Seth Godin's Blog, page 139

Unconscious consumption

Black Friday, of course, is a con.

But it's also a symptom of a terrible trap we've set for ourselves.

Consider the joy a little kid has the first time he spends his own money to buy an ice cream cone. This isn't something he does every day, it's not something he has to do, it's not something he's trying to get over with. Instead, the entire process unrolls in slow motion. It's consumption, no doubt about it, the last step in a long industrial/agricultural/marketing system. But at least this last step is special beyond words.

Now, consider the mall. The mall, today.

For the three billion people on Earth who have never experienced air conditioning, window displays and the extraordinary safety and wealth that the mall represents, a trip to the mall is mindblowing. For the typical consumer, egged on by a media frenzy and harried by a completely invented agenda, today is nothing but a hassle.

All that time, all that money, all those emotions spent for not one good reason.

It's more about what you didn't get on sale, or how many more people you need to "cross off" or just how much shiny but useless stuff you can grab faster than the next person. A reversal of 100,000 years of not enough to a brief few decades of more, more, more.

Every person reading this today has access to more wealth than the last King of France did. An astounding array of choices, a bounty of available connections and emotions.

Don't let someone else scam you into being unhappy.

            

The vulnerability of 'thank you'

Thank you as in: I couldn't do it without you. As in: I don't want to do this alone. As in: I was afraid. And mostly: I would miss you if you were gone.

Thank you brings us closer together.

Thank you is a limb worth going out on.

            

The end of the future is premature

Twenty years ago, when I was working on projects with AOL, we were sure that this was the next big thing for a long time to come. It was a profitable natural monopoly, one that could expand to serve everyone's needs. They were the end of the future of the Internet.

When one surveyed people in 1996, most thought AOL = The Internet. They were the same thing, game over.

Then, of course, just four years later, Yahoo cornered the market. It was where everyone started their internet experience. All you needed. That didn't last more than a decade.

We have similar conversations about the form factor and platform of the iPhone. And Facebook, of course, will be the way generations connect online... it's hard to imagine the next thing.

Until it's here.

As far as I can tell, there's always a next thing.

[Even better, it turns out that this thing, the thing we have now, is worth working with, because it offers so many opportunities compared with merely waiting for the next thing.]

            

All cases are special cases

The art of the successful institution is figuring out which cases are special enough to deserve a fresh eye.

It's virtually impossible to scale an institution that insists on making a new decision every time it encounters a new individual. On the other hand, what makes a bureaucracy stupid is its insistence that there are no special cases.

They're all special. The difficult work at scale is figuring out which ones are special enough.

And, if you want to be seen and respected and sought out as the anti-bureaucracy, there's your strategy: All cases are special cases.

Good judgment, it turns out, is very difficult to boil down to a few pages in a rulebook.

            

Thanksgiving reminder

Today's a good day to download The Thanksgiving Reader. It's free to share, of course.

We're gratified at the huge number of families that have already downloaded and printed a copy. And the creative ways people are choosing to share it. A school in California printed a copy for each of their staff, and distributed them in beautiful folios. 

If each of us shares it with ten people this week, we'll have created a new tradition.

Have a wonderful holiday.

            

Is productive the same as busy?

No one complains of having spent an entire day doing 'productive work'. Busywork, on the other hand, is mindnumbing.

It's possible that if you have a job where your tasks (your busy-ness) is programmed by someone else, that being busy is your job.

For everyone else, though, busy might be precisely the opposite of productive.

Maybe the best exhortation isn't to, "get busy."

Instead, perhaps it involves slowing down enough to feel the fear. The fear that we might only hear in the quiet moments, in the gaps between crises.

The fear is a necessary part of actually being productive in doing creative work.

            

Did you do the reading?

It's absurd to think of going to a book group meeting and opining about a book you didn't even read.

More rude: Going to a PhD seminar and participating in the discussion without reading the book first.

And of course, no one wants a surgeon operating on them if she hasn't read the latest journal article on this particular procedure.

It makes no sense to me to vote for a candidate who doesn't care enough to have read (and understood) the history of those that came before.

A first hurdle: Are you aware of what the reading (your reading) must include? What's on the list? The more professional your field, the more likely it is that people know what's on the list.

The reading isn't merely a book, of course. The reading is what we call it when you do the difficult work of learning to think with the best, to stay caught up, to understand.

The reading exposes you to the state of the art. The reading helps you follow a thought-through line of reasoning and agree, or even better, challenge it. The reading takes effort.

If you haven't done the reading, why expect to be treated as a professional?

            

A reason persuasion is surprisingly difficult

Each of us understands that different people are swayed by different sorts of arguments, based on different ways of viewing the world. That seems sort of obvious. A toddler might want an orange juice because it's sweet, not because she's trying to avoid scurvy, which might be the argument that moves an intellectual but vitamin-starved sailor to take action.

So far, so good.

The difficult part is this: Even when people making an argument know this, they don't like making an argument that appeals to the other person's alternative worldview.

Worth a full stop here. Even when people have an argument about a political action they want someone else to adopt, or a product they want them to buy, they hesitate to make that argument with empathy. Instead, they default to talking about why they believe it.

To many people, it feels manipulative or insincere or even morally wrong to momentarily take the other person's point of view when trying to advance an argument that we already believe in.

And that's one reason why so many people claim to not like engaging in marketing. Marketing is the empathetic act of telling a story that works, that's true for the person hearing it, that stands up to scrutiny. But marketing is not about merely sharing what you, the marketer believes. It's about what we, the listener, believe.

More on this here.

            

Yes, in my backyard

The opposite of NIMBY, the opposite of isolation.

Building a fortress is expensive. It cripples your tribe. And it won’t work.

Modern fortresses amplify fear, destroy the value that's at the heart of the connection economy, and don't actually pay off. It's far more valuable to live in a community of hard-working, trustworthy refugees and (former) strangers than it is to become isolated.

To be clear, the threat might be real. And the fear certainly is. That's not in question. The question is: What to do about our fear?

Let’s begin with this: In the long run (and the long run keeps getting shorter), even the biggest fortress can’t keep ideas out. Ideas move at the speed of light now, and they don’t need a carrier pigeon or an infiltrator to carry them. It's okay to detest an idea, but it's foolish to build a wall to protect against it.

Even though this is clearly and demonstrably true, fearful leaders want to do more inspections, insist on more pat downs, build bigger walls. Walls that won’t keep ideas out. 

And building a fortress cripples us. It turns people into spies and informants. And spies and informants are so busy being afraid that they fail to actually build anything of value. Not to mention that doing the right thing, doing it in a way we're proud of, is part of who we are, all of us.

Human beings thrive on the quest for total control, for a day that feels like it's up to us. That quest is compelling, but it turns out that we're in danger of building a world where the fruitless search for control is undermining the future we hope to create.

Remember the St. Louis.

            

Your big break

...isn't.

Your big break might be a break, but in the long run, it's certainly not big.

Breaks give us a chance to do more work, to continue showing up, to move a bit further down the road.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it, "your big new start."

The most important lesson is this: If you spend too much time looking for your next big break, you'll be stealing your opportunity to do your best work. Which is the the most important break of all.