2026-08-05 17:03:00
They’re often out of whack.
A Hard Day’s Night took less than 15 hours from idea to finished record. More Than a Feeling, from Tom Scholz and Boston, took five years. Each pleased their audiences. One is not 1,500 times more valuable than the other.
Sometimes, work that requires effort leads to scarcity, and that scarcity can increase its value. But not always.
And just because we put in effort does not mean we deserve the audience to reciprocate with a similar amount. Seven years to write a Ph.D. thesis but a professor on the committee might spend an hour reading it. The student’s effort is not related to the committee’s.
The mythology of creation seems to beg us to calculate the effort when computing the value. But in practice, buyers rarely do.
If the creation is what the audience needs or wants, it actually doesn’t matter how hard it was to create, or who or what created it.
This creates an interesting challenge when it comes to education or fitness. Is the point of assigning an essay to demonstrate that a student can work hard, or to challenge them to have the good taste and judgment to hand in something of quality? Is the trainer at the gym pushing you to go fast/lift a lot, or simply creating the conditions for you to do just a bit more than you did last time?
Focusing on absolute outcomes when we’re trying to improve relative effort is a trap. “A for effort” is a legitimate grade, but even in school, the system rarely chooses to actually do this–the natural writer or athlete gets accolades, not the person who tried harder or overcame obstacles.
When developing our skills, effort is essential. But when engaging in the marketplace, I’m not sure it matters. We should be consistent about which we’re seeking to reward.
2026-08-04 17:03:00
People lie.
They lie in focus groups, they lie on surveys and they lie to themselves.
Culture can be seen as an organized lying function. Be aware of what other people are thinking and make choices about your preferences so you can fit in.
Without this effect, we wouldn’t have trends, fads or hits.
Part of our work as marketers is to create the conditions for people to happily do what they were hoping they could do all along.
2026-08-03 17:03:00
It doesn’t have to be well-crafted, historically important or aesthetically unique. It simply needs to be famous.
Celebrity art is famous, with a story and thus emotional resonance. It’s a souvenir for our eyes, a chance to have proximity without ownership. It conflates familiarity with scarcity, the power of in-person experience with the context of our culture. It’s simultaneously a statement of status and a signifier of connection.
It shows up in more places than we realize. Once an egg cream joint is Instagram famous, the line out the door is yet another example of how much we want to be near something that others have noticed.
Plenty of art is good enough to qualify for celebrity. But celebrity only happens after the network has kicked in. It’s more random than we’d like to admit.
What would it take to make your art, in whatever form, worthy of celebrity?
2026-08-02 17:03:00
“Working in the studio is like building a ship in a bottle. Playing live is like being on a rowboat in the ocean.” Jerry Garcia
You probably need some studio time, but you definitely need to play live.
2026-08-01 17:03:00
What if they meant it?
What if your return felt special to the people behind the counter?
What if they knew, without looking it up, or being told–what if they knew that you were here, again, a vote of trust and confidence.
Returning home is one of the oldest human desires. It’s a feeling that doesn’t easily lend itself to automation, procedures, or scale.
Being welcomed home offers us dignity, safety and belonging. Hard to fake, worth working hard to create.
2026-07-31 17:03:00
We transferred an idea from engineering to culture, but it’s incomplete.
If you build a watch that doesn’t tell time, it’s fair to say it doesn’t work.
But when a critic says, “that joke didn’t work,” after seeing a comic perform to a raucous audience, what they probably mean is, “that didn’t work for me.”
The problem might not be the comic. It might be the critic.
“It’s not for you,” is a useful, almost essential way to navigate the creation of our cultural work. If you say it too often to the people you were seeking to serve, your work needs improvement. But when you say it to a critic you never intended to please, you’re opening the door to serving the people you do care about.
