If you start moving forward with this theory, you’ll soon find outliers. Sugar only has five letters, and watercress has ten. If we want to stick with our theory, we’ll have to come up with more and more complex reasons why we ignore some of the data and embrace the rest.

Of course, this is absurd.

And yet we do it all the time. Ornate explanations about the stock market, SEO or politics. Charts and graphs where we spend most of our time fitting a plot to a few dots, or amplifying the obscure to justify the theory.

A simple theory that matches the data is much more likely to accurately explain causation. It might not be a comfortable theory, or one that matches our trajectory, but it’s a better theory.

It turns out that the number of letters is completely irrelevant to how fattening a food is. I’m sorry you spent all this time on research, but you’re on the wrong path.

If you want to know why your marketing, your investments or your arguments are floundering, it might pay to reconsider the theory, not look for more data to justify the current one.

        

Now, armed with AI, it’s significantly easier to bury arcane, unfair or unanticipated clauses in agreements, even (and especially) if we don’t expect it.

You shouldn’t sign anything until you’ve had your AI read it. And if it’s important, have your lawyer and her AI read it too.

The next step seems reasonable to me: You and I describe our agreement in plain English and then our mutual AI’s work out a written agreement that actually captures what we’ve agreed on. And for the avoidance of doubt, append each AI’s interpretation to the contract itself.

It shouldn’t be confrontational or adversarial. After all, it’s an agreement.

        

On the other hand, here are a dozen things many of us can do (or do better) if we stick with it:

Three-ball juggling
Touch typing
Rubik’s Cube
Drawing
Mental math
Memorizing a deck of cards or people’s names
Meditating
History or geography
Finding joy in small things
Typography
Ukulele
Italic handwriting
Morse code
Excel and HTML

There are two hard parts:

1. The seven minutes after minute three
2. Doing it again tomorrow

“I can’t do that,” might often be more honestly reported as, “I haven’t chosen to be able to do that.”

        

The stores were nominated by you, the readers of this blog, and are only lightly curated. There’s no business model for the site, just a collective sharing. Click and explore.

There are three ways to visit the site:

The HOTLIST creates a grid of the stores. The odd numbered entries are random, the even ones are sorted by the number of clicks they’ve received. Every time the page is loaded, these re-sort based on popularity.

The CATEGORY view shows you all the listings in a reasonably coherent directory.

And the RANDOM view is just what you’d imagine.

I hope it gives small businesses a bit of a boost.

Also, we’ve reached the last few weeks for the holiday bundle of three of my books and a handful of spindices. Sold only by the friendly folks at Porchlight.

[If you missed the original form for nominations, I’ll open it again for one more batch. I can’t promise to include everything, but I’m thrilled at the creativity and care that these merchants and creators have brought to their work.]

Bonus: a lovely post by Ari about Purple Cow and the magic of being hard to explain.

        

It’s a signal. It might be proof that you offered it to the wrong person, or that the right person saw something about your work that didn’t serve their needs. Without learning from this signal, we’re doomed to experience it again and again.

What do we know for sure?

It was rejected.

What else?

Nothing. The reasons listed in the rejection letter are almost certainly made up. Perhaps they’re insulating themselves from being re-sold (“you said you didn’t like the color, but we have other colors!”) or perhaps they’re protecting your feelings. It could be that they aren’t telling themselves the truth, or don’t want to be hassled for telling you the truth.

Few people explain their rejection with, “I’m afraid,” or “I wanted to do it but my boss won’t let me,” or “you have bad breath and I don’t like you.”

Being rejected hurts, and we’re likely to marinate in the pain. We imagine that the person who rejected us understands everything about what we offered, is a rational actor and cares as much as we do. While we’re at it, we personalize, amplify and multiply the rejection.

But all we really know is that this person, on this day, in this situation, hearing the story the way we told it, said no.

Years ago, I self-published a booklet for political activists. My timing was good, and I had a chance to sell the books from an organizer’s booth at a march on the very topic my book was about. It was a beautiful April day, and I stood on the side of route as the march went by. More than 400,000 passed my table, and I sold four books.

That’s 399,996 rejections. Maybe more.

Was it the price? Halfway through the march, I lowered it from $10 to $1, just to have a good story to blog a few decades later.

Sales did not increase. Perhaps it was the color of the jacket, the page count or the typo on page 32? None of those things.

What did I learn? That people at a march are at the march to march, not to shop.

Watch what people do, not what they say. And if you really want to learn something, change the situation and see what happens the next time.

Learning from rejection begins with understanding the lesson that’s being offered.

        

Sorry to share that.

Human beings evolved to have a distaste for things that are almost, but not quite, the usual thing. It takes a while for someone who wasn’t raised with cilantro to like it–the same with hot sauce. When Edison first showed people his moving pictures, people screamed. Our brain is warning us that categories are getting surprising and we should be on alert.

As AI spreads through the culture, we’re seeing plenty of mediocre AI-style writing. And then humans subconsciously start writing in that style because they see it so often. And finally, a grudging acceptance that it sounds okay. We’ve been through this a hundred times before.

No one asks to get creeped out. It’s usually done to us, not for us. But, over time, the creep fades.

Like most warnings, we ought to keep two things in mind:

1. All warnings are not the same. We need to decide which ones to ignore.
2. Just because a warning fades doesn’t mean that the problem is gone.

The creepiness fades.

But at the same time, there’s a creeping change as trusted and expected elements of our culture fade away.

        

Thanks for checking it out.

Also, here’s a preview of the three-book holiday bundle. It’s limited to the first 170 folks.

        

I’m not sure the evidence supports this. After all, other similar organizations are thriving–drawing from precisely the same labor pool.

Sure, it’s easier to be a coach if Michael Jordan is on your team, but it turns out that creating the conditions for commitment, learning and resilience are the boss’s job, not the people you hired to follow along.

        

Great designers know who it’s for. And the design is for them, not for the designer.

Annie Jean-Baptiste teaches us about restrictive design. This is what happens when the designer fails to identify and recognize who the work is for, and then leaves people out. “Exclusion is a business decision, even when you did not mean to make it.”

Not everything needs to be designed for everyone. But all well-designed experiences and products are designed for someone.

Name your people, invite them in and give them what they need.

        

Putting effort into how much ambiguity we can handle can define a career and give us a path forward in our social and cultural interactions as well.

Our desire for clarity is based on safety and how we think about risk. If you know exactly what to expect, you won’t be held responsible for things that feel like they’re out of your control.

Clarity pushes us to put things in a category, a predictable box, well-labeled.

Ambiguity, on the other hand, is the nature of the future. All interactions with other people, with complex systems and with what hasn’t happened yet are somewhat unpredictable.

That range of outcomes is where possibility lies.

“I’m not sure.”

“This might not work.”

“We’ll be okay.”

Pretending that the ambiguous is certain is a short-term sort of bravado that works in the movies and politics but not in real life.

For the rest of us, there’s the chance to embrace the soft edges of ‘perhaps’ on our way to make things better.

HT to Seth B.