar for what marketing and PR involve today.
Luvvie Ajayi Jones has written a breakthrough book about dancing with imposter syndrome that’s also vulnerable and funny.
George Dyson’s book Analogia has been on this list before, but it’s worth repeating. The same goes for The Gift by Lewis Hyde and the Bandwidth series by Eliot Peper.
And, just for the next two days, the audiobook of This is Strategy is half price if you use code NOVEMBER.
Power users are tempting. They know what they want, they’re happy to share their preferences and they show up.
But power users can also be a trap, because their specific needs might not match the market you seek to serve. When you pick your customers, you pick your future.
Brooke Husic is a power user. She’s a creator of extraordinary crossword puzzles, wicked smart and culturally aware. As part of the founding team at Puzzmo, she was one of the early testers of Bongo.
Sitting next to her, I was amazed to see her beat my high score easily. She played SKIVE, a word neither of us know the definition of (it means avoiding work).
If you need to know a word like SKIVE to play well, the game isn’t as fun for some people. This is what Zach Gage calls the Scrabble problem–it rewards abnormal vocabularies. In 2015, Nigel Richards won the French Scrabble championships, and he doesn’t speak French! Instead, he memorized the French dictionary.
Zach’s insight, which I instantly embraced, was that we’d give bonus points for common words. Now, Brooke is playing on the same terms as everyone else.
PS today’s Bongo is fun. Here’s my best word to get you started. Play with your family while you’re cooking dinner. That’s what it’s for.
Before buying a house, it makes sense to spend a day on foot, walking around the neighborhood. You’ll notice things you might have missed in a car.
Before starting a business, spend a few shifts working the cash register at a similar establishment.
And before going into marketing, go make some sales.
In the USA, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Once again, the free Thanksgiving Reader is available for you to print and share and make a part of your family gathering. Here’s to connection, hope and possibility.
The money we exchange for a service or item isn’t based on how much it cost to make, how hard it was to produce or how much the producer likes it.
That’s hard to hear, because when we make something, we spend most of our time thinking about those very things.
Price is based on the purchaser’s worldview and situation, not the producer’s. The price paid will always be less than the value it creates for the purchaser. And the price is never more than the amount the purchaser can exchange.
If the price tag asks for more than that, no purchase happens.
A painting that cost $4 to produce in 1880 might sell for $40,000,000. That’s because the buyer believes they gain more than that amount in status, satisfaction or future asset value. If they didn’t feel that way, they wouldn’t buy it.
A donation to a worthy cause doesn’t happen because the cause needs the money. It happens because the donor believes the story they’ll tell themselves about the donation is worth more than what the donation costs.
And a life-saving medicine that costs $4,000 won’t be purchased by someone who doesn’t have the resources to exchange for it.
This is one reason why it’s so profitable to sell luxury goods to billionaires who seek status. They regularly over-invest in their quest for standing, valuing it more highly than most people would, and they have the resources to spend on it. It doesn’t matter that the banana and duct tape artwork was cheap to produce or easy to replicate.
At the other end of this spectrum is a trained artisan, or a vendor at a craft fair. They show up, do the work and care a lot about what they’ve produced. But if the shopper doesn’t internalize a story about the product, or doesn’t have the resources to allocate, the sale won’t happen.
There are two valuable lessons here:
The empathy we bring to imagining what our customers need, want and dream of is always part of our work.
Mastery of a craft does not guarantee its commercial viability.
A market is a category. A market is a place with competition. In a market, people have habits and budgets and social pressure to engage. There are buyers and sellers.
In many cultures, there’s a market for all the items that go with a quinceanera, a birthday party for a 15-year-old girl. While girls in other cultures might want or need the sort of attention that comes with this extravaganza, there’s no existing market for it.
It’s tempting to be a market pioneer, to be the one who shows up with the first charge card, the first personal training firm or the first home computer. But it’s a challenging road.
It can be thrilling work, but because creators focus on needs not markets, they often fail to account for just how difficult it is to activate those needs and turn them into a thriving market.
If you’re in market-creation mode, it helps to call it that and be prepared for how difficult it might be.
November 25, 2024
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