A farmer might yearn for twice as much land. But it’s far more efficient to double the yield on the land he already has.
Marketers often hustle to get the word out. To reach more people. And yet, activating the fans you already have–the ones who trust you, who get the joke, who want to go where you’re going–is far more reliable.
If you want to win an election, don’t waste a lot of time persuading people who have chosen to oppose you and your work. Instead, simply create the conditions for those who agree with you to choose to actually show up and vote. And, along the way, to bring their friends.
This is the overlooked secret of my book streak. I write books for my readers instead of trying to find readers for my books.
Marketers face a choice every day: hustle for new people or serve the ones who care. Activation is much more productive than persuasion.
But expectations are a story we tell ourselves, and that story is up to us.
The simple life hack is to lower your expectations, regardless of what you’re entitled to. Create the conditions for the outcome you seek, but leave yourself room if it doesn’t arrive.
Lowering expectations is a way to ensure that tomorrow is even better than you hope it will be.
I asked my AI about some obsolete card games, and it wrote a 1,000 word essay about Lansquenet. It made up the rules, the strategies, the betting techniques, all of it.
Saying that it was raining on July 14th last year is an error. Inventing an entirely new set of rules is an hallucination.
An AI can’t lie, because it doesn’t know it’s lying. In that sense, it’s sort of pathological, careening forward without a conscience. Humans anthropomorphize things, because it makes it easier for us to process and predict. And AI is tempting us to do that more than we might with an ordinary machine.
That’s probably not the most helpful strategy, and it’s setting us up for real trouble.
AI is a tool, and judgment, for the foreseeable future, remains our job. It doesn’t matter how cool your hammer is, it’s still on you to decide which nails need hammering. And to be responsible for what happens when you use it.
Workers have rarely gotten the long end of the stick. The seduction of “do what you’re told and you’ll win valuable prizes” often doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and so it’s not surprising that many people are skeptical about delivering something extra–work is called work for a reason.
At the same time, one of the best career choices you can make is to hire a great boss. A great boss will support you as you encounter worthwhile challenges. They’ll engage you and pay you fairly. They’ll help you build a career at the same time they teach you about the work that needs to be done.
But good bosses often know that they’re good bosses, and are looking for something in the pile of resumes that fly by. (These are often things that bad bosses don’t particularly care about or even want).
Ask useful questions
Show up before you’re expected
Make big promises and keep them
Identify errors and flaws and self-correct
Default to optimism
Do work worth doing
Build a useful network worth outsourcing work to
Show your work
Develop good taste
Generously invite feedback
Make productive decisions
Communicate with precision
It’s easy to claim these skills, but not easy to commit to being quite good at them.
Most bosses don’t deserve this level of effort. I hope you can find one that does.
It’s thrilling when someone reads our minds. Sometimes we call it hospitality, or smart user interface design. Sometimes, it simply feels like being seen. The person or the system knows what you need, perhaps before you even realize what that might be.
This is a special sort of magic.
It’s easy to take this for granted, and it rarely works reliably or consistently. But we can get hooked on it.
And when it fails?
Perhaps we could speak up. Describe what we’re hoping for and what we need.
Smart systems (of humans and well designed machines) make it easy for users and participants to speak up. They can’t read your mind, but they can listen.
The alternative is that people will expect mind reading but not receive it. They can then become disengaged, bitter or isolated. This can lead to frustration, to broken connections and to undesired outcomes. (Little kids often have tantrums because they can’t understand why their parents can’t, or won’t, read their minds).
Understanding our role in the relationship or the organization can give us the confidence to speak up when it really matters. When it’s a generous thing to do. When what we need might be what the others need as well.
It’s not as fun as having your mind read, but it might be more reliable and effective.
Have you ever made a video that was seen by someone you didn’t know? Or written something that got shared outside of your inner circle?
The odds of either of these things happening a generation ago were close to zero. Now, it’s common. The skeptics said that people wanted to watch videos, not make them.
Nearly everyone with a phone is now a self-published media creator. The combination of production tools and free distribution has completely upended the media, which in turn has upended the culture.
65,000,000 people have uploaded a video to YouTube. In 1980, there were 8 movie studios actively producing mass market movies.
More than 10,000,000 people have uploaded a song to Spotify… you get the idea.
And now, it changes again. The number of people writing software tools and games is on the very same curve. We’re going to go from hundreds of software companies to millions, in just a few years.
Change the tools (and their distribution) and you change the future.
There are two ways of thinking about doing more than is necessary.
It can become a really useful marketing tactic. When you deliver more than people expect, your overdelivery creates connection. The surprise and delight is remarkable. People talk about it, seek you out and come back for more.
Of course, since it’s a useful tactic, you’re not actually doing more than is necessary. You’re doing the right amount.
The other sort is magical. It’s difficult, ridiculous and offers no obvious commercial benefit.
This sort of effort isn’t always noticed or appreciated by the customer, but that’s okay. It’s the calm, proud and professional approach that serves the maker, regardless of whether it’s worth it to the consumer.
It’s difficult to care enough to do more than is necessary if you are on the assembly line, hustling to make the quarterly numbers or being measured for every keystroke.
Finding the space to care an unreasonable amount is cultural and it often requires a system to nurture that sort of effort. We need room to spare. We need to stop being in such a hurry and focus on the work and the art in a way that’s generative, not frazzled.
The Japanese term for this is yoyu. 余裕 is effort and ease, time and passion.
The characters 余 (yo) means “surplus” or “extra,” and 裕 (yu) means “abundance” or “affluence.”
Yoyu has several interconnected meanings:
Having spare time or room
Being relaxed or composed
Having financial leeway or resources to spare
Mental/emotional capacity to handle situations calmly
Yoyu produces its own reward.
In a competitive market, it’s easy to see how we slide down the slippery slope of efficiency. The boss usually doesn’t often embrace yoyu, seeking easily measured productivity instead. Make the assembly line a bit faster, change the intensity of the lighting, give out a few bonuses or fire some people.
And scale isn’t the friend of yoyu. If we use our resources to expand and amplify, we’ve taken them away from our daily craft. If the project gets bigger when you have slack, slack disappears. Stress arrives.
So why bother?
We’re not machines, or even cogs in a machine. When we are at our best, we’re fully human. Human as producers and as consumers as well.
What’s the point of rushing if we never get anywhere?
Craig Mod has a new book out tomorrow, and I am excited that he’s going to be reaching a larger audience. His walks in Japan have helped people around the world understand the power of yoyu.
The industrial system that we all live in is persistent and powerful. It’s easy to believe that we can outrun it, bring our measured productivity to an impossible 11 and then, at the key moment, veer toward a different way of working and contributing. In fact, we can shift whenever we like. Not completely, not without effort, but we can begin.
Our approach to the work can change from filling our day with tasks to the generous act (for others and for ourselves) of craft. And that shift, amazingly, creates more opportunity, more connection and more satisfaction.
(A handwritten note that came with a $25 order of koji).
Sorting puts our options into two piles. One pile is the don’t-like, not-good-enough or wrong stack. These are the flavors we don’t enjoy, the paths that are dead ends and the people we simply don’t want to hang out with.
The other pile meets spec. The other pile is good enough.
Choosing among the good pile makes a small difference, but getting the piles right is the hard part. All the time we’re agonizing about our choices, we’re avoiding the hard work of really considering how we sorted things in the first place.
We need to spend less time choosing and more time sorting.
One way to deal with a changing world and new problems is to take yourself very seriously, others not so much.
The other way is to take the situation quite seriously, but perhaps not focus so much on taking ourselves seriously.
As Ani DiFranco points out, rock musicians take themselves very seriously but don’t care so much about the rest of the world. Folk singers do the opposite.
