EMBA的小眼睛

The whiner's room

The decline of fascination and the rise in ennui

The biggest, best-funded non profits have an obligation to be leaders in innovation, but sometimes they hesitate.

One reason: "We're doing important work. Our funders count on us to be reasonable and cautious and proven, because the work we're doing is too important to risk failure."

One alternative: "We're doing important work. Our funders count on us to be daring and bold and brave, because the work we're doing is too important to play it safe."

The thing about most cause/welfare non-profits is that they haven't figured out how to solve the problem they're working on (yet). Yes, they are often offer effective aid, or a palliative. But no, too many don't have a method for getting at the root cause of the problem and creating permanent change. That's because it's hard (incredibly hard) to solve these problems.

The magic of their status is that no one is expecting a check back, or a quarterly dividend. They're expecting a new, insightful method that will solve the problem once and for all.

If we define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance, we can also understand its antonym, anticipation.

When you work with anticipation, you will highlight the highs. You'll double down on the things that will delight and push yourself even harder to be bold and to create your version of art. If this is going to work, might as well build something that's going to be truly worth building.

If you work with anxiety, on the other hand, you'll be covering the possible lost bets, you'll be insuring against disaster and most of all, building deniability into everything you do. When you work under the cloud of anxiety, the best strategy is to play it safe, because if (when!) it fails, you'll be blameless.

Not only is it more fun to work with anticipation, it's often a self-fulfilling point of view.
 http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/

Avoiding the false proxy trap

Most advice is bad advice...
People mean well, especially friends and family, but they're going to give you bad advice.

This leads to two challenges as you strive to create original work that matters:

1. Ignore their advice, even the well-meant entreaties that you stick with the status quo

and

A graduate seminar is going on, with a dozen students paying a fortune to fill seats that are in high demand. Some of the students are using cell phones to update Facebook or tweet--and they are sitting right next to students listening intently and not merely taking notes. This juxtaposition puts a very sharp point on an overlooked distinction: some forms of media we engage with because there's a significant utlity, and sometimes, we're merely entertaining ourselves.

Every student in the lecture makes a choice in each moment--to be entertained and be in sync with the crowd online, or to find utility, by doing the more difficult work of focusing on something that only pays off in the long run.

And if that was the end of it, caveat emptor. But it's not, because media consumed doesn't merely have an impact on the consumer.

Media, of course, has morphed and expanded, and the change is accelerating. It has grown in both time spent and impact on us. Now, media consumption changes just about everything in our lives, all day long. While a century ago, a few minutes a day might have been spent with a newspaper or reading a letter, today, it's not unusual for every minute of the day to involve consuming or creating media (or dealing with the repercussions of that). Media doesn't just change what we focus on, it changes the culture it is part of.

I think we can agree that sending animated gifs or wasting an hour with the Jersey Shore have no utility, really, other than as a pasttime. Court TV didn't make us smarter, it just wasted our time and attention. At the other extreme is learning a difficult new skill or attending an essential meeting, bringing full attention to something that doesn't always delight or tantalize. Or consider the difference between viewing politics as a sporting event with winners and losers each day, compared with the difficult work of digging in and actually understanding (and participating in) what's being discussed...

Ten years ago, in Purple Cow, I argued that in a media-saturated marketplace, there was no room for average products for average people to gain the same foothold that they used to. Merely pushing an idea via relentless ad spend is no longer sufficient. The alternative: remarkable products and services, where 'remarkable' means something that someone is making a remark about.

When someone remarks on what you're doing, the word spreads, replacing the predictable and expensive Mad-Men strategy of advertising with the unpredictable but potentially magical effect of significant word of mouth--ideas that spread win.

But what makes something remarkable?

Last month, I self-published an 800-page, 19-pound book, a book big enough to kill a small mammal if misused. It's not for sale, but those that received a copy via Kickstarter have postedabout it, talked about it and even made videos.

The nicest thing anyone told me was that it was, "ridiculous."

Hits are more valuable than ever, mostly because they're more rare than ever.

The Zipf Distribution, also described in Chris Anderson's Long Tail, helps us understand just how valuable hits can be.

A bestselling book/record/movie/consultant/tech startup might make a thousand times more profit than one that's only seventy or eighty rungs lower on the bestseller list.

Simple example: In 2010, Toy Story 3 took in more than $400,000,000 at the US box office, turning a profit of more than a quarter of a billion dollars, while just about every one of the thousand movies below #80 on the list lost money.

While this makes it clear that there's a huge reward to being seen as the one, the best in your field, the current sensation, it also gives us a chance to wonder about how important it is to invest in dressing up your work with the trappings of the inevitable winner. Not for nothing did Toy Story 3 sell more tickets in the first 48 hours than just about any other movie did over its entire run... that's the result of expectation, distribution and marketing, not just in being good.

Beggars can't be choosers
If you'd rather be a chooser, enter a market or a transaction where you have something to trade, something of value, something to offer that's difficult to get everywhere else.

If all you have is the desire to get picked, that's not sufficient.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/12/beggars-cant-be-choosers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

Bigger vs. better

It's not always one or the other, but sometimes the trade-off is unavoidable. It's clear that more is not always compatible with our other goals.

Like most choices, this one usually works better if you make it on purpose.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/12/bigger-vs-better.html

Empathy takes effort

When we extend our heart, our soul and our feelings to another, when we imagine what it must be like to be them, we expose ourselves to risk. The risk of feeling bruised, or of losing our ability to see the world from just one crisp and certain point of view.

It's easier to walk on by, to compartmentalize and to isolate ourselves. Easier, but not worth it.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/12/empathy-takes-effort.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

London, Boston and sharing your art (plus the new iphone app, it's free)
Tickets just went on sale for the Icarus event in London, organized by Penguin UK. It's during the evening on the 17th of January. I'll be talking about, reading from and doing Q&A about The Icarus Deception. You can get tickets here.

Also, tickets are now available for the Boston session on January 23rd at MIT. Find out more here.

All the early bird tickets for New York on January 2nd are gone, but there are still some other tickets remaining.

We now have more than 250 locations around the world established for the Icarus Sessions on the evening of January 2. Please find your city by clicking here. You can read about how it works right here. A few things to clarify:

Agency is the ability to make a decision, and to be responsible for the decision you make.

Since there have been armies, society has made an exception for soldiers. A soldier following orders is not a murderer, as he doesn't have agency--society doesn't generally want its soldiers questioning orders from our generals.

But the industrial age has taken this absolution to ever-higher heights. Every worker in every job is given a pass, because he's just doing his job. The cigarette marketer or the foreman in the low-wage sweatshop... they're just doing their jobs.

This free pass is something that makes the industrial economy so attractive to many people. They've been raised to want someone else to be responsible for the what and the how, and they'd just like a job, thanks very much.

As the industrial company sputters and fades, there's a fork in the road. In one direction lies the opportunity to regain agency, to take responsibility for ever more of our actions and their effects. In the other direction is the race to the bottom, and the dehumanizing process of more compliance, a cog in an uncaring system.

Association

"This is the best I can do"

Accepting small promises

The bell curve is moving (mass geekery)

What are professional reviews for?

Freedom in a digital world

For a long time, there was alignment between what we wanted when it came to privacy and what was possible for the government to do. We relished our privacy and got used to the freedom to act anonymously at the same time that the government and marketers really couldn't keep track even if they wanted to.

In the pre-internet world, there was just no way to imagine a useful database of every citizen's fingerprints. The thought that a store would know every item you've ever purchased (and not just at their store) was crazy. Freedom from intrusion existed largely because the alternative was impossible.

Today, of course, we know that we can sequence the DNA of every resident and put it in a database. We can install so many cameras in a city that just about every corner is under surveillance. We can even wire cars so that they give themselves tickets when the driver is speeding. And yes, marketers already know about which websites you've visited recently.

Which leads to a series of questions that we're not asking.