Category: Commentary

I can’t decide if ‘see I told you’ so is acceptable, and if so, how much.

There are plenty of people who love to show receipts for accurate predictions made by others, but is it ok to show your own receipts, or is that just tacky?

Proving someone was right about something isn’t only about bragging rights. It can be entertaining, but it can also be useful.

When someone is correct about something most people missed, it causes you to ask why and seek to understand the worldview that led them to the prediction. Sometimes they just got lucky, or made so many predictions one was bound to happen. Other times, there is a useful new lens you can apply to more accurately understand the world.

Yes, most people use it as a way to own their enemies more than a way to enlighten and start interesting conversations about frameworks for understanding the world. But usefulness is possible. Sometimes ‘see I told you so’ is productive.

Back to the question. Is it in bad form to show your own receipts? Should you just let others discover it on their own (or not)? I don’t know. Something about it seems a bit too attention-seeking and needy. On the other hand, I’ve learned some interesting things from people who are very eager to let others know when they were right.

Maybe it’s slightly annoying and damaging to their reputation but also useful at the same time.

I suppose it would help if people who did this often also showed receipts for when their predictions were wrong.

I’ve written over 2,500 articles. I’ve done daily blogging on and off for years. I’ve published ten books.

Yet I show up every morning and face this blank screen with no idea what I’m going to write, how I’m going to write it, or whether it will be good.

When I’m done I don’t really know if it’s good either. There’s no metric or grade or expert to decide. Some posts make me happier than others. That’s about all I’ve got to go on.

I have no method or rules for writing either. Every time, I’m making it up from scratch. Tendencies and styles have emerged, but I’d be lying if I said those were deliberate decisions or disciplines. I just start typing and don’t stop until it feels like I’ve said enough.

I rarely edit and am bad at editing my own stuff. If I do, it takes the form of hitting publish, then reading the published piece over once and noticing mistakes or parts that make me cringe and quickly changing them.

The point is, I have no idea if I’m a good writer or a bad writer or a mediocre writer and I don’t even know how I’d measure it. Which is perfect because I don’t care. I write for me. Not to achieve any kind of status as a “good” writer.

So I’m not a good one to ask about methods and processes and rules for writing. I can sometimes tease out things that I notice, and I’m good at editing and workshopping other people’s writing, but I’m basically making everything up as I do. It’s just my gut reaction to ways things could be more enjoyable to read.

I am not bragging or claiming that perpetual amateur hour is a good thing, but it’s my reality and it doesn’t bother me. I’ve been writing for 20+ years and I’m still a novice.

Dignity. Some (most) things should be beneath yours.

I don’t mean decorum, which I consider to be a refuge of scoundrels. Decorum is all about going out of your way to employ visible trappings that signal you are a Very Serious Person.

Dignity is more about restraint. Some (most) things don’t need to be shared with the world.

We’re in a voyeuristic age, pushing to their limits the new toys of social media and ubiquitous recording devices.

I’m a big fan of openness, learning out loud, removing pretense, and dispensing with decorum. These also tend to “perform” well on social media, which has led people to do more than just be themselves and tell the truth in a mad rush to get “engagement”. It has led them to share every single thought and detail of their life.

Being truthful and open is not the same as having no dignity and sharing everything with everyone. One is about not hiding from people, the other is about begging people to look. One is honest, the other is embarrassing.

Weaponized authenticity is has become a favorite for the passive-aggressive and humblebraggarts.

Add the fact that victim is the most highly prized social status right now, and you see what happens. People start falling all over themselves to share all of their shame, pain, and indignity. The more others can see how pathetic you are, the more cheap digital praise will come.

You’ve gotta kill that impulse. You’re clowning yourself. You’re willingly playing the fool for the thinnest reward imaginable.

Respect – starting with self-respect – is better than “engagement”.

Just half double-u

What you’re left with is not ‘u’

An odd victory

It’s costs a lot to do business. Especially as a business grows. A big chunk of the costs are utterly unneeded and serve no purpose but to feed parasitic systems.

In a free market, monopolies are either everywhere or impossible, depending on what part of the definition you focus on. It’s when a business is good enough or early enough for a window of time to have very few alternate providers. They aren’t really harmful and tend not to last long. But monopoly created and sustained by government is awful. It’s when your money is stolen from you, or you’re thrown in a cage or murdered if you compete with or don’t use the services of government favored firm or industry. That’s where all these absurd business costs come from.

Lawyers, tax accountants, and occasionally even HR people or bureaucrats can be decent humans. Some are even good people. But the roles themselves are mostly crappy and unnecessary. They are maintained by threats of violence from the state, and every business is forced to deal with endless headache, time, and money costs no matter how useless and absurd.

Imagine building a company is like pushing a boulder up a hill, putting every ounce of muscle, heart, and lungs into the effort. Now imagine as you push that boulder you have 50 pounds of leeches all over your body sucking the life from you. That’s what all these government enforced regulations do.

Can you imagine how many more companies would be started and built, how many more deals would get done, how many more products made, how much more wealth and value created without this giant pile of leeches?

I can.

Okay, a little hyperbole. Obviously not everyone is an idiot.

But seriously, everyone is an idiot.

My friend Steve Patterson likes to say, “Everyone is wrong about everything all the time.” It’s a great quote because it puts us in the right frame of mind for engaging in a world of idiots. It’s not personal, it’s just reality.

When you find someone that is definitely not an idiot, follow them long enough and you will be shocked to discover what an idiot they are about as least one thing. This is the blessing and curse of independent thinking. You can’t find someone who isn’t an idiot at least sometimes, because 100% of us are.

People often say things like, “This person has [built a billion dollar company, patented a scientific breakthrough, created transcendent art, etc.] so clearly they’re not an idiot.”

No, they are definitely an idiot.

They have at least a handful of things about which they are not just wrong, but wrong in a stupid, elementary sort of way.

I’m sure some of you think I’m an idiot sometimes. Loathe as I am to admit it, there’s no way you’re not right at least some of the time. In fact, if I’m honest, there are a few ways in which even I know I’m an idiot.

While it’s self-destructive to always be a critic and a cynic, it’s useful to realize how dumb everyone is. It takes the pressure off. You won’t be so shocked when you encounter apparently smart people acting like idiots. You won’t feel anger or disillusionment. You won’t blindly follow them assuming they know better than you.

Just because someone’s an idiot doesn’t mean they are a bad person, or not incredibly smart about certain things. You don’t need to get mad at them for being an idiot. Because you are too.

I operate optimally at around stress level 50. New ideas and pursuits will spike it to 60 or 70 until I grind and get it back down to 50. Lack of novelty or challenge will drop it to 30 or 40, then I start coming up with all kinds of new ideas that drive it back up.

I’ve realized one of the biggest challenges in working with other people is when they have a default stress level that diverges widely from my own. Anyone in the 40-60 range is easy to work with. Our rhythms sync pretty easily. Below or above that range gets more challenging.

It doesn’t mean it’s not possible to work with people who have a radically different optimal stress range. Far from it. I’ve had some really productive working relationships with people as low as 20 (lower than that seems reserved for chronic pot heads) and as high as 100 (yes, they really exist, and no, I don’t know if Adderall is involved.)

With people who thrive at lower stress levels, I’ve had to learn to remind myself how much my levels cause discomfort for them and how unsustainable that is. They can handle it for short sprints, but can’t have it as a constant. I’ve learned to shield those people from anything except actionable, clearly laid out goals. I have to refrain from sharing all the half-formed thoughts and ideas and changes in direction that I entertain regularly. They have a hard time with hypotheticals and rapid pivots and contingencies. The plus side is, these people tend to be steady, reliable, and low drama.

Those who thrive at higher stress levels require me to create a buffer between us, or I’ll get sucked into a higher stress zone than I can sustain. Tracking with a 100 elevates my ambient stress to about 80, which, again, is great for sprints. Not every day. I’ve learned to put their ideas into a waiting room for a period before letting them affect my own thought patterns and work habits. This allows me to maintain more control over the rhythms of business and keep a governor on the stress range.

Higher stress people need a lot of latitude to roam, explore, share, and get hyped. But all of these things do not demand action, certainly not right away. I am heavily action biased, which is what makes my stress elevate quickly around those with a higher optimum range. It helps to remind myself how I feel with lower stress range people – I’m always wondering why they turn every idea into some kind of burden and can’t just entertain it and play with it before letting become serious enough to disrupt their day.

My optimal range has changed over the years. Very early in my career, it was a bit lower. Probably 40 or so. As I gained confidence, experience, and a realization of my entrepreneurial bent, it rose quickly to around 60 or even higher. For about half a decade or more, I operated constantly at around 70-80 with frequent sprints of 90-100, which didn’t seem too bad until my body started to fall apart on me and I realized I was overclocking it for too long. I pulled it back down as best I could, and discovered when the dust cleared and the bodily equilibrium (mostly) returned, that my previous optimal of around 60 was now about 10 degrees lower.

I don’t know why it dropped. I’m nearly 40, so maybe it’s an age thing. Or maybe I just used up too much too fast and needed a long recovery period. Interestingly, the drop in my tolerance for above-optimal stress came with a drop in my tolerance for below-optimal stress too. I get restless and bored even easier and quicker.

It definitely put a dent in my pride at first to realize I needed a lower range and didn’t have as much room for deviation or as many sprints in me as I once did. It’s easy to construct belief systems around your optimal stress levels and decide that yours is the best for everyone. This is tempting but dumb.

Best is to figure out your optimal range, be honest about what it is, don’t wish it was otherwise, and learn to work within it. You can be an absolute beast at nearly any range (though I suspect those below 20 are suppressing some potential, and those above 80 are compensating for something and might have to pay the piper later).

I don’t know what all this means, whether there are lessons for anyone else, or any kind of broadly applicable insights or patterns. But using this framework for myself (which I just teased out of my subconscious and put into words this morning) seems pretty darn useful.

Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn is probably the best primer out there on the need for unstructured play in the learning process for kids. I highly recommend it.

Humans are wired for emulation and experimentation. Games are the most natural way to learn, because they are adjustable to the perfect balance of challenge and accessibility needed to grow and improve.

Make something too hard or too competitive for a novice and they’ll get depressed and quit. Make it too easy and they’ll get bored and quit. Easy to enter, low-pressure games, especially where new players can watch existing players (who aren’t miles ahead of them in skill) and mimic them are the ideal starting point. But then the games need to escalate in difficulty and competitiveness.

One of the studies in Gray’s book showed novice billiard (or is it pool?) players did worse when being graded and observed than when just playing freely. But expert players did better. They loved the challenge.

Play is perfect because it can flex and ratchet up to accommodate all of these competing pressures. Play is NOT easy, stress free, or without pain an anguish. Watch kids trying to beat a hard level on a video game, or athletes trying to win back-to-back titles. Play isn’t easy, but it is fun.

There is lots of amazing literature on play and learning, but most of it gets associated with children. “Learning” gets (sadly) synonymized with “school”, and school implies kids. But every job is mostly about learning. And the more upside, the more this is true.

That’s why play at work is so important!

Work can be hard, frustrating, repetitive, and taxing (just like a challenging game). But it should also be fun and playful!

If you can tap into the power of infinite games, and craft some finite games within them, you will grow and excel in work just like kids do in education.

CaaHA (Content-as-a-Homework-Assignment) is the dominant form of online creation for most companies. And it can’t die soon enough.

I’m a bit of an education radical, so I have no problem saying homework is generally stupid and trains people in bad habits. Writing assignments are particularly egregious for their forced criteria and demands of feigned interest.

I once helped my friend who was a grad assistant to an undergraduate philosophy course grade essays. To call them “bad” would be an insult to Michael Jackson. They were anti-life.

Nearly all of them hit the stated criteria – arbitrary number of pages, number of citations, specific concepts mentioned, and arguments made. But they were made with soul-sucking disinterest. The kind so intense it lacks all intensity.

Outright disdain would’ve been better, because at least the papers would’ve had some kind of substance or emotion! Instead, they clinically forged interest to placate an equally disinterested professor (who handed them off to a TA who had to also pretend to be interested. He, in turn, handed half of them off to me, who was immensely interested in the same way one would be drawn to gaze at a flaming dumpster floating in a vat of sewage).

When you’re forced to write to avoid bad grades and calls from your parents, you pump out empty flotsam. Sure, it might check all the boxes technically, but it makes all of us worse for having endured it. Just ask teachers during grading season. Or anytime.

Sadly, this habit continues into professional life. Many marketing teams feel the pressure to have an Inbound strategy, thanks to the successes of pioneers of internet marketing who created a whole new approach. Those pioneers mostly made good stuff. So good that it became the new standard. It became a requirement. It became a homework assignment.

The effective stuff got broken into formulas and checklists, and these got handed down from CMOs who mostly didn’t care about content to assistants who were paid to follow orders, and the proliferation of CaaHA began.

The voluminous collection of CaaHA has changed in particulars as SEO and social media engagement have morphed and been turned into sciences, but one thing has remained: CaaHA’s complete lack of soul.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t all about feeling. Creation as a discipline is paramount. You can’t sit around and wait for the Muses to inspire you. You’ve gotta create consistently, no matter the mood. But those daily, habitual acts of creation all don’t need to go on the company blog.

(This is why I love personal daily blogging so much, because you get to develop the creativity-as-a-discipline muscle, but then only choose the best posts or themes to expound into something worth posting elsewhere.)

So yes, create on command. Create consistently. Form a habit. But for the love of all that is lovely, don’t let your company crank out droopy-eyed shite in a panicked attempt to check the content boxes!

This is why telling personal stories is so great. It’s hard to be detached from your writing when it’s about your own life and experiences! And you don’t need to be an expert or appeal to your own authority to do this. Just keep it real, and learn out loud.

OK, so here’s a white pill I’m pondering.

All this new AI generated content seems to have perfectly nailed CaaHA writing. I guess it took a soulless rule-following bot pretending to be human to really capture the style.

At first, this might sound like bad news. Even MORE of this slop splashed across our screens!

But really, it’s good news. The cost of generating CaaHA just dropped to near-zero. This means the supply will inflate so far and fast as to cause the value to drop to near-zero as well. Whatever small, sad part of our brains is still giving this stuff a chance will finally tune it out completely. (Fingers crossed)

That means our brains will be even hungrier for and more attuned to writing with feeling. Halellujah!

That’s bullish for those of us with a heartbeat.

So I, for one, welcome our soul-dead CaaHA generating replacements.

I’ve been seeing a lot of examples recently of an AI chatbot that answers your questions with lengthy replies, vs Google which pulls up the most relevant webpages. Many people feel this is the future of search.

It may be. And a new future for search is not unwelcome. Google has gotten progressively less useful and more paternalistic in recent years, so more options sound great.

When I see the responses from this bot, it makes me wonder what the reference material is, and who writes the code that determines how this information is treated. Results may be faster, and presented in a easier to digest plain English (or at least the uncanny valley AI attempt at it), but is it better or worse when it comes to propaganda, censorship, and social engineering through exclusion and framing?

It seems a world with a single robot-delivered result is more fraught with potential abuse than a world with a bunch of (mostly) human created results a human has to sort through. Both can be manipulated, both require human coders to set parameters, but the messier, less precise results of the latter seems to at least provide some opportunity for unlikely or even unwanted findings.

As the internet gets eaten by AI generated content, perhaps the distinction between these two types of search blurs anyway. I’m not opposed to any of this, but I have a heightened sense of awareness that the internet is not the free-flowing place it once seemed to be.

All of these tools can be useful and wonderful if they are understood for what they are and not mistaken for something else. Treating an AI search tool as the source of truth would be unwise. Treating it as an interesting way to get one presentation of ideas or facts could be useful.

Every time it’s spent

A bit of joy diminished

Making is more fun

I saw this image in an issue of the FLUX Review yesterday:

It’s a great visualization of the difference between accuracy and precision.

Accuracy is how close to reality a measurement is, precision is how close measurements are to each other.

Both are valuable, but there is a distinct order of operations needed.

Get accurate first. Then get precise.

If you go for precision first, you’ll spend a lot of time dialing in your measurements, ensuring there’s a logic to them in relation to each other, ensuring you can accurately capture data down to the decimal, and setting up systems to do so.

The scope of your activities will get restricted and locked in based on the needs of the measurements.

Then you go out into the real world and experience a really tight grouping far away from the target, like the second image above.

Better is to just throw the first dart.

Now you’ve got a baseline. You can see how accurate or inaccurate your efforts are. You can adjust the efforts to increase accuracy. After you’ve gotten close to enough the target, you can start to work on precision and tighten your grouping.

The other way around just doesn’t work.

So rather than plotting out detailed OKRs and KPIs and hoping they’re relevant before you get out into the market, go do some stuff first. Throw some darts and base your plans and goals and measurements around the baseline of what you find.

I don’t know why I’ve always loved Christmas and all of its traditions so much.

Every other holiday, birthday, and memorial occasion never meant much to me. Until recently.

I’m a forward looking person, a believer in free will and the power to make any circumstances into something great. So the idea of special days never had much appeal. Why not make every day what you want it to be? Why be hemmed in by someone else’s calendar?

There’s something I still like about my instinctive lack of sentimentalist, but for the most part it has faded away.

Time has worn on and life has brought the concomitant pains and joys – births, deaths, big wins and tragic losses. Each cycle has further opened my eyes to the inescapable reality of the calendar and seasons, with their patterns and purpose. I’ve come to long for the changes in atmosphere, focus, and meaning throughout the year.

Diving into the celebrations of ancient cultures, and especially the ancient Christian church’s calendar of feasts has helped me appreciate the depth of these cycles and the power of embracing and connecting to them all, not just Christmas.

When you get acquainted with the Orthodox or Catholic calendar, you realize something: there are no “normal” days.

That’s when it hit me. The very idea that made me not care about holidays is the one that has these ancient Christians celebrating them constantly: Every day is the most important day of your life.

The difference is they ascribe unique kinds of importance to them on a consistent cadence, where I was sort of just letting it emerge or imposing whatever importance I wanted on each day.

The power of tapping into cosmic and historical realities around each day to focus its importance is immense.

Every day is part of history. Every day is connected to every other. The procession is holy and worthy of observance.

Bring on the feasts.

I went to audition for the worship team at my local church and they handed me a sheet of paper that was entirely illegible to me. I realized I was in over my head.

We’ll come back to that.

Everyone praises the use of plain language and decries too much jargon. But, annoying and overused as it may be, insider language serves a vital purpose. It simultaneously divides and binds to maintain cohesion.

The beautiful thing is that language is not (usually) imposed at the point of a gun, but emerges freely and evolves naturally. Its power to both expand and protect groups is peaceful and usually subtle, unlike most other social cohesion mechanisms which have a political or military bent.

Language is one of the 16 kinds of network effects described in one of my favorite works about startups. A network effect is something that increases in value for all current users every time a new person adopts it (Metcalfe’s Law). Language obviously fills this role. The more people speak your language, the more valuable your language is to you and everyone else.

But, counterintuitively, insider jargon doesn’t quite follow Metcalfe’s law. It does at first. Groups that form around shared ideas or pursuits develop their own technical or cultural words or variations on their root language as a way to better communicate with each other. The nomenclature increases in value as more people learn it.

But then it doesn’t. It hits a peak at some point where the other function of jargon takes over. The exclusion of phonies, outsiders, or those who don’t belong.

This exclusion is usually seen (by outsiders) as wholly negative, but it serves a positive function as well. To continue existing, groups require cohesion. There is some minimum proximity to whatever the group is centered on that must be kept or the whole thing falls apart.

Consider a group of musicians. They don’t want total uniformity, otherwise there’s no point in expanding beyond a soloist. But they have to all be close enough to the central theme around which they orbit – a rhythm, melody, or progression.

Back to the worship team.

The exclusionary role of language among musicians is what put me in a bind when I decided to record an audition video.

Though I’m by no means a highly skilled musician, I’ve played on many worship teams over the last few decades. I usually strum my guitar looking at a piece of paper with chords written above the lyrics. “G”, “D”, “Em”, “C”, and so on.

So when I printed off the audition sheet and saw no lyrics or chords, but just a string of numbers, I was flummoxed. “1 2 1 2 – 1 5 4 1”. I thought maybe my computer accidentally spit the whole thing out in Wingdings or something.

Turns out, this church uses something called Nashville Notation. It’s a numerical music system I’d never heard of, but that is apparently popular with studio musicians in the business.

The use of this foreign (to me) musical language served as a valuable and efficient litmus test for the church. They want a certain caliber of player. Those who, like me, are out of their depth with Nashville notation, would pull the band too far from their shared center. It immediately signaled to me that this worship team is for pros. If I want to join, I’ve got to learn a new language and prove it.

The efficiency gained by using insider language as a litmus test is hard to overstate. The cohesion among the group for having gone through the rigors necessary to learn it is also powerful.

Memes serve a similar function in niche online communities. Technical speak in scientific communities. Religious lingo, sports lingo, and foodie lingo all have both the binding and separating function.

Yes, these can be used condescendingly. Yes, people can become cultists unable to communicate outside of their echo chambers. Those are easy criticisms. But the beneficial, peaceful, cohesive properties of insider jargon shouldn’t be overlooked.

I’d rather people bond and exclude with language than with walls or guns.

Humility is not about thinking little of yourself. That’s usually a type of pride.

Humility is more about allowing the spotlight to shine on others, and shining it there yourself when given the chance.

It’s about putting your energy towards things that matter, even (and especially) when you won’t get credit for their success.

It’s not about lying or refusing credit when others give it. It’s about the willingness to allow the focus to be on others, and to encourage and take joy in others getting credit.

It’s about ignoring the social balance sheet. Completely letting go of the need to get the credit you feel you’re due. Doing so without pride or pomp, but a genuine joy for others, however the chips and spotlight may fall.

It’s hard because if you’re doing life well, you’ll pour yourself into things with abandon. You’ll spill blood, sweat, toil, and tears. And darn it, the last thing you want is to not get the full credit for your efforts, or worse, see someone else take it.

Humility doesn’t care a wit about all that.

Humility enjoys the effort and results with confidence, doesn’t require applause, and applauds others for their efforts.

Humility knows that keeping score never works, never ends well, and is a lot less fun than keeping joy whether or not you’re recognized for your full contributions.

Humility requires tremendous inner peace. Humility is demanding, but much more fulfilling. It naturally attracts others. Humility adds energy to all who come in contact with it.

It’s not always realized or acknowledged, but humility always wins.