2025-10-26 17:03:00
Visitors to your new bookstore are likely to have a phone in their pockets–they could buy a book from the competition without even walking into the shop.
And diners at your funky restaurant have to pass dozens of other places to eat on their way to you. Places that are faster, more conventional and probably cheaper as well.
Good, fast and cheap used to be the goals of a typical small business. Today, there’s probably a giant, heartless competitor who is gooder, faster and cheaper than you.
The way forward is simple: Be worth the trip. Be worth the price.
“You can pick anyone, and we’re anyone” isn’t going to be helpful going forward. Be someone instead.
Racing to the bottom is no longer a viable option, but it’s more compelling and useful to race to the top than ever before.
2025-10-25 17:03:00
It’s possible to consider the next event in our lives as something the world is trying to teach us.
But it might be even more effective to realize that, whenever we choose, we can learn something from what’s going on. We’re not getting taught, we’re choosing to learn. There’s a lesson in every interaction, if we want there to be.
When we choose to learn, our active participation makes a difference.
2025-10-24 17:03:00
If someone with less skill and less dedication than you took over your job, could they degrade the quality of your work?
It’s not difficult to make a list of twenty things that could be done to make it late, expensive or defective.
Here’s the hard question: If someone with more skill and dedication took over your work, how many ways could they make it better?
The first step in improvement is imagining that it could happen.
We’re often not under the circumstances, we are the circumstances.
PS it’s not too late to avoid cheap chocolate and not too early to get the free Thanksgiving Reader.
2025-10-23 17:03:00
If there was a website you could visit to find out what the future held, how often would you visit it?
We do that with the weather, sometimes daily.
People are drawn to breaking news and social media buzz because they have an urge to know the now, which is a bit like the future, except it already happened.
One alternative is to spend that time and energy inventing the future instead. There are countless things we can do today to change tomorrow.
2025-10-22 17:03:00
It’s difficult to spend the entire day working on outcomes. Sooner or later, there are tasks to be done, tasks we believe will get us to the outcome we seek.
But it’s easy to spend the whole day on tasks, failing to recalibrate and ignoring the fact that the tasks might not be helping us get the results we set out to create in the first place.
2025-10-21 17:16:00
It’s quite likely that your favorite TV show wasn’t written by a single person. There’s a room filled with professionals, bouncing ideas back and forth, provoking each other and creating a script.
The songs on your favorite artist’s hit record might have been written by them, but the music involved other musicians, engineers, producers and perhaps compression, digital editing and tuning.
The most famous magicians in the world often hire other magicians to devise and produce the tricks they perform.
And every author I know uses a spell checker, an outside editor and other support to create their work.
We understand this, it’s part of the creation process.
Rembrandt had a studio of artisans, as does Kehinde Wiley. They didn’t make their own paint, either.
Almost nothing we encounter is fully handmade if we want to be literal about the “hand” part.
When an artist, entrepreneur or organizer says, “I made this,” what they almost certainly mean is, “the people and tools and tech in my writer’s room made this with my help and under my direction.” And that writer’s room goes all the way back to the influences beginning before kindergarten.
And yet, every time the scale or technological prowess of the assistance in the studio ratchets up, it makes us uncomfortable. Powerful new tech makes creators wary, and some consumers and patrons as well.
Until it doesn’t.
Then it’s normal. Then the standards are set and we have trouble imagining productive work without them. Painters who use artificial light so they can work at night. Artists who use a camera instead of a paintbrush. Photographers who use autofocus or digital cameras…
When we use a new technology as a shortcut to replace our judgment, we’ve handed over the human part, and it won’t work. The magic disappears.
But when we use new technology to provoke and amplify, when we use it for tasks instead of projects, we’re doing what we’ve always done–creating something for the people we seek to serve. Work that matters for people who care, created with vision and risk.
The quality of your work is directly related to the skills and agenda of the people and tools in your writer’s room.
