Strategy
Make Intelligent Things, or Make Things Intelligible
- Product = Making Intelligent Things
- Marketing = Making Things Intelligible
For product, this means that the more intelligence you put into it (read: deep knowledge, craft, skill), the better the product.
For marketing, this means the more intelligible it is (read: the more people can understand it, the lower the reading level, the more the appeal to emotion), the better the marketing.
People tend to be inclined towards one or the other.
At the extreme, the most intelligent person can make the best product that no one else can understand.
At the extreme, the most intelligible person can make the best marketing for a product that is practically useless.
Howard Gardner theorized that humans possess multiple intelligences.
For example, a star athlete is not dumber than a star writer. Athletes tend to possess kinesthetic intelligence, while writers tend to possess linguistic intelligence.
I believe that there is more leverage in product-intelligent people learning to be more intelligible than intelligible people learning how to be more product-intelligent.
In other words, smart people should learn to market because it will be of better benefit to everybody.
So, here are 3 steps for intelligent people learning to become more intelligible:
- Consider marketing as a different type of intelligence.
- Consider that the skill of making things intelligible is another degree of freedom of your intelligence, another intelligence-based skill that you can learn (like chess, or quantum theory).
- Realize that if you don’t figure out how to make your intelligent thing intelligible, then no one else will. Because the natural marketers won’t do it for you.
Why Use Mental Models? (Or, How To Live A Life You Always Enjoy)
Because our brains are wired for the natural world of 10,000 years ago.
Since then, we’ve discovered more effective ways to navigate the world.
Yet, we have to consciously choose to navigate the world in these more effective ways; hence, mental models.
For example.
Most people assume that being themselves and being liked by other people are opposing goals.
Consider integer thinking (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3).
Western Europeans thought the idea was “absurd” until about 300 years ago.
Now, we use it everywhere.
But that means that it’s not “natural” to think in these terms (our wetware isn’t wired to perceive the world in these ways).
We see this in ratings: we give something a 1 to 10 rating, or 1 to 5 stars.
Consider that a 1-star rating is terrible, no good, wouldn’t visit again, while a 5-star rating is excellent, couldn’t have been better.
Often when we’re young, our brains note this interesting phenomenon: we can be ourselves, or we can “fit a mold” that doesn’t feel like who we are.
Our default model turns it into a star rating for authenticity vs. being fake.
Fitting the mold is 1 star, and being completely ourselves is 5 stars.
Our default model tells us we have to choose being ourself (5 stars), or being liked by others (1 star).
But consider integer thinking as a mental model.
If we use this mental model, it might look like this:
-5: Something everyone else likes and I hate. +5: Something only I like, but nobody else does.
But wait, what does that make zero?
Well, if the integer line represents “positive experience”, then: 0: Something both everyone else likes and I like.
Experientially, we know this. Ella Fitzgerald is considered, almost universally, a good singer. Being fit is considered, almost universally, a physically attractive trait. In every reality, people like pizza. jk.
In this mental model, something that is popular and that you dislike isn’t 1 star, it’s something like -4 stars.
Also in this model, 4 stars might be something I like, and only 100 other people in the world like it, too. While 1 star is something that I like that 80% of people also like.
So if we use our default model, we think we have to choose between pleasing others vs. living authentically ourselves.
If we use the integer model, another reality becomes possible: you can always live a life you enjoy.
How?
By never being in the negative.
If you want to get along with everybody (0), engage in things that everyone likes and you like.
If you want to find your tribe, engage in things that are +3 and +4 stars to you.
If you want to be a true artist and not care what anyone else thinks, go for +5 stars only.
But. You never need to engage in the negative stars.
Because the lowest you’ll go is the overlap between universally enjoyable and enjoyable to you.
Which means, you would live a life you always enjoy.
Comedians and Entrepreneurs (and Pixar too)
Most people think of comedy as a performing art.
But consider the process:
- Think up something you think would be funny
- Tell the joke to an audience and get feedback
- Incorporate feedback to either scrap the joke or make it better.
Contrast this with what Clark Beckham describes as the process of art: having a clear vision, and then building the skills to express it so that you feel what comes out is true to your vision.
An artist would say whatever is in them, even if others don’t think its funny.
A comedian is more like a software developer building features for an audience.
Get feedback, tweak, deliver, tweak again. And once every part is working, ship it as a new product (a new comedy special).
Pixar does the same thing.
Like for Toy Story 3:
- First draft of script; shoot, edit, and produce actual animation of it
- Screen it (to a small group) and get feedback from the audience
- Repeat this process 7 to 8 times, until the final piece gets the reaction they desire.
Comedy (and the Pixar process) isn’t really a performing art. It’s a lot more like performing entrepreneurship.
Three Career Turning Points (or, the Four Stages of Career)
Most beginners think career looks like this:
- First, find your passion (or your superpowers)
- Second, find a way to do what you love
Yet 10,000 high school basketball players are NBA hopefuls. 3 of them make it.
Those that don’t? Many still had the height, the athleticism, and the practice routine to get there.
To the recruiters, it just didn’t manifest as good enough skills.
Finding what your good at is still important. It’s just not the start of the career. It’s the zeroeth step, the thing that happens before a career. In other words, talent is assumed. The real process looks something like this:
First, consistent skills. Second, consistent business (including choosing the right projects). Third, consistent people. Fourth, consistent life.
For the NBA hopeful, first you have to be good enough to make it in, then you have to learn the business of the NBA and adjust to that life, then you need to find the team that’s the best fit for you and your goals (both personal trainer, but also which team in the NBA), and then you have to maintain consistency while making sure your life outside of your work doesn’t break down.
That is the full arc of the career, in four stages. Which means three career turning points.
There comes a point in your career where you have complete confidence in your skills. You’re just not sure the market wants to pay for them consistently (a business).
There comes a point in your career where you have complete confidence in your business. You’re just not sure you can get the right people, clients and employees, to collaborate consistently (a team).
There comes a point in your career where you have complete confidence in your team. You’re just not sure if it will all come crashing down, or if you get too old to do it, or if you waited too long for everything else (a life).
The hard turnings are from skills -> business, from business -> people, and from people -> life.
For example:
- In working with beginners (n > 10,000), they don’t get out of stage even understanding what they’re good at. If you’re naturally 1 in 1000 (top 0.1%) without trying, then you’ve found something you’re good at.
- In working with talented people (n > 100), they can’t build consistent skills. You know you are consistently skilled when you feel like your skills match your talent: you’re not limited in executing what your mind and body are capable of.
- In working with consistently skilled people (n > 30), they can’t build consistent businesses. A business (including a day job) is where you are not limited by how much money you want to make executing your skill. You make as much money as you want with your skill.
- In working with consistent business people (n is approx. 10), they can’t build consistent teams of people. A consistent team of people are those that increase your success, and aren’t a hindrance to it. This includes in your personal life (think Will Smith and Jada).
- A consistent life means you’re not the 50 year-old CEO who gets divorced and his kids hate him. I’ve worked with n = 3 people that get there, and they have all built billion-dollar empires.
Notice that these turnings flip back and forth from micro to macro.
Stage 1 is micro, your ability to focus within yourself to develop skills.
Stage 2 is macro, building a career/business that can house the ability for you to execute on your skills.
Stage 3 is micro, your ability to focus within people what actually matters, and build an internal (within your business) support system.
Stage 4 is macro, building a life that can house your business.
We all stumble because we’re naturally inclined towards one of these, and not the other.
The key to a great career life is being able to navigate all of them.
Asympathy
A word to describe a common experience of high level entrepreneurs (n > 200).
There is a kind of taking that is not greed and not even envy in the usual sense. People who have never had to protect a high-output life do not know what that life is made of. They experience their requests as ordinary: talk about my thing, sit in this mood, solve this tangle, be available in the way everyone else is. They do not see that an afternoon of being pulled off the work is not “an afternoon.” It is a break in the chain that produces books, businesses, championships, capital. It is cost-blind.
I call it asympathy.
It sounds like (a)sympathy, or being without sympathy.
But it’s actualy (asym)pathy, or asymmetric pathos.
Asympathy is the relational stance in which one person treats attention, access, and emotional labor as interchangeable across a large gap in operating cost. It is feeling and relating to another human being as if the costs (high, lows, and demands) are symmetric, when they are not. Which means the damage is disproportional to the intention.
Sometimes, we think that there may be solidarity in other “successful too” peer groups.
But consider Will and Jada Smith.
One could say that Jada, among other things, demonstrates asympathy towards Will.
“Just get a better peer group” doesn’t alleviate it.
The deciding factor is whether someone is a boon or a drain in the presence of someone else’s altitude.
Why Business Leaders Play Poker
Journalist Maria Konnikova went undercover to understand how poker works. Going from never playing poker, she became an international champion. She had something interesting to say about what poker teaches you.
Most people rationalize their decisions by their outcomes. If you have a success, you congratulate yourself on having made a good decision. If you have a failure, you beat yourself up for having made a bad one.
In Poker, you can be dealt a great hand, make good decisions and still lose. Or, you can be dealt a bad hand and make bad decisions and still win.
Poker teaches you a different way to relate to outcomes. Be proud of yourself when you played the hand the best you could. Be tough on yourself when you didn’t, even if the outcome was good. Be humble in the face of both success and failure. And always always always remember, there’s another hand to play.
Business works in a similar way. You can have great funding, great employees, a great idea, and the business still fails (to turn a profit). Or, you can have all the cards against you, have no experience or skill in business, and still hit a home run.
So, if you want the lesson from poker (without playing for thousands of hours), here it is:
Being good at business means relating differently to success. Be proud of yourself when you made the best business decision you could. Be tough on yourself when you didn’t, even if the outcome was good. Be humble in the face of both success and failure. And always always always remember, tomorrow is a new day.
Quaverity
Chris McCarthy, head of Paramount and Yellowstone pusher, said this about streaming services: “I think the misconception was the winners are always going to be the ones with the most amount of content, when in fact the winners are gonna be the ones with the most mass hits. And what breaks through that clutter for most people is franchises.”
A franchise is not the point.
Creating something that resonates with people is.
I think the progression can be summarized like this:
- Quantity
- Quality
- Quaverity
We spend a lot of time in pursuit of more. Get more out of your day. Hustle more. Produce more content on more platforms to reach more people.
That may have worked 50 years ago. But we’re not in the industrial age anymore. The most successful people, teams, and brands don’t win on quantity.
We’ve learned that quality matters. When you google anything, if you’re not on the first page, you’re last. It’s the difference between being a New York Times bestseller and just another writer. In a world of (seemingly) unlimited quantity, quality makes you stand out.
Quality was the formula for success 20 years ago. Then ChatGPT came along. Now, anyone can produce quality. AI killed the information star.
So what’s next?
I think it’s quaverity.
What’s quaverity? It’s a word I made up that comes from quaver. Here’s my definition:
_Quaverity is the set of deep emotions, insights, commonalities, and metanarrative that, taken together, account for a consumer’s experience of content.
If a consumer (whether that’s an individual, a group, or a business) isn’t deeply affected by a product or service, then no quaverity exists for that consumer. _
Quaverity puts a value to how much an experience captures the heart and mind of a consumer.
Today, a franchise is a shadow of quaverity, something that signifies it’s existence. But just as it takes more than a great recording studio to make a hit song, it takes more than sequels and spinoffs to make something into a successful franchise. If it doesn’t move you emotionally, or spark epiphanies, or make your world make a little more sense, then there is no quaverity. At least not for you.
Franchises have quaverity. But so do viral videos. So does Eric Clapton’s Layla. It’s a quality we often ascribe to cult leaders and their followers: bizarre from the outside, but when you’re on the inside it grips you, if you’re the right person.
And here’s the thing: quality isn’t required. B-movies and William Hung have strong followings as well.
If the information age was ruled by quality, then the intelligence age is ruled by quaverity.
If you don’t have quaverity, then no amount of quality or quantity is going to help you.
What is AI's taste like?
The other day, I gave AI (grok) an excerpt from John Steinbeck.
It rated it a 6 out of 10 in terms of writing.
Steinbeck is a Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award winner.
Initially, the AI thought that I had submitted my own writing.
But that’s besides the point.
(Even after, this it said 6 out of 10 is what you would expect from a high school level student).
Taste is subjective.
It’s okay that AI gave Nobel/Pulitzer/National Award-level writing a 6 out of 10.
Just realize, it may not have the same taste as you do.
Make Desirable Things, or Make Things Desirable
What business is about, from Rory Sutherland, English advertising guru.
As an advertiser, he argues that making things desirable is underrated (of course).
But as a gross simplification:
- Product is making desirable things, Marketing is making things desirable.
- Working in your business is making desirable things, working on your business is making things desirable.
Gladwell would say that making desirable things is excellence criteria, while making things desirable is entrance criteria.
My take: most people are good at one or the other. Get good at what is natural to you.
Niches
A niche is a slice of the 8 billion people on this planet that you plan to serve.
A different way to think of it: a niche is a number.
“I serve gym owners making between $500k and $1M”.
According to Google, that’s 4,700 gyms in the world.
Do you plan to have 4,700 customers?
Most service businesses can’t literally serve all the customers in their niche.
Note that some outside that niche will be interested, too.
AVC vs. KLT
Most savvy business people know KLT. Know, Like, Trust.
Its the way to build a business (read: something sustainable that generates value).
But most people run on AVC. Attractive, Valuable, Competent.
Its what’s shiny.
As in, I want to do business (or be in a relationship with) him/her because they are hot. Or, because they have money (or can bring me a lot of money). Or, because they’re good with their hands.
As opposed to, I have seen who they are. I like (read: enjoy) what I’ve seen and how they operate. I trust (I would expose my secrets and know they wouldn’t abuse) them.
The world runs so much on AVC that KLT seems foolish.
However, there used to be a word for people that chose AVC over KLT.
Shallow.
As in Shallow Hal (Jack Black), A Different Man (Sebastian Stan), and Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
A few reasons why you might consider running your social (business, friendships, romance) on KLT:
- AVC decays over time. KLT compounds over time. Not always, but as a general rule.
- There’s a near infinite number of AVC people in the world, and a much smaller KLT list. So it serves as a great filtering tool, at the very least.
- World-class people filter based on KLT (in my experience). Logically, it makes sense: if you’re the best looking in the world (A) or the richest (V) or incredibly skilled (C), then you know other AVC people are going to seek you out based on that alone. What you really look for, then, is KLT.
The 4Cs of Success, Tredux (2 more questions to define success, from a social perspective)
Question 1: Do you want everyone to view you as successful, or just an exclusive few?
Only commercial success and credentialed success are universally valued, any and everywhere you go.
Critical and cultural success are, by definition, appealing to a smaller group of people who “get it”.
Question 2: Do you want to be the people’s champ, or the institution’s pearl?
Critical and credentialed success are conferred by a governing body, a membership panel, an acceptance letter, or passing a test.
Commercial and cultural success are created by giving the people what they want.
Maybe its easier to determine how you want to be successful by thinking about how you want people to respond to it.
Innovations of Jazz (the enjoyable, rhythmic remixing of things that feel like home)
Jazz was, once upon a time, 4 things:
- Improvisation (the creation)
- The Blues (the content)
- Swing Rhythm (the pulse)
- Joy (the feeling)
Innovating jazz expanded one of those scopes.
No improvisation? That’s just classic swing (Frank Sinatra, Big Bands).
I different sort of Blues? Other base music with deep comfort, familiarity, and meaning? That’s world jazz (Hiromi Uehara, Jorge Luis Pacheco, Tigran Hamasayan).
No swing rhythm? That’s Rockabilly and Rock n' Roll, R&B and Modern Gospel.
Swapping out the feeling of joy? That’s cool jazz, modal jazz, smooth jazz, hard bop and free jazz.
Jazz isn’t only what you make it. But most modern forms of music have, at least, a little jazz in them.
Abstractions of Jazz
“Profoundly naive; unimaginably wise. They were spectacular. Everything I’d hope to find in the system…biodigital jazz, man.” — Kevin Flynn
Wynton Marsalis defined jazz as improvisation, the blues, and swing. But what does that mean, really?
Improvisation is spontaneous creation. Or, as the old saying goes, “composition is slow improvisation, and improvisation is fast composition.”
Blues is a feeling. Deeply emotional, deeply comforting. Everyone has their own set of the blues.
Swing is a type of rhythm.
So jazz can be any creative remixing, of deeply familiar and deeply emotional content, done with a consistent poetic rhythm, with an emotional tone of joy.
In that sense, anything can be jazz. If you play it right.
The 4Cs of Success Redux (or, how to define the success you really want)
You can figure out what sort of success you’re seeking by asking two questions.
Question 1: Do you want to be accepted by a tribe, or create a tribe?
Question 2: Do you care more about success now, or after you’re gone?
If you want to be accepted by a tribe, you’re looking at either credentialed success (acceptance by the governing body) or critical success (acceptance by the cool kids in your industry).
If you want to create a tribe, that’s either commercial success (lots of customers) or commercial success (lots of fans).
If you care more about success right now, that’s either credentialed success or commercial success. Nobody remembers a random marine biology Ph.D. from 20 years ago, and if Coca-Cola disappeared tomorrow, very few people would genuinely miss it.
If you care more about success after you’re gone, that’s either critical success or cultural success. Win an academy award, and you are enshrined in a long line of award winners, never forgotten. Make Rocky Horror Picture Show, and 50 years later people will still be playing dress-up to your film.
Of course, its possible to have different types of success in different areas.
C.S. Lewis received an Honorary Doctorate in Divinity (critical success), as well as creating enduring fiction with the Chronicles of Narnia (cultural success).
And of course, these are not mutually exclusive. You can experience success both now and after you’re gone.
But if you want to be a writer, you’d know:
- Credentialed = get a Creative Writing MFA
- Critical = win a Pulitzer Prize
- Commercial = write sleazy romance novels (they make the most money)
- Cultural = create the next Lord of the Rings
And that the skills and pathways to each of those types of success look very, very different.