3.4 247 Just say no (?) (!)

Today’s podcast

Worksheet

SETH GODIN  Ideas need handles: the thing about subject lines

A bureaucracy recently asked me to submit a few documents. They were very specific and the person on the phone said that the subject line of the email I sent should be blank.

This is really unsettling. Almost like taking the labels off bottles at the supermarket. My email software didn’t even want to let me send it.

Sumerians created millions of clay tablets but never managed to invent the subject line. As a result, the only way to know what’s on a tablet is to read the whole thing.

And a restaurant menu evolved to be the subject lines for the foods we’re about to eat.

Centuries later, SEO became an arcane art designed to create a subject line for a website. YouTube is filled with linkbait, with subject lines labeling videos creating the expectation of the best video you’ve ever seen, followed by the inevitable disappointment once you’ve invested a minute or two. The race for attention has relentlessly reduced the trust we put into subject lines, because they’re easy (and tempting) to game.

Books have had titles since Gutenberg. The title, of course, is nothing but a subject line. That, together with the genre it’s filed in give us a set of expectations for what the book will deliver. I’ve been to bookstores with a shelf labeled, “Famous authors.” We’d like to know what to expect–we care about genre and provenance, and guard our attention and resources.

But AI can’t be bothered with a subject line. It’ll just read the whole thing, watch the entire video and listen to the song from beginning to end. And then it’ll create its own subject line, on demand.

This is going to be unsettling in many ways.

Creators often use the subject line to create. It’s something to lean against. The blog title often comes before the blog. And giving up authority over the subject line to a robot that might not understand is hard to do.

And consumers have come to expect a handle for the next idea they’re going to consume, and often over-trust their instincts about what’s worth their time or not (which is why stupid ideas like the flat belly diet or snakes on a plane come and go). How are we going to help an AI sort though all the choices for what’s next?

It’s probably more efficient than clay tablets, but the transition is going to be one more way our culture changes as a result of the dominance of AI intermediaries like Perplexity.

There will still be handles. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when they’re written by a system we don’t fully understand.

December 19, 2024

3.3 251 You never know (?) (!)

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN The fame/trust inversion

A generation ago, the Generals ruled. General Motors, General Foods, General Mills, General Dynamics… they were big, and they had a lot to lose. As a result, people trusted them to show up and keep their promises–it just wasn’t worth letting a few people down at the risk of their reputation. The same was true for folks like Mr. Peanut, Mr. Coffee and Mrs. Butterworth. They might not be royalty, but they had a valuable slot on the store shelf, and they weren’t about to blow it.

The path was difficult but simple: earn trust, generate word of mouth, gain market share and then fame. A few million dollars in TV ads couldn’t hurt.

Over time, we came to associate fame with trust.

Social media presented a shortcut to some. Hack your way to fame and don’t worry about trust. Assume that people will give you the benefit of the doubt simply because they’ve heard of you.

And now, people in many lines of work, people who were trained to know better, are finding the pull of this shortcut irresistible. It’s tempting to trade credibility for fame.

When the hustle increases, it goes from ‘trust leads to fame (sometimes)’ to ‘fame despite untrustworthy behavior.’

The simple question worth asking is: That piece of media or interaction or investment you’re making–is it to earn trust or simply find attention?

It’s a race to the bottom, and my guess is that you’d rather not win.

This is cyclical. The audience might not be smart in the short run, but over time, we figure it out. Well-earned trust might go out of style for a while, but it’s always going to be a useful tool.

December 18, 2024

3.2 249 Do less than your best? why (?) (!)

Today’s podcast

worksheet

Prayer  Let’s pray…

Jesus said, "Repent, and believe in the good news! The kingdom of God is in your midst; it is within you."

Let's use that presence; seeking the power and audacity to imagine better versions of ourselves and our communities:

-- To love God with all our Heart, and mind, and soul;

-- To love one another as Jesus loved us; and 

-- To love ourselves with no conditions.

Let's nurture and share that presence, seeking the courage to go from here to the margins:

-- To help the hungry, the thirsty, the unhoused, the unwashed, the incarcerated, and the sick because  we belong to one another;

-- To join those whose burdens are more than they can bear because, it's the only way that we'll stop throwing people away;

-- To pray for our orphans and widows, living at the margins of society, especially in inhumane conditions, overlooked by institutions and considered of lesser importance.

In the name of the father, son and holy Spirit,

Amen.

3.1 255 Outside your skull-sized kingdom (?) (!)

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN What do we do with our chance?

Everyone needs more chances, more benefit of the doubt, more opportunity.

But what turns a chance into a big break is what we do with it once the chance arrives.

December 16, 2024

2.7 250 G.school #98 Victory! (?)

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  Change your shoes

Like all good metaphors, it might be practical too.

Your ‘shoes’ are the point of greatest leverage. The spot where you have traction and engage with the world most directly.

For a freelancer, it might be the way you engage with customers, or your software tools. It might be the reputation (or lack of reputation) you have with your peers.

Organizations that struggle with marketing often seem to struggle with customer service, product design and supplier relationships as well. All places where a new set of shoes might help.

Customer traction is everything, and traction is something we can work on. It’s not as easy or direct as buying a new pair of shoes, but it’s worth it.

PS If you play competitive Frisbee or soccer, a pair of cleats will change everything.

And if your back or shoulders hurt, if you’re out of energy more often than you’d like, consider getting a pair of insoles. Pull out the disposable ones that came with what you’re wearing now and put these in instead. It might make an astonishing difference. And they’re a fabulous gift…

December 15, 2024

2.6 258 G.school #97 deadlines! (?)

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  The opportunity for AI formbots

Forms are a convenient way for bureaucracies to collect information. They’re convenient because they offload the work to the patient/customer/taxpayer.

The shift in labor led to an explosion of self-serve forms, but the built-in inefficiencies punish everyone.

• Organizations don’t see the cost of inefficient or badly designed forms, since the user engages in private.

• Organizations continue to add more to the forms, since it doesn’t cost them much to do so.

• Legacy systems and forms persist, because it’s expensive and organizationally challenging to upgrade them.

The fundamental inefficiency is this–the form creator has to imagine all the possibilities before printing the form that will be used for years. As a result, the user finds themself plowing through irrelevant questions, because the form is already set. You are 9 years old and the form wants to know how many kids you have. You live in Buffalo and the form asks about a New York City resident tax…

There are four problems here.

• The first is that time is wasted by every single user, every time.

• Because there’s so much nonsense, even alert users glaze over and skip over things that might be important.

• The form can’t check for errors and inconsistencies, and can’t prioritize the questions with the most important ones first.

• And most of all, the form is unable to intelligently dive deeper on the areas that matter.

When we moved to online forms and PDFs, almost nothing changed. By building an analog of the paper form, we captured all the kruft and waste and redundancy without adding much in the way of value. Tell me again why we need to sign this 24 page electronic document in 9 places?

Leaving technology out of this for a moment, imagine what intake might be like if, instead a form, you were talking to a human who could make decisions based on what you said? If you’re applying for a visa to Spain, they wouldn’t ask you questions that are irrelevant to this fact over and over again. But they might ask if you’ve had a travel vaccine yet.

This person wouldn’t keep asking you for your name and birthdate, over and over. You already told them.

Even more powerfully, though, a thoughtful person who heard that you had a problem with your spleen when you were a teenager would go on to ask you a number of clarifying questions about this issue, not simply instruct you to jump to the next box on the form.

AI is already capable of doing this, and with some training, I’m imagining it could do an ever better job than a human interviewer. It could have more domain knowledge, more patience and provide (some people) a greater sense of privacy.

A dialog (even by audio if that’s what the user benefits from) would take far less time and yield far more information, presented in a much more useful format. And it could highlight any missing information or discrepancies in the report it creates. It would also score the way it was trained, highlighting for the bureaucracy that they were asking for dumb things or creating user frustration.

It would save millions of hours of user time, but much more usefully, it would save lives.

If it’s worth filling out a form, it’s probably worth replacing the form with an actual gathering of information.

December 14, 2024

2.4 275 Keep things simple (!) (?)

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  Better at being better

In most competitive markets, when an organization offers a new benefit, others will quickly move to match it.

This means that it’s hard to justify the hard work of creating something better, because it’s just going to become a new standard. It doesn’t pay for a credit card company to invest in customer service, the thinking goes, because that won’t pay for itself, it’ll just raise costs for the leader and for all of its competitors. That’s how the race to the bottom begins.

Perhaps it pays to simply focus on being better at making a profit, or being better at getting new customers, or being better at making the stock price go up. These proxies push short-term thinking and aren’t resilient.

What truly changes the game is when an organization decides to commit to being better at being better.

That’s hard to do and difficult to compete against.

December 12, 2024

2.3 277 Re-Invent yourself (!) (?)

Daily podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  How many sparks?

That’s the tempting question. How much hustle, hoopla and initiative do we need to get this idea ignited in the marketplace…

But the much better question is: How much kindling do we have?

Kindling doesn’t happen all at once. It’s the result of investments over time. We can earn the benefit of the doubt, create remarkable products and services and develop the empathy for the people we seek to serve.

If the wood is wet, it actually doesn’t matter how many matches you have. But when we do the hard work to create the conditions for an idea to spread, one spark might be enough.

December 11, 2024

2.2 266 Neurotransmitters (?) (?)

today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  On the way to professionalism

Professionals make choices. Including:

Don’t exploit friends and family. Surgeons shouldn’t do surgery on their kids, and investment advisors shouldn’t manage their dad’s retirement fund. It doesn’t matter if you’re sure you’re the best in the world. Swap with the person who’s second best.

Demand that clients ask hard questions. Don’t be offended if they shop around or ask you about your training and performance stats. In fact, that’s precisely what you want.

Say, “I don’t know.” Then find out.

Embrace technology that amplifies your judgment while increasing benefits to your constituents.

Call out the bad actors and the forces that push you to do a lesser job for the people you serve.

Eagerly refer people to someone more specialized than you whenever it makes sense for the client. “I’m not for you,” is a symptom of care and confidence.

Don’t show up because you feel like it. Show up because you said you would.

December 10, 2024

2.1 263 Occam's Razor (!) (?)

Today’s podcast

Worksheet

SETH GODIN  Complaints

The best way to complain is to make things better.

Complaining can be a form of intimacy. It’s a useful way to explain our behavior. And best of all, it gives us a way to communicate as we work to create community action. The best sort of complaint requires generosity and courage.

Complaining isn’t whining, though. Whining is communication that exasperates others, because it is complaint without benefit or action. The best traveling companions are often those that don’t whine, even when they have a very good reason to. Whining is empty commentary where no action is possible, about something we already understand.

We all know it’s raining.

Let’s walk.

December 9, 2024

1.7 262 G.school #96 what if they are right?

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  What if they’re right?

We spend a lot of time in our own heads, certain that our path and our method make sense. We often become more certain in the face of criticism or even suggestions.

This confidence is essential, as it allows us to lean into our project.

Once in a while, though, it might help to model the alternative. What if they’re right? How would that play out? If they’re right, what could I do with that insight?

If it’s helpful, run with it.

We can always go back to being right tomorrow.

December 8, 2024

1.6 258 G.school #95 saints vs. sinners

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN You’ve already failed

No project is going to exactly match every hope you have for it.

And even before you ship the work, you’ve already succeeded. No project is totally worthless.

So, given that failure and success are on a spectrum, at least partly out of our control, the real question is:

Now that you’ve signed up for this window of time and effort, how will you spend it?

We can’t possibly control the future, but we can certainly focus on right here and right now. Any effort we spend on controlling the uncontrollable bits is wasted.

December 7, 2024

1.5 257 search for meaning (!) (?)

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  The problem with shock design

If attention is what you seek and attention is what you measure, it’s likely you’ll create drama. And drama is inherently short-lived.

The managing director of Jaguar said, “We’ve certainly gathered an awful lot of attention over the last few weeks.”

Choosing the word “awful” was appropriate.

Here’s the design that made Jaguar iconic:

Sixty years later, it still turns heads and fuels dreams.

And the logo that went with the car did its job as well.

It’s easy for attention-confused marketers to get distracted. They think a rebrand and a re-logo are the same thing, they’re not. A rebrand happens when you change the promise that you make, and the expectations we have for you. A re-logo is cosmetic. Rebrand at your peril, especially when the old brand is trusted, iconic, historic and connected to a basic human need. It’s a mistake to focus on clicks, not magic.

The director of Jaguar finished his statement with a sentence that is almost certainly not going to stand the test of time: “We need to make sure that Jaguar is relevant, is desirable, is future proof for the next 90 years of its history.”

There are potholes to avoid here, even if you’re not a car designer or marketer:

• Clicks are not purchase intent.

• Awareness is not desire.

• Gimmicks are not marketing.

• Social media followers aren’t following you.

• Noise is not information.

• Burning down your house draws a crowd, but it’s a lousy way to renovate.

[Whether or not I like the new design is irrelevant. This is actually about the promise a brand makes and the way it measures success. What’s the promise of the new brand? How does the design make this promise?]

Design is story telling with utility. But if the story is only noise and outrage and the utility is missing, the design, by definition, is incompetent.

The thing is, we’re not running out of noise, but we can always use more beauty.

December 6, 2024

1.4 261 get off the fence! (?)

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  Who owns your words?

There are many ways to ask and answer this question. Authorship used to be rare, but now, all of us write something.

If you’re putting your words on a social media platform, you might be surprised to discover that they could disappear at any moment. Some platforms acknowledge that they own the relationship you think you have with your readers, not you. Others go so far as to insist that they can take your username and transfer it if they choose.

The words (and images) you share could be harvested for the data they contain as well.

At a more metaphorical level, in community discourse it’s easy to get in the habit of parroting talking (and arguing) points. Take a moment to think about whether you mean what you just said or perhaps are simply cheering for your team. If they’re not your words, you still might be responsible for uttering them.

More mundane but important: If you’ve ever been asked to sign a release, take a moment to read it. It probably insists that your words (and even your likeness and reputation) now belong to the company that asked you to sign. I consistently refuse, and I’m surprised that they’re surprised that I take the legal document seriously.

Words can change minds, build our culture and make an impact. They only work when we share them, but they still belong to us.

PS Now you can find my words on Bluesky.

December 5, 2024

1.3 263 It's not lack of resources! (?)

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  Elites (vs. elitism)

Tom Brady is an elite athlete. Few have even approached the stats he had playing football. And Catherine Walker, NSTA Science Teacher of the Year, is an elite, because her pedagogy and understanding give her the ability to create better outcomes for her students. There’s a hospital for special surgery, but all surgery is special if it’s surgery on someone you care about, so we seek out an elite doctor because outcomes matter.

Our culture prizes performance, we spend a lot of time ranking and measuring output. Fans of a team are rooting for their side to win, because identity is easily hooked into performance.

But this is not at all related to elitism. Elitism is a barrier, where we use a label to decide who gets to contribute and who is offered dignity. A law firm that only hires from a few law schools is elitist–they have no data to confirm that these recruits are more likely to contribute than others, they’re simply artificially limiting the pool they draw from.

Opening our filters and seeking a diversity of experience undermines elitist insecurity and creates the possibility for even better solutions and connection.

Elitism also shows up when elites who are arguably very good at something believe that this means that they’re also good at everything.

The scientific method isn’t elitist, nor is a stopwatch used to record the 100 meter dash. Seeking coherent arguments, logical approaches and a contribution that leads to better outcomes isn’t elitist, in fact, it’s precisely the opposite.

We can celebrate elite performance without being elitist. In fact, it’s the best way to do so.

December 4, 2024

1.2 276 be ready!

Today’s podcast

worksheet

SETH GODIN  Searching for stars

It’s easy to imagine that talent is a magical gift, and that we’ll know it when we see it (and that you have it or you don’t).

And yet, over the years, Star Search has rejected each of these musicians, picking someone else to win the competition:

• Aaliyah

• Britney Spears

• Christina Aguilera

• Justin Timberlake

• Usher

• Alanis Morissette

• Beyonce

One could argue that they’re simply incompetent at judging talent. Perhaps, though, it’s a lesson about the futility of getting picked and the hard-won process of developing a skill and learning a craft.

A star might simply be someone who persisted long enough to combine skill and luck in a way that others celebrate. Persistence, skill and luck, over time.

PS Hank Green (!) created today’s Bongo.

December 3, 2024