The disconnect between effort and value

They're often out of whack. A Hard Day's Night took less than 15 hours from idea to finished record. More Than a Feeling, from Tom Scholz and Boston, took five years. Each pleased their audiences. One is not 1,500 times more valuable than the other. Sometimes, work that requires effort leads to scarcity, and that scarcity can increase its value.

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Preference falsification

People lie. They lie in focus groups, they lie on surveys and they lie to themselves. Culture can be seen as an organized lying function. Be aware of what other people are thinking and make choices about your preferences so you can fit in. Without this effect, we wouldn't have trends, fads or hits. Part of our work as marketers is to create the conditions for people to happily do what they were hoping they could do all along.

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Celebrity art

It doesn't have to be well-crafted, historically important or aesthetically unique. It simply needs to be famous. Celebrity art is famous, with a story and thus emotional resonance. It's a souvenir for our eyes, a chance to have proximity without ownership. It conflates familiarity with scarcity, the power of in-person experience with the context of our culture. It's simultaneously a statement of status and a signifier of connection.

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The Rowboat

"Working in the studio is like building a ship in a bottle. Playing live is like being on a rowboat in the ocean." Jerry Garcia You probably need some studio time, but you definitely need to play live.

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“Welcome back”

What if they meant it? What if your return felt special to the people behind the counter? What if they knew, without looking it up, or being told--what if they knew that you were here, again, a vote of trust and confidence. Returning home is one of the oldest human desires. It's a feeling that doesn't easily lend itself to automation, procedures, or scale. Being welcomed home offers us dignity, safety and belonging. Hard to fake, worth working hard to create.

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“That doesn’t work”

We transferred an idea from engineering to culture, but it's incomplete. If you build a watch that doesn't tell time, it's fair to say it doesn't work. But when a critic says, "that joke didn't work," after seeing a comic perform to a raucous audience, what they probably mean is, "that didn't work for me." The problem might not be the comic.

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Organizations that need you

"How few people can we get away with?" That's a question many bosses think hard about. Automate. Streamline. Improve productivity and take humans out of as many tasks as possible. It's a time-tested way to create profits and to increase a certain kind of reliability. Claude Code is popular with many organizations for precisely this reason. "How can we include more people into this process?" is a less popular but often more valid way to create value.

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Eager to give up agency

We work so hard to have freedom and leverage and choice. And then, as soon as a social network, boss or cultural force instructs us to do something, we fold our tents and go along. Responsibility is scary. Sometimes it's easier to find someone (or something) to blame. Just because AI tells you to put your finger in a pencil sharpener doesn't mean you should, said every mother ever.

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The smush

When new creation technologies arrive, they make the best a little worse and the bad a lot better. Desktop publishing made every local garage sale sign a lot more legible, but can't quite replace the hand-kerned and tweaked typography of the era before. A smartphone in your pocket takes far better video of the family cookout than a super 8 camera ever could, but it's no match for Hitchcock shooting in 35mm.

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Optimizing yourself into a corner

Organizations thrive on incremental improvement. They find a stable foundation and then build a feedback loop of relentless improvement. This leads to great efficiency, higher productivity and more profits. It enables more throughput and builds market share. Except things change. Optimized offerings are brittle. When the foundation shifts, all of that incremental improvement breaks into shards. When the dust settles, the optimized alternative is almost always surpassed by the resilient one.

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The Lego problem, revisited

For generations, the rules of Lego were simple: many pieces, all able to connect in many ways, led to many outcomes. That almost drove the company into bankruptcy, though. Lego kits saved the business. Each kit has just one way to do the work, follow the instructions carefully. Industrial indoctrination in a box. While it made Lego plenty of money, it didn't create a generation of creative thinkers.

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More interesting

Built into the concept of "interesting" is the unexplored. The temptation of discovery and the new. And so, by definition, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, it's likely that there is something more interesting somewhere else. The people at the next table may be talking about something more fascinating than your date is... the only way to know is to listen in.

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First take/next take/last take

Nailing it in the first take is a sign of preparation and professionalism. No need for two tries if you are clear about what you're doing and how. The next take is where hope lies. This one was pretty good, but next time, we'll bring it. And the last take is good enough. That's why there are no more takes after that.

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The Having/Doing job gap

It's a dance between workers, bosses and the market. The most stable quadrant happens when a thoughtful and consistent boss hires the right person, pays them fairly, creates positive working conditions and useful training. In return, the company gets extraordinary performance. That's someone doing a good job who also has a good job. A particularly unstable quadrant is the worker who gets all of the above, but because of culture, choice or lack of enrollment, simply doesn't do a good job.

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The power of positive argument

Hank Green has an interesting take on the scientific method: We advance because scientists work to persuade others that they're correct. Every paper, statistical analysis and experiment is nothing but an argument designed to persuade an intelligent critic. The method of argument is determined by the audience--if they require double-blind studies and useful statistical models, then that's what you'll need to use to change their minds.

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Pointless banality and the uncanny valley

The folks at TryAI put Fable to the test in directing a music video. The AI glitches show up from the start and continue. But it's even more unsettling than this. When AI tries to create and direct joyous human dancing, it fails. The dancers look like retired accountants at a wedding. The stiff awkwardness jumps out at us...

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Imminent, urgent, trending and important

The nearest lightning was 1,200 miles away. At least that's what the weather site reported. When lightning is that unlikely, we don't worry about it much. It turns out that this is the best time to install a lightning arrestor on your home, though. The urgency of the moment might be the push we need to take action, but if we rely on that, we've given up our agency to external events.

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Resources and focus

There are lots of things you can do, but it's not clear you should. OpenAI has virtually unlimited resources. And in addition to building a chat-based AI, they chose to launch pretty good image generation, a basketball, a meme video generator (since cancelled), an upcoming speaker that actually moves around your house, and a myriad of other tools, with new ones coming all the time.

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Two kinds of word salad

The right words in the right sequence create information. Ideas that change our world. The first kind of word salad allows the writer to hide. Fancy words, carefully juxtaposed, saying nothing. This can serve a valuable function for politicians, academics and bosses--but there's no real information for the reader. It's simply a collection of words pretending to be an idea.

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Disposable software

Even though it's invisible, easily transported and weightless, software used to stick around. It took years to architect and build a complex bit of software, and thousands of people to help maintain it. Even a complex website could be seen as a durable technical asset. Now, with Claude Code on everyone's desk, new software is often easier to write than old software is to maintain.

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“Is it okay if I share my screen?”

The meeting is now broken. Even if you were actually engaging with the attendees before, it's over. You took a new medium and stuffed an old one into it, changed the dynamic and ruined it. Zoom is a device that eliminates physical distance and enables a synchronized conversation. Interactions in real time. In particular, groups of three to eight professionals, there to have a discussion.

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The hedonic treadmill

When we upgrade something in our lives, the thing we used to be satisfied with is no longer satisfying. That's the nature of an upgrade. After a certain point, the only thing we're buying is the way the upgrade makes us feel in the moment, not our satisfaction going forward. Stereos, salt, art on the wall. It's easy to get hooked on the climb, not the altitude.

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Controversial

This is a useful term. It helps us understand a topic or theory that can be considered from multiple points of view by people engaging with good intent. "Pluto is a planet" was a controversial statement among some people who study the solar system. On the other hand, it's not controversial that Pluto actually exists. Choosing to engage in a conversation about something that's controversial gives us a chance to share our insights and engage in dialogue.

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Mel’s back

Last year, the recording session I did with Mel Robbins was going so well that her producers asked me to stick around--four hours later, we had recorded enough for two episodes. One never knows how these things will feel until after the fact, but part 2 is live now. I hope you get as much out of it as I did...

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A captive audience

The moment you start treating your customers as captives, they begin to make other plans. It might take a while, but they always end up leaving. The first step is warning away their friends. On the other hand, when we treat our customers like the free agents they are, they often choose to stick around (and bring the others). Before you reward an analyst for jacking up the price and making some money this week, it might be worth focusing on what that short-term move is going to cost you.

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Riff-o-matic

More than 345 riffs, worthy of a calendar, all in one place. They don't fit in a blog post, so I made a page of them. Hit the refresh above to see another one, or see them all, and vote on your favorites, at sethsriffs.com On the riffs page, you can click the ? icon and launch a search of the blog for more details and discovery. Share links are also there.

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Generous collusion

The professionals you have the most in common with may be your competition. They wrestle with similar problems and have similar goals. And you can offer value by sharing what you've learned and what you know--and that value will often be reciprocated. I met Tom Rielly when was running PlanetOut in the 1990s. About forty of AOL's biggest software partners had been invited to a conference, and Tom hosted a small gathering for a dozen of us in his hotel suite.

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Goal clarity and the Hawking index

What's this idea (book, meme, song, TV show, marketing campaign) for? Perhaps you want to reach the largest number of people. Or make the most sales. Or generate the most word of mouth. Or be notorious. Or change part of the culture. Or get good reviews. Or have people actually finish your book. You might want to gain status, make friends, make a point or make a living.

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Facts and feelings

The world is like this and therefore I feel like that. That seems right. It's raining, so I'm sad. The person cut me off in traffic and so I'm angry. Ford makes better cars, so I like them more than Chevys. Occasionally, this cause and effect is what happens. But more often, it goes in the other direction. We find ourselves with feelings, and then we find (or invent) 'facts' to justify them.

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The urgency paradox

The more often we succumb to the urgency of the moment, the more urgency we create. The next minute is probably not the last minute, but when we treat it this way, it will be soon followed by another last minute.

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