And it’s honest when we acknowledge that just about everything is out of our control. We can work to influence it, we can practice accepting it, but any time we’re engaging with others or with the future, we’re not completely in charge.
Control is elusive. If we accept the parts that are out of our hands, we can focus on the elements where we have leverage and influence instead.
]]>Today, if there’s something I don’t know, it’s almost certainly because I haven’t cared enough to find out.
I don’t understand molecular biology, the history of Sardinia or much of agronomy–but that’s my choice. Now that information is widely and freely available, our sense of agency around knowledge needs to change.
It pays to acknowledge that this is a choice, and to be responsible for it. What else have we chosen not to know?
]]>If you’re not open to the tension that is caused by knowing you could do better, it’s unlikely you’re willing to do the work to get better. As you’re doing that work, there’s the satisfaction it brings, but also the knowledge that just a moment ago, you weren’t any good.
]]>Twenty years later, it was obvious.
When I first saw Prodigy in 1986, I saw that the consumer internet would have many possibilities, but I didn’t have the guts to ask what I was missing. “In 40 years, for what purposes will it be useful” would have been a productive way to think about the change that was happening.
AI is as big a change as the internet, perhaps more so. And in just a few years, people will wonder why we weren’t wondering better.
]]>And when it occurs to us that we might be able to make a useful contribution or do something important, perhaps we could do it now.
]]>We need to begin with empathy and a useful story… useful to the people who want to believe it, spread it, and use it to accomplish their goals.
But then, the story needs firm footing and a way to stick with us. Patagonia is a great name because while most people have no idea where the place known as Patagonia is, they’re able to associate it with the story that the company has been telling for a long time. Nike is a great name, even though it’s not obvious how to pronounce it. Genghis Khan had a memorable, unique name–you don’t have to be beloved for the name to be useful.
The industry that’s the current world champ at bad naming is AI.
ChatGPT is a terrible name. And the trademark office in the US just denied them ownership in GPT, so even if they were a pioneer, that’s gone now. It’s hard to tell the story when you don’t know what to call it.
Claude.ai isn’t particularly distinctive (something about the phonemes make me keep forgetting it, and without a bookmark, I’d never find it again), and Gemini walks away from the huge value that Google has invested into the name of their search engine.
Louise wrote the book on it.
]]>Amazon, on the other hand, has no shelf space problem, and the Kindle multiplies it. As a result, the average book on the Kindle is virtually worthless, because once it’s easy to include everything, everything gets included. Amazon doesn’t promise to curate, they insist the purchaser does.
Christopher Nolan hasn’t made many movies (and has carefully kept his first student film hidden from view). If he puts his name on it, people pay attention.
YouTube has countless (actually countless, because new ones arrive faster than you can count the old ones) videos. And a significant number of them have less than ten views, and they don’t even deserve that many. YouTube doesn’t curate, they encourage the crowd to do that for them.
The long tail is a business model and a way of bringing work to the world. More is better.
Curation, on the other hand, offers a different reward for the publisher/creator.
Either your motto is, “we don’t sell anything, we sell everything” or “we put our name on this one.”
Lately, there’s pressure to be somewhere in the middle. To be sort of proud of each choice and sort of have a lot of choices.
It’s a very difficult path to walk. Economic pressure pushes for more, now. But more now might be stealing from we stand for something.
]]>In our modern world, we often end up holding on to ideas, to grievances or to our view of the world.
Ironically, the harder we hold on to the things we’re hiding from, the less dear our life becomes.
Perhaps we could let go for dear life instead.
]]>The purpose of the memo or the table or the graph or the presentation is to create the conditions for someone to make up their own minds. Because it’s almost impossible to make up their mind for them.
The aha is actually a chemical reaction, a rewiring of our brain, the moment when we see what we hadn’t seen before and make a new decision based on what we believe to be new information.
Causing an aha requires insight and elegance, and there are three ways we avoid it.
Sometimes, we are entranced by our own insight, or impressed with our communication tools. We let facts, formatting and filigree get in the way of a good story.
And sometimes, we’re afraid of our power, so we bury the lede too far, letting ourselves off the hook by not influencing someone else.
Once in a while, we do the opposite. We say what we mean so clearly and so directly that the story disappears and the facts bounce off the inertia and self esteem of the person encountering them.
Persuasion works best when it’s actually self-persuasion. But you already knew that.
]]>Taste is individual preference, not absolute truth.
In team settings, then, it’s much more helpful to say, “I prefer this over that,” instead of, “this is wrong.”
Some things are wrong. There are standards that we can all accept when it comes to utility, efficiency and even beauty.
Your authority doesn’t lie in your ability to be the sole arbiter of an accepted constant. Instead, we’re listening to hear about your personal preferences.
When we try to turn our taste into a universal standard, we shut down the creators around us.
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