Simply say it.
The first minute of a speech, the first paragraph of a novel or the tuning of the orchestra before they begin… The performance improves if we skip that part.
Sometimes, our throat actually needs clearing.
But most of the time, we’re hooked on a ritual that doesn’t benefit the audience.
If you need to get settled, consider doing it before you go on stage.
Cutting
Growing
Grinding
Pruning
Irrigating
Sanding
Cultivating
Grafting
Pressuring
Polishing
Shifting
Feeding
Bending
Welding
Celebrating
Melting
Burning
It works better when we choose with intent.
It’s easy to be distracted by the wave that’s crashing on the shore.
On the other hand, the tide is inexorable. It’s the long-term trend, the one that is quietly happening, over time.
Sometimes, a big wave comes along and we lose our focus. It’s urgent.
But expecting and working with the tide pays off. Waves burn out.
It’s not unusual to encounter conflicting weather reports. One site says it’s going to rain, the other insists it won’t.
On the other hand, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It’s sunny, right now, you can tell. A weather service that said it was raining would deserve to lose all trust and respect.
And yesterday’s weather? It’s really not up for debate.
It’s easier than ever to find an audience for predictions and to insist that you have real insight into the future.
But a resilient way to earn trust is to acknowledge the present and not to rewrite the past.
If you’ve ever caught a ball, you’re a physicist. You might not be trained in it, but your intuitive sense of where the ball is going to land requires having a theory about gravity.
And if you’ve ever taken aspirin for a headache, you’ve articulated a theory about medicine.
Studying physics is unlikely to make you a better baseball player, but understanding economics will probably make you a better investor.
How are your theories working out for you?
Everyone who votes (or chooses not to) has a theory of politics. And when those theories don’t square up with what’s happening, it might benefit us to look into why. Defaulting to intuitive theory making is fine, as long as the theories pay off.
Every time you read, post, listen or engage with media, you’re engaging in media theory. Assertions about why you focus your attention in one place instead of another. Theories about how accurate the insights you’re getting are, or the benefits you’ll get from being informed in this place instead of that one.
The culture we live in always feels normal, but it’s a new normal, almost completely different from the one our parents lived in. A lot of the normal is in media. Where we get our news, what gets put on our agenda, how the noise turns into information and how the information changes our affect…
Don’t surrender agency too easily. Articulating a theory of media and being choosy about how we spend our focus and our trust helps us thrive.
It hadn’t happened in such a long time that I hesitated to respond.
As I was walking through town, a driver pulled up, rolled down his window and said, “is this the way to Irvington?”
We now take for granted that we’re unlikely to ever again be in a car and not know where we are.
It’s not just cars or GPS. Now that we have Perplexity and Claude, our need to ask a person for directions of any kind continues to decrease.
What we need more than ever, though, is help in discovering if we’re asking the right questions and choosing to go to the right place.
“Should I be going to Irvington?” might be a better thing to ask a trusted friend or advisor.
Perhaps you’ve encountered a sink with two taps, not one. One for hot, one for cold, without a chance to mix them before you scald or chill yourself.
It seems absurd that the folks who figured out the technology to build sinks with running water couldn’t be bothered with the last step of making it useful.
But this isn’t the case. Centuries ago, the hot water in a home was suspect. It might have been in an unclean cistern for a while, it might carry disease–you didn’t want to mix it with the clean water unintentionally.
Now that we’ve mostly nailed the sanitary conditions of hot water, the design is obsolete. But it persists, because systems and style and culture allow it to.
We’re surrounded by obsolete design. It’s worth asking “what’s it for?” and consider what it used to be for.
Once it’s obsolete, good design becomes bad design.
Novels, movies, even consulting, are based on a knock knock business model.
Tom Cruise made a movie, and you need to buy a ticket to see it. Jane Collins is an engineering professional and you need to pay to get their insight about how to fix your bridge. This 300-page autobiography is worth your time to read.
The publication or offering creates tension (there’s something here, you might want it) and the way to relieve the tension is for the person you’re reaching to buy access to it.
Huge swaths of our culture are based on this simple approach to intellectual property. The idea comes in a wrapper, the wrapper costs money, the money pays the bills.
Mass media was the way creators could spread the tension and announce their work. You’re waiting for “who’s there!”
It’s worth distinguishing these knock knock offerings from cultural organizations, communities, and tools. In these cases, you can tell the whole story, give away the entire idea, and the IP is worth more, not less.
When people around you are all talking about using the tools in Atomic Habits or This is Strategy, the book becomes a foundation for what happens next. If you’re open to signing up for the blog after you read the book, that’s a hint. That’s not true for The Power Broker.
Rocky Horror Picture Show isn’t like Mission: Impossible. At Rocky Horror, the ticket buys you a chance to see a movie you know by heart–with other people. Being in the club is where the real value is.
Music succeeds when it becomes an anthem. And anthems spread, are played on the radio and become part of our culture. So it doesn’t make sense to say, “I have a new song but you can’t hear it.”
Yes, you need to start with a great piece of music, but the real work is in creating community and ubiquity, Grateful Dead style, not to put your secret recipe behind the doors of a vault.
You can see where the tension for creators comes in.
If you create a knock knock situation, you have to alert people to what’s on offer, but not actually give them what’s on offer. You need ‘who’s there’. That means that your online posts and videos are about the thing, they aren’t the thing itself.
And the opportunity for tool builders and community organizers is to give away the punchline, often. To focus on abundance (of connection and utility and trust) not scarcity.
Many of the creators I’ve worked with over the years feel this tension and then fall into a gap. They have a fine knock knock on offer, but promotion is grating, endless and feels demeaning. Hustle isn’t the solution, not any longer. The best way for this sort of work to become popular is for people who have engaged with it to tell their friends (see the Blair Witch Project for an example). But “getting the word out” has never been more frustrating or difficult than it is now. The web is not TV.
We need this sort of thoughtful, long-form scholarship, but the business model for it is shaky indeed. The breakthroughs happen via peer-to-peer promotion, not hustle.
At the same time, it’s never been more productive to build tools and communities. And it helps to do it with intent.
The phone book was a groundbreaking innovation. For the first time, you could actually look up the person you were seeking to reach.
At about the same time, the department store arrived. You could actually have a shot at finding what you were hoping to buy.
TV Guide was, at one time, the most valuable magazine in the US, worth more than any TV network. Directories transform consumption.
Incrementally, slowly then all at once, we’ve multiplied the sorting and directory building of our world. We didn’t notice it happening, but we’ve sorted the people, the ideas, the media, the culture, healthcare, even which lake to go fishing on. Serendipity used to be normal, now it’s rare.
Why stumble when you can look it up?
It’s not simply the extraordinary efficiency of this sort that makes it important. It also represents a different expectation of how the world works.
There’s no place to go look up what to do with that insight, so we’ll have to figure it out as we go.
The more common, easier to execute sort: Instructions to remind people who already know what to do, what to do.
The more essential and harder to create kind: Instructions for people who don’t know what to do.
It’s a mistake to assume that just because you know all the steps, the person you’re writing for does as well.
[Almost all instructions on car dashboards, and most on the highway, are for people who already know how to drive and where they’re going… instructions that teach are a special category.]
Here are some steps to consider:
This is more challenging than it looks. That’s okay. That’s why we need you to do it.
