What we’re actually doing is slicing our focus, jumping from one thing to another and then back again.

All that jumping decreases our productivity and worse, erodes our peace of mind.

You’re only doing one thing at a time anyway. Might as well embrace that instead of spending so much time shifting gears.

        

The marketer who decided to improve the picture was making a choice, one with consequences. When you choose to disappoint a customer later so you can make a sale right now, you’ve also chosen to create disappointment for a living.

If you’re not proud of it, don’t serve it. Improving the image on the package shouldn’t be a substitute for making something people want to buy.

        

First, the path is barely noticeable. But then, others see the hint of a path and walk on it, making it more clear. Finally, the path becomes the route.

Sometimes there’s a small rut. But a rut shifts gravity and wheels or feet land in the rut, making it deeper. This is how moguls appear on ski hills as well.

When it rains, the paths and ruts fill with water, and we call them puddles.

Of course, puddles are a metaphor.

Puddles only exist when there’s been some sort of motion that caused a depression that could collect the water. If you want to see how the audience is responding, how the culture is shifting, how your customers are acting–look for the puddles.

Fill in the rut and a new one will appear somewhere else. There are almost always puddles.

        

In fact, it’s such a relatively small expense that it’s easy to simply avoid it. Send the money to the bottom line and focus on the parts that are actually worth paying for.

Gratuitous bonuses send signals.

They tell the customer that you have the resources and confidence to pay attention to the little things.

They help distinguish extraordinary items from ordinary ones (after all, the folks in coach show up at the arrivals gate at exactly the same time).

And they deliver a story of status, one that’s internalized and often shared.

I’ve never seen a product or service that couldn’t be improved with metaphorical warm pistachios.

Pass the nuts.

        

Social media platforms fall into a trap like this when they seek to grow. For example, at the beginning, Substack had a very high signal to noise ratio–plenty of good ideas and so readers were happy to expect that an email from them or recommendation from the platform was worthwhile. It didn’t get put in the spam or promo folder, because it wasn’t spam.

But now, having run out of the highest-quality content, the site is making it easy for hustlers to import vast lists of email addresses and quickly grow (or appear to grow) their lists. I’m getting unsolicited and unwanted”subscriptions” often, and the easiest thing to do is just send all of their messages to spam. Which hurts the original good currency. Once the bad “money” shows up, it attracts more bad money.

The same thing happens when trusted sources start padding their content with AI slop, or when a small business inserts a few low-value, high-margin items into their sampler pack.

Attention is precious. Trust is even more so.

When you trade them both for growth, it’s inevitable that you’ll fade away.

        

Mindfulness can improve your life. So can stillness and spiritual grounding. This is not a post about that.

Breathing is an architectural challenge and a chemical necessity.

We breathe about 20 pounds of air a day (and if you’ve ever tried to weigh air, you can imagine that this is quite a bit.) Why bother?

The body is fueled by a series of chemical reactions, and most of them require the right balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The body is finely tuned to be aware of the available quantity of each, and reacts accordingly.

We evolved to have a particularly complicated system for ingesting air. We have two nostrils and a mouth. Thanks to speech and other requirements, the mouth is well suited to rapid inhalations and exhalations.

Which is a problem.

The first lesson of James Nestor’s book is simple: Shut your mouth.

Spend three days breathing only through your nose. Even when you work out. Especially then. (Except swimming. I tried. It doesn’t work.)

And consider slightly taping your mouth when you sleep. Just a small piece of surgical tape, about a half inch across–right in the center. Put some lip balm on before applying so it won’t irritate you. Don’t do this if you have apnea or other issues, or a doctor who suggests against it. It’s a very small piece of tape, easily removed.

That’s it. Three days.

Nestor spends hundreds of pages explaining a huge range of benefits and volumes of peer-reviewed research. Some of it might be a bit overblown, some is surprising, but all of it makes sense.

But you don’t need a Ph.D. to determine how it feels after three days. It’s like discovering you’ve been using the wrong door to get into and out of your house.

I had such a good experience that I felt like it was worth sharing. Breathe through your nose, small sips, not gulps. You may find that you sleep better, snore less, run further, and are less stressed.

No one told me. Now we know.

        

Courage, on the other hand, is the commitment to take risks and work hard to make something better than most people think it needs to be.

Example:

Open Source software (the real kind, not the window-dressing some big companies use) takes courage. To share your code, to invite others to participate, to have to cycle faster and hide less–it doesn’t always make traditional investors happy, and it can be a hassle. But time has shown us, again and again, it leads to resilience, to better performance and to a tighter connection between users and providers.

The conversation behind most of the excuses all around us is built on a simple choice: what’s the purpose of our work? Why are we showing up, putting in the cycles and making promises to the world? The short-term path to quick returns is usually excusable, and then we can get back to what we were doing, even if we’re hesitant to label it. “We don’t do this because it’s important, we do it because we’re getting paid right now to do it and because it’s easier.”

On the other hand, if your purpose is bigger, longer-term or more important than the easy path to quick profit, labeling it is important.

Tom Peters called it Excellence. It’s valuable because it’s scarce, and it’s scarce because there are plenty of available excuses. Excellence is an option, and excellence is a choice.

It’s much easier to find courage if you know why you’re looking for it.

        

When the Mac offered typesetting to the masses, typographers were incensed. They had grown up with lead or photo composition, they understood why it was called a ‘case’ and they knew how to kern. The typographers warned us that we’d soon be inundated by ugly, careless or even unreadable type, and everything would get worse. They were half right.

There was a lot of bad typography, but some great innovations as well. And the typographers who stuck it out ended up with far more opportunities (and more creative outlets) than they originally had.

When digital photography arrived, the skilled craftspeople who understood Bokeh and f-stops warned us about the same thing. People took their own pictures anyway. Many were lousy. Some changed the art form. And there are still professional photographers, even if the workaday gigs have mostly faded away.

And many doctors don’t want you to google your symptoms. Because it can lead to bad outcomes, and because it undermines their status and authority… but it has also saved countless lives. There are more patients than doctors, and so we go ahead and do what feels good to us, not to them.

A copywriter might say that it’s never okay to have an AI do your writing, but that same person uses AI to retouch photos or do the first pass on their spreadsheets… They even use a spellchecker instead of a human editor. You’re a producer some of the time, but also a consumer, and the consumer in you wants the best available option, regardless of how it was made.

These technological changes often have negative side effects. They don’t always make things better. But they happen when consumers insist. Mass production, factory farming, frozen food–they replace craft with accessibility and efficiency.

The market doesn’t care that much about the hard-won expertise of those that came before. And the shifts create muck and slop and then, over time, quality and taste and expertise often find their footing again.

The best way to complain is to make good stuff.

        

When a powerful new technology arrives, it offers us wishes. Too often, we waste them, asking it to take on simple chores or offer us trivial conveniences.

We’re in the biggest moment of technical change of our lifetimes. What are you using your wishes for?

        

But when we remove the friction that gives people traction on their journey, they flounder.

Remove the hassles that people don’t care about, but celebrate the hassles that make it worth the effort.