Business
- Make it shorter. No extra points for filling your time.
- Be really clear about what it’s for. If the presentation works, what will change? Who will be changed? Will people take a different course of action because of your work? If not, then why do you do a presentation?
- Don’t use slides as a teleprompter. If you have details, write them up in a short memo and give it to us after the presentation.
- Don’t sing, don’t dance, don’t tell jokes. If those three skills are foreign to you, this is not a good time to try them out.
- Be here now. The reason you’re giving a presentation and not sending us a memo is that your personal presence, your energy and your humanity add value. Don’t hide them. Don’t use a prescribed format if that format doesn’t match the best version of you.
Ben Affleck on ‘Air,’ New CEO Gig and Those Memes: “I Am Who I Am”
Lexy Perez writes a profile of Ben Affleck. It’s not bad.
So if DC came to you now and said, “Do you want to direct something?”
I would not direct something for the [James] Gunn DC. Absolutely not. I have nothing against James Gunn. Nice guy, sure he’s going to do a great job. I just wouldn’t want to go in and direct in the way they’re doing that. I’m not interested in that.
I’m not 100% convinced he won’t direct a movie in the new Gunn-led DC movie universe, but then again he might not.
The Hierarchy of Productivity
Least Important: Tips and tricks and hacks and shortcuts.
Very Important: Habits and routines. Your daily actions and behavior. Your system of execution.
Most Important: Vision and values. Your purpose, your priorities, your why.
I’m not sure I spend enough time on the most important.
How Shaquille O'Neal Made Himself Bigger Than Ever
Will Leitch, writing for Inc magazine, has a business oriented profile of Shaquille O’Neal.
And to be sure, O'Neal's approach to business, at least until recently, has looked like a holdover from an earlier era of celebrity business that was rooted in sponsorships, endorsements, and licensing deals. But a new model has appeared in recent years--led by LeBron James and carried forward by Kevin Durant, Patrick Mahomes, and others--that's less about being a smiling pitchman and more about building empires. Durant's venture-capital firm, 35 Ventures, was one of the earliest investors in Postmates and Coinbase. James's production company, SpringHill, has a $725 million valuation. The conventional wisdom holds that O'Neal, by comparison, is just cashing checks.
But then you take a closer look. Consider the sheer number of companies that O'Neal owns a piece of, often a substantial one: Papa Johns, Five Guys, Krispy Kreme, Auntie Anne's. The connected doorbell company Ring, well before Amazon acquired it in 2018 for north of $1 billion. Even Google, all the way back in 1999, long before its IPO, when it was valued at only $100 million. (Guess he didn't lose it all on that one.) O'Neal has opened more than a hundred franchises--car washes, health clubs, restaurants--around the country. He founded a film production company, Jersey Legends, and won an Oscar with a documentary about women's basketball great Lusia Harris. He founded a marketing agency called Majority that has created campaigns for clients including Sprite, GM, and the CDC.
I had no idea about some of his investments. I always saw Shaq as a spokesperson and not really that invested in the companies he “shilled” for, and I was wrong. I love the Starbucks story and what he learned.
The Last Minute
If you do anything at the last minute that takes more than a minute, you’re not organizing your project properly.
The last minute is not a buffer zone, nor is it the moment to double-check your work.
The last minute is simply sixty seconds to enjoy and to remind yourself that you successfully planned ahead.
This needs to be a giant poster in my office.
Signal v Noise Exits Medium
Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson on the reasons Signal V Noise has left Medium and created a new Wordpress site.
These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise. […]This fascinates me because for a short while I thought I might actually be able to use Medium as a platform for my own brand of writing. As much as I love the look and feel and audience of Medium, I wasn’t making any money with the partnership program and I decided the way Medium changed from a social networking blogging platform into a subscription based magazine wasn’t for me. It’s turned into something akin to the Huffington Post. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what I want.Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization. […]
That doesn’t mean we regret our time at Medium. Being on Medium helped propel some of our best writing to a whole new audience. But these days there’s less of a “what Medium is doing for us”, and a whole lot more of “what we’re doing for Medium”. It was a good time while it lasted, but good times are gone.
So, I’m in the slow process of removing various posts from Medium as well as writing and posting to my own site. I think I prefer it that way.
7 Things Successful People Ignore
I’m a sucker for listicles about what successful people do every day. Josh Spector has a good one.
Successful people share a common ability, but it’s not what you think.Read the rest.We hail them for their hard work, vision, and dedication, but overlook what truly sets them apart —an ability and willingness to ignore things.
No matter how talented or dedicated you are, your ultimate success hinges on your ability to overcome a gauntlet of powerful forces that can tempt, distract, and derail you.
Power and Responsibility
Seth Godin dips his toe in the comic book waters by mentioning one of the most iconic bits of writing ever in the medium, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Those words written by the late, great Stan Lee are the essence of Spider-Man. It’s a powerful lesson that millions of readers (and movie watchers) have heard. It’s a clear message.
Godin then goes on to say the lesson doesn’t hold. He believes it’s backfiring because so many don’t want the responsibility that comes with power.
He’s right in a sense that it’s far easier to follow than lead. Not everyone is a leader. He would probably argue that everyone is a leader. I disagree. However, everyone should be in charge of their own lives and make their own personal choices on leading, creating, innovating, and helping.
Many people are given great power, but they don’t know it or believe it.
In a democracy, we each have more power to speak up and to connect than we imagine. But most people don’t publish their best work or seek to organize people who care. Most of the time, it’s far easier to avert our eyes or blame the system or the tech or the dominant power structure.
He calls this a paradox. It isn’t. It’s freewill.
The Urgent Goes Away
Seth Godin on emergencies:
Those emergencies from a year ago (and a month ago), they’re gone.Always good to remember. And yes, it does make it easier to recognize the problem.Either they were solved, or they became things to live with. But emergencies don’t last. They fade.
Knowing that, knowing that you will outlast them, every single one of them, does it make it easier to see the problem, not the panic?
The Very Definition of Overwhelm
Shawn Blanc writes about feeling overwhelmed.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, then perhaps you feel as though you have been given too much. In fact, you’ve been given so much that you’re to the point of feeling buried and drown beneath a huge mass of stuff — from urgent issues, undone tasks, incoming requests of your time and energy, and more. And as a result you feel overpowered and defeated.His idea to combat this feeling is to create a to-do matrix.
I’m not a fan of this, but I get it. He says it allows you to know exactly what you’re in charge of and so you can then prioritize accordingly. In my experience, even if you aren’t in charge of something or the “owner” you still have to do it. You still have to get it all done.
It doesn’t make the overwhelmed feeling disappear. It only organizes it into a game of responsibility four square. I don’t find this concept liberating at all.
Why Being an Asshole Can Be a Valuable Life Skill
Mark Manson is back with more insight into human behavior. He equates being an asshole to totally committing to being disliked.
Of course, his caveat is being an ethical asshole. I’m not sure that unicorn exists, but Manson makes an argument.
The Art of Writing Short Emails
Frankie Rain on Medium lists a bunch of techniques to write shorter emails.
In short, writing short emails is a win-win. Now that you know how to do it, you can potentially save up to an hour a day dealing with your email inbox, while come out looking like a thought leader in the process.Everyone should read this and apply his ideas.
I Can’t Hear You
Julia Belluz at Vox does a deep dive into the increasingly high decibel levels of restaurants.
Being exposed to noise levels above 70 and 80 decibels — which many restaurants boast these days — causes hearing loss over time, Gail Richard, past president of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, told me. This kind of hearing loss is “preventable, but it’s also irreparable,” she added.
I’ve noticed the rising levels, and my wife and I avoid those locations when dining out. The piece outlines ways to fix acoustics, but unsurprisingly, they are expensive.
How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions
Jeff Maysh in The Daily Beast has one of the summer’s most engrossing stories.
Jerome Jacobson and his network of mobsters, psychics, strip-club owners, and drug traffickers won almost every prize for 12 years, until the FBI launched Operation ‘Final Answer.’
I knew a little bit about this story, but not all of it. The McSting is awesome.
How to Make Your Presentations Better
Seth Godin on making your presentation better. Good advice all around.
Like a Rolling Stone
I’m a sucker for redesigns and reimaginings of products and brands. This one from Rolling Stone is huge.
The old logo’s drop-shadowed, cross-hatched look is iconic, so making a change to a modern, flat logo is pretty bold. I think it works. It pops on the magazine shelf, but right now, it does because it’s this combination of familiar and different.
It’s an excellent evolution for a brand that plays a massive part in American culture.
Full of Marks
I think this story of grifter and con artist Anna Delvey by Jessica Pressler in The Cut has got to be one of the most jaw-dropping exposés I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read it, go. Do it now before it becomes a blockbuster of a movie.
The Great High School Imposter
Daniel Riley writing in GQ details the story of Artur Samarin, who pulled off one of the most amazing hoaxes of all time. This story is going to be a movie. It’s too good.