Here’s a simple rubric for outsourcing:
If you’re never going to need to do this again, and it’s easier to do it than to instruct someone else to do it, by all means, do it yourself.
If doing it yourself will give you joy or satisfaction that is greater than the productivity boost you’ll get from leverage or better tools, by please do it yourself.
But if you’re going to do it more than once, and the customer can’t tell if you did it yourself or not, perhaps you should have someone else do it or build the tools to get it done more efficiently.
Next time will happen sooner than you expect. Better to invest a bit more now than to spend for that shortcut again and again.
Unreasonable commitment is unreasonable. It happens before there’s a guarantee it will work. It’s out of proportion to what others think is standard. Unreasonable commitment is dedication, persistence, care, energy, connection and investment that doesn’t seem to make sense.
You can’t do this in everything, and you probably can’t do it all the time. That’s why it’s unreasonable to expect.
I’ve been fortunate enough to do hundreds of podcasts. The hosts are even kinder and more professional than you’d imagine, showing up for months or years with virtually no listeners. They do it because they care.
But only one podcast host had me in tears before we began recording.
Last September, I spent the day with Mel Robbins and her team of more than a dozen professionals. We recorded for four hours, two episodes worth, and then they quietly spent six months editing the work.
Mel’s even more Mel-like in person. She’s fully present, committed and yes, over the top. Our conversation led to my new book and course, and it also reminded me that better is possible. Not just for the person in front of the camera, but for everyone on the team, for the guests and for the people listening.
Neil Pasricha wrote about Mel a decade ago. Before last year’s bestseller or the Golden Globe nomination or the podcast hit its stride. It’s a choice.
Unreasonable commitment doesn’t seem like a good plan until after it works.
He also understood the process of organizing a plant to build a car.
Scott Belsky knows how to use Photoshop and remembers what it was like to run a small business.
And Sarah Jones knows exactly what is required to be on stage, alone, in a crowded theater.
The world keeps changing (faster than ever) and leading our team (and our career) requires us to do things we didn’t used to know how to do.
In essence, the CEO of every organization, of every size, is more incompetent than ever before. It’s not enough to know how to use the product and have empathy for your customers.
Are you making decisions about AI, supply chains, vendor management, the sales pipeline or employee health?
It’s hard to wing it if you haven’t flown before, and now most of what CEOs do (even for companies of one or two people) has little to do with the actual product or service on offer.
One alternative is to freak out, bury your head and hope for the best.
The other is to use the system to learn about the system. Instead of winging it, find the time to learn enough to make good decisions and to understand the tools well enough to benefit from hiring people to use them.
Because that’s what CEOs make. They make decisions.
The Knot, Problems Can Be Solved, will be available in September.
And this week, I’m launching a video course that covers the ideas in the book. You can find the course, and how to get it at no extra cost, here.
We’re surrounded by problems. Problems create the arc of our days, and solving them creates value for ourselves and for others. There are big problems, the ones that are on a grand stage, and local problems, related to our career, our peers or our projects. If it’s a problem, it can be solved.
The best reason for me to publish a book is to help inspire conversations and the momentum that leads to change. Books give us an excuse to engage, and they create a portable bundle of ideas that are easy to share.
Several hundred people have already read and listened to the book, and the conversations it’s creating (and the stuck that’s disappearing) are thrilling to see.
In talking with folks over the last year and a half, the same theme returns–the frustration of being stuck. We see our world changing and feel the tension, but it’s easy to lose sight of what we can do and how we can show up to make an impact.
Without a doubt, there are situations everywhere. Situations are uncomfortable and unhappy, but they have no solution. We can’t do anything about a situation, so our best course of action is to acknowledge it and get back to work on the problems we can solve instead. Gravity is a situation, getting to the moon and back is a problem.
My approach to bringing this book to the world is to give booksellers the confidence they need to support it by enrolling as many pre-orders as I can. By creating digital interactions and courses, I’m giving readers a chance to engage with the ideas now, and then receive the book/audiobook when it ships in September.
I appreciate your trust, and I hope you find the book and the course useful.
A hardcover book printed in 1925 is almost indistinguishable from one printed yesterday. It’s easy to think not much has changed.
But book publishing isn’t about printing, and it’s a useful metaphor for the systems changes we’re seeing all around us.
The book publishing system was based on scarcity.
A successful bookstore was perfect. It had exactly the right number of books — more wouldn’t fit, and fewer wouldn’t pay the rent. The only way for a book publisher to get a new book into the stores was to get the bookseller to take an old book out.
As a result of this chokepoint, distribution became the focus. Publishers came to see bookstores, not readers, as their customers—which is why there are few ads for books, or toll-free numbers to call. There were plenty of authors, so publishers selected which ones got a distribution investment. And their timing and launch strategies all revolved around the bookstores.
Bookstores have to make smart choices. Months in advance, they choose which new books to take on (and which to leave behind.) If they were wrong, if a new book they don’t carry has an audience, then they lose sales because readers go elsewhere.
The small change? Get rid of the scarcity of shelf space. Amazon never removes a book to make room for a new book. They have all the books.
The publishers’ existing strategies make little sense when the scarcity of shelf space goes away.
One industry term is the “lay down” which describes how many books a major publisher needs to print and distribute to get good nationwide coverage at launch. For books that hope to be bestsellers, that number was 25,000 copies or so… a book from a well-known author would have that many copies in the world before a single copy was sold.
Today, for many books like this, the laydown is 250. 1% of what it used to be.
This is why the industry is shifting so much attention to pre-orders. The online world not only eradicated space (you can buy things from anywhere, so shelves don’t matter), it also shifted time. You can indicate interest by buying things long before they’re distributed.
Bookstores don’t stock a new book unless they see it’s already been selling online.
Another example: Pop music.
Through a happy accident, the typical record store was exactly big enough to hold all the music that the typical listener might ever hear on the radio. The radio as a sampling medium was about the same size as the physical distribution medium of the store. You didn’t hear hula music on the radio and you couldn’t buy it at Tower Records.
First, we blew up the store. The internet meant that any song you wanted, you could download for free if you cared enough, or listen to it on YouTube (if you only cared a little.)
Then, we blew up the radio station. The internet meant that the sampling medium went from DJ-curated to streaming-on-demand. And we demanded.
Change the distribution, change the medium.
There are still hits, but they’re not driven by A&R teams, record-store distribution deals or payola. The sampling medium and the revenue medium have become the same.
And one more shift, one that’s changed both industries:
The cost of making a book or a song has plummeted. Thanks to AI, autotune and other tools, combined with the roll-your-own distribution of ebooks and social media, anyone can create and self-publish. So, anyone will.
Scarcity of creation and scarcity of distribution have been replaced by a surplus of both.
What doesn’t scale? Trust, attention and belonging.
AI is making relatively small changes to very big systems, everywhere we look. But if those systems are built on the desires of humans, we will need to earn trust, attention and belonging more than ever before.
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