When energy is cheap, people build buildings that are poorly insulated. It’s faster and cheaper in the short run.
In the long run, though, insulation always wins. You invest in it once and get the rewards forever.
And of course, this is true for all things, not just buildings.
Learning to do it right is cheaper than using effort to overcome our laziness every single time.
Most of us are terrible at some things.
Lack of skill, focus, practice, care or just temperament means that we don’t do the task as well as we might. This might be anything from promptness to conflict to high-stakes negotiation. It could include filling in forms, taking notes or brainstorming innovative ideas. Perhaps it’s living with uncertainty…
Once you realize your areas of terrible, choices arise:
The one that’s probably worth avoiding is: Accepting tasks and making promises and then quietly doing a terrible job.
One friend recently opened a bookstore instead of a bookmobile.
Another is investing two years of his life to open a restaurant instead of a series of pop up dinners.
And a third is buying a boat instead of chartering one.
It’s easy to see why. A real bookstore has a lease. They post their hours. It’s solid.
And a real restaurant, the kind we’ve all been to, looks, feels and smells like a restaurant.
Leaving the ridiculous economics of boat ownership aside, it’s worth taking a look at the first two.
The key questions are:
If the asset of the future is trust and attention, then it’s easy to do a new calculation. The purpose of getting a lease and a place on Main Street was to momentarily get the attention of passers by–and to earn their trust. After all, you’ve got a building.
But when we shift to a permission asset, when we cherish attention and use it to build trust over time, being on Main Street might not be the best way to achieve this.
The landlord gets paid regardless of whether the space does the job, and the upside is limited by the size of the space.
What happens to the life of a chef when they have 6,000 people who eagerly read their popup updates? When each person comes to two or three dinners a year, each held at a fascinating location, rented just for the night…
Instead of finding diners for their restaurant, they could create dining experiences for their diners.
The bookstore? Imagine a route, a series of partnerships with 50 or 100 organizations that value information and exploration. A curated selection of 400 books, ready to roll out at a community center, church or school…
In both cases, the hard work is earning attention and trust. It’s easy to avoid that when you’re passively sitting in a leased space waiting for people to come to you.
This applies to musicians, filmmakers or anyone who seeks to create magic.
Earn attention and trust. Spend time and money on that, and the rest will take care of itself.
That’s easy advice and a fine goal.
Except… if you look at the last hundred years, we haven’t seen many useful advances in mousetraps, despite the number of people who have tried. It feels like an infinite market, so it attracts a lot of entrants.
You probably won’t come up with a better mousetrap. But you might find the empathy and focus to find a small group of people with a more specific problem and solve it for them in a way that earns you trust, traction and word of mouth.
That’s enough.
Who is Nicole Bennet and why does she keep calling me?
A few times a day, a voice pretending to be someone named Nicole rings my cell, and in a petulant, entitled voice, insists she’s calling me about a loan that I never applied for. I’ve never interacted, I block each number, but the calls keep coming.
AT&T certainly has the technology to block calls like this, but they don’t have an incentive to do so.
At the same time, many subscribers to this blog don’t receive their emails because Google has a clear incentive to move the emails to the promotions folder. Google benefits by forcing marketers and writers to pay them for access to folks’ attention.
Merged medical practices have an incentive to charge patients more, push doctors to work even more unreasonable hours and cut corners on medical outcomes.
Instagram has an incentive to make people feel as though they’re falling behind unless they adhere to the algorithm. And Amazon has an incentive to denature the business model of most of their merchants by charging for advertising, even though they know the ads serve neither merchants nor customers.
Tim Wu is our best explainer of how, without boundaries, networks always spiral out of control. His new book is twenty years too late or exactly what we need right now.
But we don’t need any more Nicole Bennet, thanks.
42 years ago, Apple’s 1984 ad ran on the Super Bowl. Once. It’s generally considered the most effective ad of its kind, creating a legend and also a trap.
Was this ad the reason the Mac is still around?
Or was it Regis McKenna’s work in getting Steve on the cover of more than 20 magazines the month it launched?
After all, they say that getting the word out is the key to marketing.
That’s not what did it.
It was Guy Kawasaki’s tireless year of evangelizing the platform to software developers, creating an ecosystem that made the Mac useful from the start.
And it was Susan Kare’s and Bill Atkinson’s unreasonable standards that made the experience of using the Mac unlike its alternatives–an advantage that has lasted half a century.
Hype is a trap. Better is better.
Why do books and records have standard pricing? You’d think that a record from Miles Davis or Patricia Barber would cost more than one from the local garage band.
Economists tie themselves into knots trying to explain why wine and handbags have such wide price variation, but tickets to movies do not. They invoke “credence goods” and “focal point coordination” and “transaction utility” and “cost disease.” Darby, Karni, Schelling, Baumol, Thaler—a parade of Nobel-adjacent thinkers building elegant models to explain what’s sitting right in front of them.
It’s simpler than that, I think. People don’t go into publishing or music to make a profit (not most of them, not the smart ones). They do it to create culture and to be part of a culture. They’re not going to brag about making a lot of money, they’ll brag about finding art or sharing it.
Meanwhile, down the street at the hedge fund, the entire point is to find and capture price differences. Leaving money on the table isn’t just a missed opportunity—it’s an embarrassment. It means you weren’t paying attention.
The pricing norms in any industry reflect the identity of the people who built it.
Hermès could auction Birkin bags and make more money. They don’t, because scarcity-through-restraint is the elegant move, the identity-consistent move. It’s what people like them do.
Movie theaters were built by showmen who inherited vaudeville instincts: pack the house, give ’em a show, make it up on popcorn. Uniform ticket pricing isn’t economically optimal. It’s simply what people like us have always done.
This explains why industries are so stable—and why disruption feels like betrayal.
When concert tickets went dynamic, the backlash wasn’t about economics. It was moral outrage. Artists who adopted surge pricing weren’t just changing strategy; they were declaring themselves to be a different kind of person. The fans noticed.
Amazon didn’t share publishing’s allergy to profit. Ticketmaster didn’t share the old promoter’s loyalty to fans. They weren’t optimizing within the culture—they were violating it.
The price variation in any market reflects not what the market will bear, but what the people in that market can bear to charge.
The economists will keep building models. But if you want to understand why things cost what they cost, don’t ask what’s efficient. Ask what kind of person would be embarrassed to charge more. Or embarrassed not to.
It’s difficult to write directions.
A user interface, a map or a recipe all require empathy.
That’s because the person writing it knows something the reader doesn’t. In fact, that’s the only reason to do it.
But because instructions exist to bridge this gap, we benefit by understanding and focusing on the gap. The instructions aren’t there to remind you of how to do something. They serve to help someone who doesn’t know, learn.
Here’s a useful way to begin:
Assume less.
Yes, the person reading your recipe knows what a knife is, but do they know you keep your mustard in the food cabinet, not the fridge?
List every step you could imagine, and then list some more.
Once the overdone, step-by-step instructions exist, begin removing them. The interface for your induction cooktop probably doesn’t benefit from having icons so obscure they’re meaningless, but it also doesn’t need every step for boiling water enunciated in capital letters.
In my experience in reading instructions, it’s easier for the user to skip over steps that are too complete than it is to try to guess what the person writing the directions had in mind.
We are story-processing creatures, and the most effective stories are often embodied in people. Living examples of the lesson we’re trying to learn and the posture we hope to model.
Heroes, mentors, martyrs, examples, icons, avatars, archetypes, and even villains.
Sometimes those people are fictional, living in an anecdote and refined to form a legend.
The leverage of media, though, has made history more powerful than any made-up story ever could be.
When we rehearse and amplify the story, we can’t help but make the person less real. The story has a purpose, and its purpose is to remind us of who we could be and how we move forward.
This is what saints do for us. This is why we put pictures on the wall or invoke the memories of the people who came before us.
Reminded of our heroes, we know we can improve. We can work harder for justice, find more compassion and show up as a contribution. We can look at the ordinary moments when someone chose to keep going and realize that choice is available to us as well.
There are so many extraordinary people who have come before. It’s on us to choose our heroes wisely and to do the hard work to honor the contributions they made. Even when it’s difficult and unpopular. Especially then.
Today is a fine day to consider who’s on our wall.
Celebrity gossip, fortune-telling and superstitions are the original forms of fake news, but now it’s increasingly widespread. In every field from science to world affairs, it’s troubling to see. People who are familiar with reality can’t understand why it’s popular–in a low-trust world, why would people engage with made-up noise disguised as information?
The irony is that it’s easier to trust fake news. It’s consistent, simplified, coherent and predictable, all the things that humans look for when we’re seeking solace.
The challenge for all of us is that while it’s easier to trust in the short run, it ultimately disappoints.
The trust we earn with complex and consistent analyses of reality takes more effort, but it’s worth more in the long run.
What sort of trust are you selling? And what are we buying?
