3.1 295 What are your tribes?

Toady’s worksheet

SETH GODIN The lazy jugglers

The best jugglers don’t seem to be trying very hard.

That’s because they understand what the work involves, and they don’t confuse effort with results.

Some approaches to keep in mind:

Focus on the work at hand

Don’t take on more than you can handle

Establish a spec, and ignore perfection

Throws are far more important than catches

Devote a significant amount of time to honing your craft

Consistently add incremental challenges

Frantic leads to more frantic. Let it drop and begin again.

JULY 1, 2024

2.6 298 G.school #49 Clues to Christ

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN Meaningfully informed

Community requires individuals to have the option of speaking up. If we’re in this together, we ought to be able to chime in.

But while every member of the community can speak out, the ones that are heard also have something useful to say. Being informed is a requirement to be heard.

Sometimes, our insight can come from firsthand experience, but it’s most likely that we’ve learned about the issue and the alternatives we face.

Education is at the heart of the conversation. Organized schooling, substantial peer engagement and intelligent media consumption give us a chance to earn our opinion.

Successful communities celebrate learning.

JUNE 29, 2024

2.5 307 why do you believe what you believe?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN “Ready” vs. “Done”

Ready means that time is up, spec is met and the user can engage.

Done might mean that you believe it’s perfect and cannot be improved.

We’ll settle for ready. In fact, meeting spec means we’re not settling. It’s just what you promised.

JUNE 28, 2024

2.4 297 What was Hercules' Choice?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN The Pinocchio protocol

He had a hard time lying because his nose got longer every time he did.

Gas-powered leaf blowers would disappear if the smoke they belched out was black instead of invisible.

And few people would start smoking if the deposits on their lungs ended up on their face instead.

We’re not very good at paying attention to invisible or gradual outputs.

The trick is simple: If it’s important, make it visible. If it happens over time, create a signal that brings the future into the present.

Creating vivid measurements of essential variables that others overlook is a significant competitive advantage.

JUNE 27, 2024

2.3 302 Program the RAS! What?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN The paradox of self skepticism

If we’re to publish, teach, invent, imagine or promote, we need the confidence to believe that we have something to offer. That we are, in some way, right.

But the enterprise of rational thought is based on theories, tests and improvements. We can never be certain, all we have is the best available explanation.

So the hard work is to speak up at the very same time you’re open (in fact, eager) to change your mind based on new data.

One without the other is worthless.

JUNE 26, 2024

2.2 306 Where do feelings come from?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN Return on effort

It’s a pretty simple calculation.

How much value per dollar does a freelancer produce for you? What’s the psychic reward for the time you put into your favorite hobby? That machine that takes time and money to set up and run… what does it create when it’s operating?

Not everything can or should be evaluated on a return on effort basis, but when we’re comparing two alternatives, it’s a fine place to start.

Instead, we often find ourselves focusing on how easy it is to avoid the issue and choose to focus our effort on more of what we did yesterday, or how painful it might be to walk away from a sunk cost or asset. We think about the effort around the effort, instead of the choices we can make each day about what might be worth our focus.

JUNE 25, 2024

2.1 327 What's inside my skull-sized kingdom?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN Leprechauns

Is there a rainbow underneath your pot of gold?

Sometimes, we get it backwards.

JUNE 24, 2024

1.7 317 G.school #48 a mustard seed of faith?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN Assume lack of context

The person you’re working with might not know what you know, might not see what you see.

It’s tempting to begin where we are.

But it’s more useful to begin where they are.

JUNE 23, 2024

1.6 324 G.school #47 What's the point?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN The Coney Island problem

Disney theme parks created more than 20 billion dollars in revenue last year.

Coney Island, not so much.

Coney Island is dozens of small honky tonk vendors and attractions, an ecosystem, not a corporation.

Independent local stores got hammered by the more organized stores in the mall and then by the centrally controlled Wal-mart and other box stores. And then the big box stores got hammered in turn by Amazon, a rigidly controlled system that puts the little guys at its mercy.

RSS and blogs were a federation of independent voices. It didn’t take much for them to be co-opted by a few tech giants.

We’d like to believe that we prefer to walk down the picturesque street, visiting one merchant after another, buying directly from the creator or her gallery. We’d like to think that the centralized antiseptic option isn’t for us…

And yet, when the supermarche opens in rural France, it does very well.

It turns out that we respond well to large entities that pretend that they’re simply a conglomeration of independent voices and visions, but when masses of people are given a choice, they’re drawn to the big guy, not the real thing.

The long tail is real, but we’ve been trained to prefer it if the tail is contained within a centrally-controlled system run by a corporation.

JUNE 22, 2024

1.5 327 Why can't happiness be pursued?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN The Western Union trap

When the telephone began to gain traction, the monopoly of the time, Western Union, decided to get even better at sending telegrams.

JUNE 21, 2024

1.4 322 Why humans control the planet?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN Phrenology

For thousands of years, and as recently as the 1930s, phrenology was seen as a useful proxy to judge someone’s character.

Carefully charting the bumps on someone’s head, along with the slope of their forehead and other telltale signs was seen as a thoughtful and proven way to determine whether someone was creative, honest or empathic.

Even with the nutty pseudoscience we are all surrounded by, it’s pretty easy to tell that this is nonsense.

And yet, we want proxies so badly, we embraced this idea for centuries, despite a lack of evidence.

We engage in this soothsaying search for proxies every time we do a job interview with someone. Unless we’re interviewing for people who have interviewing as their job, there isn’t a lot of evidence that doing a great job in the interview means you’re going to do a great job.

False proxies are expensive. They also create significant social and moral hazards.

Perhaps hanging up this poster is a good way to remind us not to fall into that trap.

JUNE 20, 2024

1.3 327 What's the truth of addiction?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN Are you weather?

The thunderstorm doesn’t know we exist. Rain dances and wishes are ineffective at bringing or preventing a storm, because it isn’t caused by our actions.

Metaphorical weather is tempting to mistake as a response. When someone cuts us off in traffic or doesn’t engage with us the way we might hope for, it’s easy to take it personally.

But the weather would be there with or without you.

There are two useful questions:

The first is whether we’re signing up to be in weather conditions that aren’t safe or helpful.

And second, when the tables are turned, is to ask ourselves, “Am I being someone else’s weather right now?” Because that’s something we do have control over.

JUNE 19, 2024

1.2 329 How important is IQ?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN “What will I tell my boss?”

If you can’t answer that six-word question, you’re selling a commodity.

Organizations don’t buy things, people do. And people at companies aren’t spending their own money, so this is the only question on the table.

A cogent story, based on affiliation and status, one that sees and respects the dynamics of the organization, is actually what they’re paying for.

JUNE 18, 2024

1.1 335 Why are we here?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN The intentional stance

Dan Dennett explained that it began as a survival mechanism. It’s important to predict how someone else is going to behave. That tiger might be a threat, that person from the next village might have something to offer.

If we simply wait and see, we might encounter an unwelcome or even fatal surprise. The shortcut that the intentional stance offers us is, “if I were them, I might have this in mind.” Assuming intent doesn’t always work, but it works often enough that all humans embrace it.

There’s the physical stance (a rock headed toward a window is probably going to break it) and the design stance (this ATM is supposed to dispense money, let’s look for the slot.) But the most useful and now problematic shortcut is imagining that others are imagining.

There used to be a chicken in an arcade in New York that played tic tac toe. The best way to engage with the chicken game was to imagine that the chicken had goals and strategies and that he was ‘hoping’ you would go there, not there.

Of course, chickens don’t do any hoping, any more than chess computers are trying to get you to fall into a trap when they set up an en passant. But we take the stance because it’s useful. It’s not an accurate portrayal of the state of the physical entity, but it might be a useful way to make predictions.

There’s a certain sort of empathy here, extending ourselves to another entity and imagining that it has intent. But there’s also a lack of empathy, because we assume that the entity is just like us… but also a chicken.

The challenge kicks in when our predictions of agency and intent don’t match up with what happens next.

AI certainly seems like it has earned both a design and an intentional stance from us. Even AI researchers treat their interactions with a working LLM as if they’re talking to a real person, perhaps a little unevenly balanced, but a person nonetheless.

The intentional stance brings rights and responsibilities, though. We don’t treat infants as though they want something the way we might, which makes it easier to live with their crying. Successful dog trainers don’t imagine that dogs are humans with four legs–they boil down behavior to inputs and outputs, and use operant conditioning, not reasoning, to change behavior.

Every day, millions of people are joining the early adopters who are giving AI systems the benefit of the doubt, a stance of intent and agency. But it’s an illusion, and the AI isn’t ready for rights and can’t take responsibility.

The collision between what we believe and what will happen is going to be significant, and we’re not even sure how to talk about it.

The intentional stance is often useful, but it’s not always accurate. When it stops being useful, we need to use a different model for how to understand and what to expect.

JUNE 17, 2024

4.6 343 G.school #46 what is Fathers' day?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN Spam 3.0

Any fully open system of digital communication will corrode over time. Bad messages will crowd out the good ones.

The new normal: Someone finds a database of every residential property, then another of cell phones. An AI is trained to call every homeowner, every day, asking if they’re thinking of selling their home. Millions of calls an hour. The leads (one out of 40,000 calls, perhaps) are sold to real estate brokers.

Multiply this by 500 different hustlers in a dozen industries, and now the open nature of the phone is gone forever.

And then texts.

And of course, email. An inbox with 100,000 unread messages in it is no longer a functional tool.

Open systems come with the requirement of self-restraint and humanity. When we replace those with automated stealers of attention with a profit margin, the system can no longer remain open.

Permission and trust keep going up in value, precisely as quickly as selfish forces work to succeed without them.

JUNE 16, 2024

4.6 345 G.school #44 / What is your relationship with Jesus?

Today’s worksheet

SETH GODIN Better than Google

I haven’t done a Google search in months.

Perplexity is more powerful, more pleasant and more effective.

Instead of being corrupted by invasive ads, surveillance and sneaky dark patterns, it presents you with a simple, footnoted explanation of exactly what you’re looking for. Asked and answered.

And I like that there’s a pro version that we can pay for. This makes us the customer, not the product.

Most of all, the limited scope of the promise gives AI a chance to shine. ChatGPT often comes across as both arrogant and bumbling, because it promises that it can do everything, all at once. Perplexity is simply a smart search partner without the corrosion that racing for more ad dollars will cause. At least for now.

So far, I’d give it five stars. It’s worth checking out.

JUNE 15, 2024