| 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.
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- Last Modified: 2012-12-15 04:32:00
| 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
2. Try to discern the actually useful good advice, so you don't insulate yourself in the bubble of the self-deluded. In general, this good advice pushes you to go faster, or to do things that make you uncomfortable.
PS the irony of this post is not lost on me.
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- Last Modified: 2012-12-14 04:46:00
| Apple's naming approach is inconsistent, it begs for lawsuits (offensive and defensive) and it shouldn't be the model for your organization. iPhone is a phone, iPad is a pad, iPod is a ... (and owning a letter of the alphabet is i-mpossible).
Procter and Gamble, on the other hand, has been doing it beautifully for a hundred years. Crisco, Tide, Pringles, Bounty, Duracell--these are fanciful names that turn the generic product (and the story we believe about it) into something distinct.
If you can invent an entire category, fabulous, that's an |
- Last Modified: 2012-12-13 04:51:00
| 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 th |
- Last Modified: 2012-12-12 04:20:00
| 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.
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- Last Modified: 2012-12-11 04:27:00
| 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 |
- Last Modified: 2012-12-10 04:01:00
| 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.
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- Last Modified: 2012-12-09 04:01:00
| Psychics, advertisers and coaches work hard to create interactions that feel direct. They'd like you to think that their work is about you, (lots of people thought that the song was actually about them) that they know what you're thinking and what you want.
The tsunami of data available online makes this easier than ever. It's not hard to buy data, not only about your demographics, but about how you spend your time on the web.
Which means that it seems as though that site or this ad is just for you. What could be better?
The important distin |
- Last Modified: 2012-12-08 04:08:00
| If the explanations you're demanding for what works aren't working, perhaps it's because you're avoiding nuance in exchange for simplicity.
It would take Lee Clow far more than five minutes to explain how to design an ad that works. Clive Davis didn't have the words to tell you what would make a hit record. Even the ostensibly simple food of Alice Waters can't be easily copied by an amateur.
And yet your boss keeps asking you to explain your whole plan in three Powerpoint slides.
The VC who allocates one minute to understand why your busines |
- Last Modified: 2012-12-07 04:45:00
| ...then having a tool isn't much of an advantage.
The industrial age, the age of scarcity, depended in part on the advantages that came with owning tools others didn't own.
Time for a new advantage. It might be your network, the connections that trust you. And it might be your expertise. But most of all, I'm betting it's your attitude.
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- Last Modified: 2012-12-06 04:21:00
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