When your project, proposal or resume is rejected, it’s tempting to try to understand why. Scrutinize the rejection letter and turn the short sentence into a paragraph or an essay, then play it over and over in your search for how to do better next time. If you can simply answer this rejection, next time […]

Keith Jarrett on improvisation. When the artist is creating in real time, in conjunction with the witnesses in the room, “performance” goes away. It’s creation. Improvisation is a privilege, a chance to create without a guarantee.

There’s a village in Luxembourg that’s right outside the main metropolis. A farmer often ties up a donkey to the little bridge leading to town. The juxtaposition of international digital trading and donkeys is a reminder that as fast as the future arrives, the past also sticks around. We can measure the distance not just […]

You’re not a crow, neither is your project. To get from a village in rural France to Los Angeles, the trip to London might be a tiny fraction of the distance from London to LA, but it takes more than half the time. It’s easy to imagine that every step in our journey proceeds at […]

Is this where books go to die? There are about 7500 public libraries in the US, and until recently, more than a third of their transactions were for DVDs. What’s a library for? The media has changed, our needs have changed, but the dynamics of funding, architecture and expectation have largely remained the same. The […]

They’re often out of whack. A Hard Day’s Night took less than 15 hours from idea to finished record. More Than a Feeling, from Tom Scholz and Boston, took five years. Each pleased their audiences. One is not 1,500 times more valuable than the other. Sometimes, work that requires effort leads to scarcity, and that […]

People lie. They lie in focus groups, they lie on surveys and they lie to themselves. Culture can be seen as an organized lying function. Be aware of what other people are thinking and make choices about your preferences so you can fit in. Without this effect, we wouldn’t have trends, fads or hits. Part […]

It doesn’t have to be well-crafted, historically important or aesthetically unique. It simply needs to be famous. Celebrity art is famous, with a story and thus emotional resonance. It’s a souvenir for our eyes, a chance to have proximity without ownership. It conflates familiarity with scarcity, the power of in-person experience with the context of […]

“Working in the studio is like building a ship in a bottle. Playing live is like being on a rowboat in the ocean.” Jerry Garcia You probably need some studio time, but you definitely need to play live.

What if they meant it? What if your return felt special to the people behind the counter? What if they knew, without looking it up, or being told–what if they knew that you were here, again, a vote of trust and confidence. Returning home is one of the oldest human desires. It’s a feeling that […]

We transferred an idea from engineering to culture, but it’s incomplete. If you build a watch that doesn’t tell time, it’s fair to say it doesn’t work. But when a critic says, “that joke didn’t work,” after seeing a comic perform to a raucous audience, what they probably mean is, “that didn’t work for me.” […]

“How few people can we get away with?” That’s a question many bosses think hard about. Automate. Streamline. Improve productivity and take humans out of as many tasks as possible. It’s a time-tested way to create profits and to increase a certain kind of reliability. Claude Code is popular with many organizations for precisely this […]

We work so hard to have freedom and leverage and choice. And then, as soon as a social network, boss or cultural force instructs us to do something, we fold our tents and go along. Responsibility is scary. Sometimes it’s easier to find someone (or something) to blame. Just because AI tells you to put […]

When new creation technologies arrive, they make the best a little worse and the bad a lot better. Desktop publishing made every local garage sale sign a lot more legible, but can’t quite replace the hand-kerned and tweaked typography of the era before. A smartphone in your pocket takes far better video of the family […]

Organizations thrive on incremental improvement. They find a stable foundation and then build a feedback loop of relentless improvement. This leads to great efficiency, higher productivity and more profits. It enables more throughput and builds market share. Except things change. Optimized offerings are brittle. When the foundation shifts, all of that incremental improvement breaks into […]

For generations, the rules of Lego were simple: many pieces, all able to connect in many ways, led to many outcomes. That almost drove the company into bankruptcy, though. Lego kits saved the business. Each kit has just one way to do the work, follow the instructions carefully. Industrial indoctrination in a box. While it […]

Built into the concept of “interesting” is the unexplored. The temptation of discovery and the new. And so, by definition, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, it’s likely that there is something more interesting somewhere else. The people at the next table may be talking about something more fascinating than your date is… the only […]

Nailing it in the first take is a sign of preparation and professionalism. No need for two tries if you are clear about what you’re doing and how. The next take is where hope lies. This one was pretty good, but next time, we’ll bring it. And the last take is good enough. That’s why […]

One of the best traditional bakeries in New York has a kitchen you can see from the counter. People wait in line for their handmade French baguettes, and the confirmation that they were made right here and right now is reassuring. I noticed that the baker was using a mechanical gadget called a loader. It […]

Compared to what? 98% of the time, the state champ loses at nationals. Every billionaire but one isn’t the richest person in the world. Only one of the 300 people who direct a feature film each year will win an Academy Award. And only one public company has the greatest share price growth. Competition is […]

It’s a dance between workers, bosses and the market. The most stable quadrant happens when a thoughtful and consistent boss hires the right person, pays them fairly, creates positive working conditions and useful training. In return, the company gets extraordinary performance. That’s someone doing a good job who also has a good job. A particularly […]

Hank Green has an interesting take on the scientific method: We advance because scientists work to persuade others that they’re correct. Every paper, statistical analysis and experiment is nothing but an argument designed to persuade an intelligent critic. The method of argument is determined by the audience–if they require double-blind studies and useful statistical models, […]

The folks at TryAI put Fable to the test in directing a music video. The AI glitches show up from the start and continue. But it’s even more unsettling than this. When AI tries to create and direct joyous human dancing, it fails. The dancers look like retired accountants at a wedding. The stiff awkwardness […]

The nearest lightning was 1,200 miles away. At least that’s what the weather site reported. When lightning is that unlikely, we don’t worry about it much. It turns out that this is the best time to install a lightning arrestor on your home, though. The urgency of the moment might be the push we need […]

There are lots of things you can do, but it’s not clear you should. OpenAI has virtually unlimited resources. And in addition to building a chat-based AI, they chose to launch pretty good image generation, a basketball, a meme video generator (since cancelled), an upcoming speaker that actually moves around your house, and a myriad […]

The right words in the right sequence create information. Ideas that change our world. The first kind of word salad allows the writer to hide. Fancy words, carefully juxtaposed, saying nothing. This can serve a valuable function for politicians, academics and bosses–but there’s no real information for the reader. It’s simply a collection of words […]

Even though it’s invisible, easily transported and weightless, software used to stick around. It took years to architect and build a complex bit of software, and thousands of people to help maintain it. Even a complex website could be seen as a durable technical asset. Now, with Claude Code on everyone’s desk, new software is […]

The meeting is now broken. Even if you were actually engaging with the attendees before, it’s over. You took a new medium and stuffed an old one into it, changed the dynamic and ruined it. Zoom is a device that eliminates physical distance and enables a synchronized conversation. Interactions in real time. In particular, groups […]

When we upgrade something in our lives, the thing we used to be satisfied with is no longer satisfying. That’s the nature of an upgrade. After a certain point, the only thing we’re buying is the way the upgrade makes us feel in the moment, not our satisfaction going forward. Stereos, salt, art on the […]

This is a useful term. It helps us understand a topic or theory that can be considered from multiple points of view by people engaging with good intent. “Pluto is a planet” was a controversial statement among some people who study the solar system. On the other hand, it’s not controversial that Pluto actually exists. […]