On a good day, my bongo score looks like this:
Compared to all the people who have played this morning, it’s right at the top. That could be great…
Except I’m not being compared to every player in the world. The first graph is built to compare every player who has never previously won the competition.
Here’s the curve of all players, including the 500 previous champions. To win the day, you need to get through that dip that most players don’t achieve.
Same score, different ranking.
Here’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce running against the other parents at a school picnic:
I’m sure she deflated the egos of quite a few parents, the ones who usually win at these sorts of things.
Choosing our competition is the most productive decision we make each day.
The internet has made the world smaller, and the universe of competitors larger. But it’s still local–awareness, trust and convenience drive choice.
To be chosen, we need to be seen as the best in the world. But we get to choose which world.
Rivian has a new ad, starring Bill Murray.
It’s not a great ad (more on that below) but the remarkable thing is that it features the quirky, beloved and scarce Bill Murray. Between the movie rights, music and Bill, they had to have spent many millions of dollars, and it doesn’t look like they bought a single slot of ad time. For less total cost than a boring Ford commercial in 1985, they hooked up with two icons.
That’s a complete flip from hiring an unknown to pitch your brand of freeze dried coffee but spending millions on network TV.
Thirty years later, the attention equation is now reversed. No one watches an ad on YouTube unless they want to, and so, your talent buy is your media buy.
This is going to amplify a different sort of creative agency as well as give recognizable talent more leverage. A good ad in the TV days was annoying but led to action. A good ad today creates enrollment and buzz. Attention is insufficient, though. Ghostbusters was seen by millions, but it didn’t sell many vintage Hearses.
[And why is this a lousy ad? I love my Rivian, but not because it has a Ghostbuster button. The first job of advertising a new brand is to earn it a position, to give us a story about what you’d like to stand for. Who it’s for and how we’re going to feel when we wear the label you’re offering us. Jaguar dropped the ball when they re-branded last year. AI companies are terrible at this as well, and it appears that Rivian missed a chance with Bill.]
Don’t cross the streams.
PS While we’re on the topic, please don’t buy cheap chocolate.
When focused on the things we can change, dissatisfaction is a powerful tool.
Accepting everything else–the parts we can’t or won’t change–reserves our energy for the places where it’s useful.
The tricky part is telling them apart and then focusing our agency and leverage on the useful.
Solving problems for others is how we create value.
Civilized culture is based on a thin sort of friction. You don’t yell at the library, act boorish at a restaurant or hassle a minor celebrity at the supermarket. It’s just not done.
The result of these human layers and inferences are cues and norms that add up to a connected, generative society.
Add selfish hustle, AI agents and cheap bots, and the thin friction is insufficient. They can multiply exponentially, care little about being shunned and have no interest in their reputation.
Fake sincerity is now cheap. Interchangeable identities subvert a generations-long tradition of owning your words and your actions.
You’ll miss the thin friction when it’s gone, replaced by taller, thicker walls. You might already be noticing it.
Interactivity and permeability to those we don’t know well were largely overlooked foundations in the creation of learning, science and culture. We figured out a scalable approach to “knock knock, who’s there” but now it’s going away.
You won’t be able to knock unless you’re invited first. Of course, the invitation will probably be filtered out.
The djinn go back millennia, powerful and elusive creatures of the supernatural. They show up across time and culture.
Three hundred years ago, Charles Perrault retold a short story about a headstrong woodcutter and his wife. On being granted three wishes from Jupiter (archetype for the genie of legend), he accidentally blurts out that he’d like sausage for dinner. One wish, gone. His wife calls him a fool, and he responds by turning her nose into a sausage. Now, with just one wish left, he’s torn between being rich (but having a wife with a sausage attached to her nose) or using the third wish to end up right where he started.
Marital harmony and common sense prevail, and he ends up where he started, but filled with regret for what could have been. Ever since, we’ve been telling stories about people who screw up their wishes.
The persistence of genie morality in our culture is bigger than a Disney marketing ploy. It’s an important reminder about responsibility, long-term thinking and how often we fail to recognize how much agency we actually have. The three are woven into a narrative that often leaves us with a sausage attached to our noses.
In this moment, the biggest technology revolution humans have ever lived through, we’re all at risk of getting our wishes wrong. Careful what you wish for. But don’t forget to wish.
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