In 1970, when Walter Cronkite was narrating current events for the United States, he was 54 years old. Hitchcock made his last film when he was 77.
When there’s a limited number of slots for narrators to fill, they can stick around for a long time.
One of the overlooked cultural shifts of our time is that by dramatically expanding the number of slots (and removing the gatekeepers) we skipped twenty or thirty years. Now, there are writers, pundits, video stars and producers who aren’t being asked to wait two decades to have a voice.
Existing media (like traditional book publishing or network TV) will hold on to proven voices for as long as it can, but new media (which now captures far more attention) has no mechanism for that.
If it seems like it’s happening all at once, compared to history, it is.
PS the big finale of the GOODBIDS auction launch week is ready. Get two Taylor Swift tickets (in Amsterdam in July) plus a travel budget. To benefit charity: water.
It’s possible to have a useful conversation about what to do about something that’s broken or needs improvement. But first, we must acknowledge that it happened.
It’s not controversial to understand the facts, the data and the shifts that are happening in the world we live in. In fact, the only way to have a useful conversation about what to do about it is to understand and accept the reality of what’s here.
Movements that deny reality choose to do this because they don’t have a better plan, and stalling is their best option. Which is no option at all.
Today is Earth Day, which like Mother’s Day, shouldn’t be a day at all, more like an all-year-round celebration.
Two years ago, hundreds of volunteers from 90 countries came together and produced an Almanac.
Since then, the book has been translated into languages around the world (recently with a free edition in Spanish), been a bestseller from China to Italy to the Netherlands, and remained in the top 100 in its category in the US.
And yet, it’s possible that you haven’t seen it yet, that your kids aren’t using it in school, that it’s not being handed out at community meetings or required reading at organizations large and small. Today would be a great day to share a copy.
It’s surprisingly easy to be generous and find solutions to our friend’s problems.
Much easier than it is to do it for ourselves. Why?
There are two useful reasons, I think.
FIRST, because we’re unaware of all the real and imaginary boundaries our friends have set up. If it were easy to solve the problem, they probably would have. But they’re making it hard because they have decided that there are people or systems that aren’t worth challenging. Loosening the constraints always makes a problem easier to solve.
And SECOND, because resistance is real. Solving the problem means moving ahead, confronting new, even scarier problems. It might be easier to simply stay where we are, marinating in our stuck.
When we care enough to solve our own problem, we’ll loosen the unloosenable constraints and embrace the new challenges to come.
These are useful tools, but they don’t pretend to be well-informed or wise. They’re dumb, and they look dumb too.
That’s one reason that tools are effective. We use them to leverage our effort, but we don’t trust them to do things that they’re not good at.
The reason AI language models are dumb is that they don’t actually know anything, the model is simply calculating probabilities. Not about the unknown, but about everything. Each word, each sentence, is a statistical guess.
I’ve switched mostly to claude.ai because it’s more effective and less arrogant, but it’s still guessing.
If a guess is good enough, you’re set. If it’s not, plan accordingly.
In my experience, the most useful approaches to AI are:
Ask clearly bounded questions, where you can easily inspect the results.
Don’t let AI make decisions for you. Instead, challenge it to broaden your options.
Take advantage of the fact that it doesn’t have feelings, and use its honesty to get useful feedback.
Don’t ignore AI because it’s dumb. Figure out how to create patterns and processes where you can use it as the useful tool it’s becoming.
Expertise and firmly held beliefs don’t always go together.
Here’s a simple XY grid to help us choose where to sit at whatever table we’re invited to:
Plenty of well-trained professionals have earned the right to have strongly held beliefs. These convictions save them time and error, particularly if the world is stable. Surgeons, jugglers and historians make countless decisions, and they rarely have the time or resources to reconsider each underlying factor. This makes them efficient, but can also cause a field to get stuck.
Fortunately, there are innovators. These are individuals with plenty of experience and training who have chosen to be flexible, to repeatedly ask ‘what if’ and ‘why’. When an innovator suggests a counter-intuitive or even nutty concept, it might pay to listen carefully.
For most of us, most of the time, we have the chance to be curious. We don’t have a lot of domain knowledge, but we’re able to ask intelligent questions and to listen carefully to the answers. The hallmark of a curious person with goodwill is that they’re eager to change their minds.
Alas, social media has elevated the foolish. People possessing little in the way of expertise, and generally unwilling to change their assertions or goals.
Dreams are fine. And dreams involve contradictions. We want this AND that, but both can’t happen. That’s what keeps them from being plans.
Plans embrace boundaries and reality, they don’t ignore them. Plans thrive on scarcity and constraints. Plans are open for inspection, and a successful planner looks forward to altering the plans to make them more likely to become real.
Sometimes, we’re so afraid of creation that we don’t even leave blank pages around.
If your workspace has a hole exactly the size of a creative idea in it, you’re more likely to fill the hole.
When we decrease the number of steps to begin creating, and increase the expectation that something is going to arrive, it’s far more likely to happen.
Book a recording studio. Leave the laptop open. Schedule a blog post. Make sure the whiteboard can be seen. Buy more blank canvasses than you need.
Blank pages beg to be filled, and it helps to have them around.
Some GOODBIDS auctions to consider:
Get some direct and useful advice on your project from Daymond John. Supports BuildOn.
This week is the 150th anniversary of the most important failed art exhibit of all time.
It was organized by and featured artists who weren’t even among those that had a slot at the runner’s up exhibit for artists who weren’t featured in the real Salon in Paris. Manet didn’t have the guts to join them, so he participated in the ‘Refused’ exhibit. The others understood that a real change was possible.
Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Berthe Morisot, Pissarro, Béliard, Guillaumin, Lepic, Levert, and Rourt all participated. They not only put their art in the show, they organized and paid for it.
A few lessons worth taking away:
The first exhibit was a financial and critical failure. The show received fewer than 1% of the number of visitors that the mainstream salon benefitted from, and there were few reviews, most of them negative.
They knew someone who had a building, and the empty space he offered them was enough of an instigator that it turned some maybes into yesses. Use it or lose it.
One of the most positive things to come from the exhibit was a scathing satirical piece, the one that gave the impressionists their name. The insecure critics came to regret their inability to see what was possible.
And yet, the artists persisted. Year after year, eight times, gaining momentum each time, they returned, working their way from outsiders to become the dominant form of artistic expression of their time.
But most of all, so much easier today than in Paris 150 years ago, these individual painters did two things: They picked themselves and they did it together.
Everyone wants to be picked, but no one wants to organize the collective ‘we’.
It’s the ‘we’ that creates a school of thought, a movement, a network, a culture.
Curate, connect, organize and lead. Who better than you?
PS launched yesterday, a GOODBIDS auction for a very rare signed first edition of a nationwide bestseller.
A rare signed first edition of Remarkably Bright Creatures. A beloved bestseller, this one is signed by the author with a doodle of the novel’s star.
Every competitor faces pressure, and it varies by industry, consumer/investor segment and geography. This applies to services, products, ideas, organizations, jobs… whenever there’s a choice and a market. The pressure might push you to be:
Cheaper
Simpler
Dumber
More short term
Easier
Coarse
More convenient
Hyped
But it’s also possible to choose a marketplace that rewards:
Durability
Difficulty
Elegant design
Resilience
Thoughtfulness
Higher performance and efficiency
Patience
A real challenge is in trying to bring the desires of one segment to the other. That’s difficult indeed.
I’ve heard this from presidential candidates, from small business leaders and nonprofits as well. It’s easy to believe that the goal of marketing is to shout, hype, hustle and otherwise promote.
It’s tempting to focus on your story as the top of the pyramid, and decide that your work is to share that story to everyone downstream, downwind or near you.
Hire a PR firm, run some ads, post more on social media and hype and hustle. After all, it’s important.
But that’s not how the world works, and it hasn’t worked that way since network TV started to fade a few decades ago.
Ideas that spread win. Horizontally, not from the rooftops.
When we build something that our users want to talk about, remarkable happens. Remarkable means worth making a remark about.
This is the engine that GOODBIDS is built for. A nonprofit uses the permission asset they’ve built with their existing donors to let them know about an auction. That’s anticipated, personal and relevant, and backers are delighted to hear about it.
And then what happens?
If the auction is interesting to friends or colleagues, the supporters happily tell the others about it. They do it to earn free bids, or they do it to help a cause they care about, or they do it because spreading the word about something interesting, worthwhile or fun feels good.
In the last four days, GOODBIDS users have shared our initial auctions with tens of thousands of people… not because someone made them do it, but because they wanted to.
Today’s auctions:
An official NASA Apollo 11 shoulder patch, identical to the one that Armstrong wore on the moon. It comes with a signed, limited edition of David Meerman Scott‘s brilliant book on the marketing of the race to the moon.
It also comes with a letter of authenticity. The patch is untouched, unflown and uncut. It will make your heart race and remind you of just how much we’re capable of when we work together with focus. Meeting Neil years ago made me cry, and I hope you’ll check this one out.
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