Seth Godin's Blog, page 25

If what you’re doing isn’t working

Perhaps it’s time to do something else.

Not a new job, or a new city, but perhaps a different story.

A story about possibility and sufficiency. A story about connection and trust. A story about for and with, instead of at or to.

Bootstrapping your way to a new story about the world around you is one of the most difficult things you’ll ever do. Our current story was built piecemeal, over time, the result of vivid interactions and hard-fought lessons.

But if that story isn’t getting you where you need to go, then what’s it for?

It’s entirely possible that the story we tell ourselves all day every day is true and accurate and useful, the very best representation of the world as it actually is.

It’s possible, but vanishingly unlikely.

What if we search for a useful story instead? A story that helps us cause the change we seek to make in the world, and to feel good doing it.

If you can’t solo bootstrap it, get some help to install a new story. It’s worth it.

            

Understanding random testing

There are two good reasons to do random testing.

The first is that you’re working with a homogenous or expected distribution, and the cost of letting something defective slip through is pretty low. For example, the chef doesn’t have to taste every single serving before it leaves the kitchen. Quality manufacturing is based on the efficient use of random testing to be sure that each batch is expected to be within tolerance. It works as long as the thing being tested isn’t itself widely variable. If it is, you’ll need to test every single unit.

The second is that you’re trying to send a message to alter people’s behavior. Drug testing or tax audits are examples of this. You can’t test everyone, but you make it clear that there’s a non-zero chance that someone who is outside the rules will get caught.

We do random testing all the time without realizing it. That’s probably a mistake–we should either test every unit (when the stakes are high or when outcomes are unpredictable) or we should trust our people and our systems enough to test very rarely.

It doesn’t make sense to set up a random speed trap. Either measure the speed of every car or measure the speed of none of them.

Sending a message through testing and draconian punishment might make good security theatre, but it’s a waste of time and trust.

            

Who cares?

On almost every issue that divides the electorate (in the US and abroad), the group that gets out the vote will win.

In most elections, the more some candidates spend, the more disillusioned the electorate becomes. The goal is to keep the opponent’s supporters from caring enough to vote.

These are not unrelated facts.

We’re being played, manipulated and pushed around. It’s important to not fall for it.

Here’s the simple math:

If you’re tempted to not vote because of the vitriol or the imperfect nature of the choices, then you’re supporting a downward cycle, in which the candidate who best suppresses voter turnout of the opponent’s backers wins.

On the other hand, if you always vote for the least-bad option, then a forward cycle will kick in, in which candidates (and their consultants and backers, who are also causing this problem) will realize that always being a little less bad than the other guy is a winning strategy. Which leads to a virtuous cycle in the right direction.

Don’t get tricked. Show up.

            

The steering wheel and the guardrails

Your car may have a powerful engine, but if the steering wheel is out of whack, it’s probably a mistake to simply drive faster. And putting in premium gas and removing the muffler doesn’t help much either.

And if you’re driving on a crowded road, it makes no sense to hit the gas and tell anyone who gets hit to be more careful.

We don’t have to wait for a wreck, a smashed engine, to put our tools to better use.

Capitalism is an extraordinary engine. It has remade every corner of the Earth, and done it in the course of two or three lifetimes. Together with its cousins, technology and industrialism, capitalism is an evolving system that changes whatever it touches.

But the purpose of our society isn’t to optimize capitalism. The purpose of capitalism is to allow our society to become better. A culture that opens doors for and nurtures the people we care about.

The issues of our time are education, corruption, access, infrastructure, civility and the downstream effects of the work we do.

Investing in guardrails and fixing the steering doesn’t deny the power of capitalism. It puts it to better use.

 

[An aside: Kevin Kelly points us to GeoGuessr, which is a superfun Google Maps game, one that I spent two hours on yesterday–it would be great if every sixth grader got good at it. One thing I noticed is how much most of the world looks alike now–one of the plus/minus side effects of the paving/cultural spread/commercial shift of the last fifty years.]

            

Persistence vs. consistent

Persistence is sort of annoying.

Consistency, on the other hand, is the happy twin brother of persistence.

Consistent with your statements, consistent in the content you create, consistent in the way you chip away at the problem you’re seeking to solve.

Persistence can be selfish, but consistency is generous.

And the best thing is that you only have to make the choice to be consistent once. After that, it’s simply a matter of keeping your promise.

            

A note from 2030

Twelve years from now, your future self is going to thank you for something you did today, for an asset you began to build, a habit you formed, a seed you planted.

Even if you’re not sure of where it will lead, today’s the day to begin.

            

Hiding in plain sight

The answer to your quandary is right there, in front of you.

It’s just that it involves more work, more risk or more trade-offs than you were hoping for.

            

Quality and effort

It seems as though the opposite of “careless” ought to be “careful.” That the best way to avoid avoidable errors is to try harder, to put more care into the work.

This means that if surgeons were more careful, there would be fewer errors. And that so many of the mistakes that mess things up would go away if people just tried harder.

And this is true. For a while. But then, it’s not effort but systems that matter.

Years ago, I created a trivia game for Prodigy. The first batch of 1,000 questions was 97% perfect. Which is fine, until you realize that this meant that 30 questions had an error. And every error ruined the experience for the user.

The second batch, we tried extra hard. Really hard. Our backs were against the wall and we couldn’t afford any errors. Our effort paid off in a 50% decrease in errors. We were down to 1.5%. Alas, that’s still 15 game breakers.

Then, I got smart and I changed the system. Instead of having trivia writers work really hard to avoid mistakes, we divided our team in half. Half the team used the encyclopedia (yes, it was a long time ago) to write the questions, and they made a photocopy of the source, along with the question, and put it in a notebook.

The other half of the team got the notebook and was charged with answering the question based on the source. They got a bonus of $20 for every question they found where their answer was more correct than the original.

The result of the new system? Zero error for the next 5,000 questions.

We need to put care into our systems. We need to build checklists and peer review and resilience into the way we express our carefulness. It seems ridiculous that a surgeon needs to write her name (with a Sharpie) on the limb that she’s about to operate on, but this simple system adjustment means that errors involving working on the wrong limb will go to zero.

In school, we harangue kids to be more careful, and spend approximately zero time teaching them to build better systems instead. We ignore checklists and processes because we’ve been taught that they’re beneath us.

Instead of reacting to an error with, “I need to be more careful,” we can respond with, “I can build a better system.”

If it matters enough to be careful, it matters enough to build a system around it.

            

The first 1,000 are the most difficult

For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.

A collection of daily bloggers I follow have passed 1,000 posts (it only takes three years or so…). Fortunately, there are thousands of generous folks who have been posting their non-commercial blogs regularly, and it’s a habit that produces magic.

Sasha, Gabe, Fred, Bernadette and Rohan add value to their readers every day, and I’m lucky to be able to read them. (I’m leaving many out, sorry!) You’ll probably get something out of reading the work of these generous folks, which is a fabulous side effect, one that pays huge dividends to masses of strangers, which is part of the magic of digital connection.

What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it. Give it a try for three or four months and see what happens…

            

Just because you don’t understand it

…doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

…doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

If we spend our days ignoring the things we don’t understand (because they must not be true and they must not be important) all we’re left with is explored territory with little chance of improvement.