Seth Godin's Blog, page 52

Rubbernecking

A traffic jam can teach us quite a lot about human nature.

In the US, when there's an accident on the side of the road, traffic in the other direction slows down. People voluntarily slow down and look over at the carnage.

This is nuts.

These very same people would never pay money to go to a movie filled with car wrecks that hurt real people. And yet, they do it from their car. It turns out we're very interested in things that are happening in real time, right next to us.

Not only that, but the jam created by this voluntarily slowdown can last for an hour or more. And yet, when it's your turn, when you get to the front of the line, instead of saying, "well, I got punished for the bad behavior of the 1,000 people ahead of me, I'm going to fix that and speed up now," we say, "hey, I paid my dues, my turn to look..."

And of course, the nature of variance means that human-controlled cars on the highway have to go much slower when they are closer together. And so the slowdown ripples backwards, because instead of leaving plenty of space so that they can all speed up quickly, we inch together, ensuring that the jam will take even longer.

Every time you think that the human beings you seek to serve are rational, profit-seeking, long-term decision makers, visualize a rubbernecking traffic jam.

            

Your kitchen table

You open the door and the vacuum cleaner salesperson comes in, and dumps a bag of trash in your living room.

Or a neighbor sneaks in the back door and uses a knife to put gouges on the kitchen table.

Or, through the window, someone starts spraying acid all over your bookshelf...

Why are you letting these folks into your house?

Your laptop and your phone work the same way. The reviews and the comments and the breaking news and the texts that you read are all coming directly into the place you live. If they're not making things better, why let them in?

No need to do it to yourself, no need to let others do it either.

            

Clark Kent's shoes

Back when Superman used to change into his outfit in a phone booth, the question was: where does he put Clark's shoes? Because even if he could compress them with his super strength, they'd be ruined.

Organizations that need to adopt different personas often get into trouble.

Consider ConEdison, which is completely failing here in NY during the recent storms (and of course, it's nothing compared to what people in Puerto Rico or other parts of the world have gone through).

On one hand, most of the time, they're invisible. They're a boring bureaucracy, optimized for stable jobs, predictable if not low-cost processes, mediocre customer service and average (or below average) user interface design. They're a monopoly and they act like one.

But then, when things break, they're expected to act like heroes, like people who truly care. They are expected to hustle, to find the edge of the performance curve, to really step up.

Unfortunately, their shoes don't compress very well.

We know it can be done. We see heroic organizations do great work. But ConEd doesn't.

John McAvoy, the CEO, is probably pretty good at steering a boring monopoly. I have no clue. But he hasn't built much in the way of heroic response capability. And every time something breaks, that becomes obvious. 

Small businesses sometimes wrestle with the opposite. They get their accounts by acting like heroes, performing miracles on an emergency basis. But when it comes time to regularly do the work, to show up and show up and show up, they don't have the resources or the patience to do so.

The opportunity is to choose. To truly embrace one and buy precisely the right kind of shoes.

The alternative is to invest the resources to have two teams that can do one or the other. And to tolerate the fact that when the other team is working, you're not at maximum efficiency.

Systems are a miracle. Until we try to force a system that's good at one thing to do another.

Then we just ruin our shoes and end up annoying everyone who trusted us.

(PS comic book geeks will recall that Clark's shoes were made out of a special kind of miracle foam that looked just like a boring Florsheim brogue but could be compressed into a really small ball. And of course, there's no such thing available to the general non-superhero management class, sorry).

            

In defense of redundancy

Saying it twice isn't a moral failing.

Repeating yourself, doing it in different ways, is a useful response to the distractions, browsing and scanning that your audience is hooked on.

It's not your fault that the world is cluttered and filled with distractions. If it's important, it's worth saying twice. 

PS new Akimbo episode today is about writer's block.

            

A flag or a constitution?

A flag is a signal. It's vivid, abstract and it represents memories and expectations.

A constitution is studied, dissected, challenged, amended, fought over. 

That next thing you're working on as you build your culture, your practice, your brand, which is it?

No sense arguing over the design of your flag. Better to focus on what it stands for instead.

            

The Bannister Method

Roger Bannister did something that many people had said was impossible.

He ran a mile in less than four minutes.

The thing is, he didn't accomplish this by running a mile as fast as he could.

He did it by setting out to run a mile in one second faster than four minutes.

Bannister analyzed the run, stride by stride. He knew how long each split needed to be. He had colleagues work in a relay, pacing him on each and every section of the mile.

He did something impossible, but he did it by creating a series of possible steps.

It's easy to get hung up on, "as possible." As fast, as big, as much, as cheap, as small... 

The Bannister Method is to obsess about "enough" instead.

            

Why is this interesting?

Interesting non-fiction often falls into one of three categories:

a. It's interesting because it's by or about a celebrity. People Magazine and various autobiographies appeal because they offer an intimate glimpse into someone you were already interested in. This is a lot of the appeal of social networks--famous to the family, telling their story.

b. It's interesting because an unlikely thing actually happened to a real person. Books about climbing Everest, starting a company or surviving drug dependency or a dysfunctional upbringing work because they happened to someone else, and we want to watch or vicariously experience what happened.

c. It's interesting because it's about us, the reader. These are books or blogs that offer a path forward, that talk about part of the human condition that you're currently experiencing, that offer solace or guidance or insight about what's happening and what's next.

We're all writers now. What makes you interesting?

            

Is snacking learning?

Why does a class last an hour? Why does a TED talk last 18 minutes? Why does an MBA take two years?

Could it be that the default lesson length has something to do with the cost of switching rooms, which makes it inefficient to have really short lessons? Or the high cost of physical space, which makes it expensive to have really long ones... Perhaps length is a function of switching costs and bureaucracy structure...

One side effect of the low switching costs and high availability of choice on the web is that people are discovering things in 600-second bursts. 

What would happen if we started to do this on purpose? Learn a math lesson, understand a social history movement, learn something about human nature, five minutes have gone by...

Or what if we chose to dive in really deep, deeper than the real world would ordinarily tolerate. Five hours on a topic that might only get three minutes on a typical curriculum... or a month-long interactive seminar designed to teach something that's almost never taught.

I don't think learning is defined by a building or a certificate. It's defined by a posture, a mindset and actions taken.

It's still early days in figuring out the best way to transfer knowledge. The length of a class ought not to be set in stone. (For the very same reason that meetings at work should never last an hour).

            

Delighting in sacrifice

In an instant-on, one-click shopping universe, the idea of sacrifice is pretty alien. When the world might end tomorrow, when you can get what you want now, when debt is easier than ever to go into, why even consider sacrifice?

Because it's the single best way to achieve your goals. Satisfaction now almost always decreases the reserves we have to build an asset for later. Investing in something worth building always requires you to avoid getting what you want today. Sacrifice might mean giving up an expenditure, but it can also be the bold step of having a difficult conversation now instead of later.

Regardless of the goal, sacrifices make it more likely that you'll get there.

The journey toward that worthy goal, though, is a key part of the goal itself. We are never certain we'll reach our goal, one significant reason that so few people persist. But if the journey involves sacrifice, we're paying for that goal, the goal we're never sure to reach, every day.

Hence delight.

The act of sacrifice, of foregoing one thing in our journey toward another one, one more generous, virtuous and useful, is actually a little piece of the satisfaction of the goal itself.

If it comes easy, it's not the same.

            

Bonnie's rules for being a better client

White space is your friend

No, you can't watch us work

Be open to things you didn't imagine

Be confident, not arrogant

Nothing takes a second

Don't be rude

Tell me the problem, not the solution

Decide who will decide

Have clarity of purpose

 

Bonnie Siegler has more than 60 in her delightful new book.