Picture Perfect Langauge

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“It’s about having a conversation with the consumer,” said advertiser Linda Kaplan Thaler. In their language.

Legibility affects our understanding. In the alpha erosion, words mean competition and market mechanism posts we looked at this idea from a producer’s angle. If a business earns excess returns it attracts competition. It’s the non-repeatable processes that allow a business to remain dominant. That is, are the advantages legible to competitors?

Another application of this idea is product development. Customers hire jobs to be done to make progress in their lives and successful product development follows the legibility of customer wants.

Thaler recalls one night on The Johnny Carson Show when an actress commented about needing her camera for a “Kodak moment”.

I looked at my team and asked if we had used that before. No, everyone said, that’s brand new.

Bingo. That’s customer language. Linda’s team had the Kodak account and making Kodak moments legible is what they sold.

Successful businesses hide legibility from their competitors and find legibility in their customers.

All-Star Differences

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“At some level, you have to rethink the all-star game in its entirety. If you think about its origins when barely any games were televised and you could only see American League or National League games if your local team was in that league. The all-star game was the only time you got to see players from the other league.” – Adi Wyner 

This time is different states that things are different when the rules change. The covid vaccine is different because the rules for vaccines changed. The 2010s technology boom was different because of accessible technology like AWS. But rules changes accumulate in ‘looser’ domains as well.

All-star games are different because the economic, social, and technological rules have changed. Major League Baseball held its first all-star game in 1933! How things have changed indeed.   

Now, Wyner wonders, how can we get players to care? – or the equivalent. The home run derby is fun, but the game is less so. The three-point contest is fun, but the game is not. We’ve always done it this way. So what! This time is different

Bourbon Jobs

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We hire jobs to be done for three reasons: functional, emotional, and social. This is clear at the liquor store.

In college, we bought cheap beer. The function was to get buzzed and the social job was to have fun doing it. We might upgrade to Coors Light or even PBR which our favorite wing place always had on tap. Even the upgrade is social.

Liquors differ. They’re packaged more colorfully. The containers are shaped. Their origins matter. It’s more story. People like us drink things like this.

In his book, Pappyland, Wright Thompson discusses the bourbon’s brand:

“The reason Pappy’s office was built to look like Monticello, with the leafy grounds of the Stitzel-Weller plant made to feel like an oasis from modern life, was because he knew that bourbon drinkers were often motivated by nostalgia—It’s a drink made for contemplating, and what is usually being contemplated is the easy and often false memory of better days.”

If our core emotions fire on danger, food, and sex then bourbon serves anti-danger. Bourbon serves ‘southern comfort’. It feels like the good old days, with dad or grandpa. Bourbon ads are warm. It’s a drink to sip. We never drank bourbon in college.

Vodka sells sex. Rum sells fun. Gin sells sophistication. Tequila sells a little bit of everything.

“A bottle of bourbon,” Thompson writes, “is a coded way for so many unspoken ideas to be transmitted and understood.” Often jobs are coded, sometimes they’re an enigma. Sometimes not.

But to really understand bourbon’s job, we’d have to go deeper. What’s the context? If this were a documentary what would it look like and feel like? Who is there? What are they wearing and where did they come from?

Solving the EV Problem, 2

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Paying 1,000 people $1 in interest is different, according to Credit Karma, from paying one person $1,000 in a lottery. 

That same thinking can be applied to electric automobiles.

Eighty percent of drivers drive fewer than fifty-five miles each day. Half of all trips are less than five miles. Yet vehicle range is a prominent selling point.*

We’ve tried to solve the EV problem before but here is another idea. 

Fuel Rods are rechargeable lithium batteries used for charging phones, bluetooth speakers or headphones, or whatever. But they can be swapped at any Fuel Rod location. You see these at airports. Here is the map of Orlando swap spots. 

Most of the time users can recharge on their own schedule. Sometimes users need a fresh swap. 

Can EVs do that? 

Previously, we focused on the subjective. The rules of chemistry dictate how quickly an EV can charge but it’s the rules of psychology that influence the enjoyability of the wait. 

But we can change ‘how quick’!

Swap the batteries. 

Gas stations sell diesel, unleaded, and propane fuels. They sell fat, carbohydrates, and protein calories. Sheetz has the best air pumps. In Florida, my state, an absurd number have car washes too. Why can’t they sell automotive fuel rods too? 

* There’s also the availability heuristic. Range is easy to understand and compare so it appears important. 

Greeting Card Competition

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In Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christiansen‘s book about jobs to be done, he talks about the three jobs groups: functional, social, and emotional. Each depends on the situation.

Clayton’s classic example is the milkshake. It functions as nutrition and provides emotional entertainment during a commuter’s morning.

In the afternoon that same milkshake provides a functional snack and an emotional connection between parent and child as an after-school treat.

Lovepop co-founder Wombi Rose talked about the depths those jobs have.

“It’s about helping you with your occasions. We want to make sure you can quickly send a thoughtful and creative gift. We’ve found that everyone wants to be more creative and thoughtful but it takes time. We want to help you with those two challenges. We’ll remind you of those occasions and make it super easy to do something that is creative and thoughtful where what you do is based on your relationship.”

Meaningful messages are costly.

In high school, one of my made-up start-ups was a celebration card company that sent out cards on your behalf. Rather than your forgetful self, hire us to send Aunt Jan’s card on time every time. As my friends pointed out, it kinda took the charm out of the whole experience.

Rory Sutherland, the alchemist, points out that digital wedding invitations work – so long as they’re costly. A song works. A poem worlds. Something that demonstrates an investment works.

Lovepop’s attempt is to link people’s lives to the cards they buy. Does your special someone have a certain plant they love, like a Japanese Maple? Do they like a certain animal? There’s a card for that.

Jobs gives language to discuss the depths. It’s like the wavelength spectrum. We can only see so much. That’s our visual language. But our tools give us the ability to understand a whole lot more. Just like jobs.

Capital Arbitrage

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Moneyball is an important idea because it represents hidden value.

Things that are valuable but not perceived as valuable cost less.

Things that are valuable can be exchanged for other things that are valuable.

We can call this idea “capital”.

Leadership capital. From Jocko Willink, when leaders make sacrifices for their team, their team will make sacrifices for them.

Social capital. The quality of a person’s relationships. This is difficult to measure.

Career capital. From Cal Newport, rare and valuable jobs require rare and valuable skills. For example, George Lucas cashed in some career capital in exchange for time capital to work on Star Wars.

Financial capital. Like emergency funds, an exchange of money for time.

Institutional capital. Financial capital with a specific set of terms: who, what, and how.

Venture capital. Financial capital with less specific, if any, terms.

Working capital. A business’s oxygen. There is a lot of gasping in Shoe Dog (Nike), The Inside Scoop (Ben & Jerry’s), and Chocolate Wars (Hershey, Cadbury).

…

The Bored Apes of 2021 was a capital arbitrage. Early crypto adopters spent thousands to buy cryptocurrencies which appreciated to hundreds of thousands and they bought Bored Apes. Were the Apes worth 1,000 or 100,000?

These capitals offer arbitrage too. It’s just up to you.

Mary and Rory: Two Great Brits

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If you want to change, writes Katy Milkman, consider the advice of Mary Poppins. In every job that must be done. There is an element of fun. And a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

But we don’t do this. “When committing to a healthy new eating regimen, we buy a basket of the most sinless foods – broccoli, carrots, kale, and quinoa – without regard for taste.”

Ahh, yes. Of course! Rory Sutherland enters.

We are rationalizing creatures. We ask, Why is this so cheap? If junk food tastes great then healthy food must taste bad. It’s the gross medicines that work best!

But, but, but, Milkman butts in. That’s what the research shows.

Think of things you want to change as chronic conditions. Diabetes is a chronic condition. Stress can be chronic too.

But so is shelter. That’s a recurring problem people deal with every day. So is food. And Milkman argues, so are your habits. So make them fun.

…

We have learned a lot from Milkman and Sutherland because they both share lessons that work. It’s not whether something works, but where, when, and with who. Monster Energy is large, full of caffeine and calories, and it tastes great. It found a where, when, and with who. Snickers found a context too.

Boiling water softens a carrot and hardens an egg. Solutions must match their contexts.

The Starbucks of Authors

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There’s no way this can be good, or so I thought. He’s the McDonald’s of authors. Cheap and everywhere. 

I was wrong, he’s more like Starbucks. 

James Patterson by James Patterson was fun! And reading should be fun. 

An “ego-biography” the book runs through Patterson’s life, from blue-collar Massachusetts to New York madmen to Palm Beach production. And the book runs. It’s fast. Short chapters. Strong stories. No wonder people love the guy. 

If there’s a summary of Patterson’s story it’s this quote from his grandmother, hungry dogs run faster. Peterson was hungry. 

He worked at McLean Hospital where “I had begun scribbling short stories…I couldn’t stop writing if I wanted to.” Catholic high school, Catholic college, a year or so at Vanderbilt, writing all the way. 

He moved to New York City. Patterson got a job at J Walter Thompson. The job was “hell” but “I’d write early in the morning, every morning. I’d lock my office door at lunchtime and write for half an hour. I’d write on the plane during every business trip. I’d write pages at four in the morning, and I’d write again until midnight. I refused to give up on myself.” 

He succeeded in New York City, rising through the ranks of J Walter Thompson. “Why? Because I chopped wood—I worked hard—and I could write. I could also write fast.” 

He wrote in New York City, finishing his first book. Then, he got “the best advice” from a fellow author, “Write another book. Start tonight”. So Patterson wrote. 

He sold in New York City. In 1993 he published the first Alex Cross novel. By 1996 he was just an author. 

And then he became ‘Starbucks’. 

At the same time I read James Patterson by James Patterson, Chat GPT became popular. The AI tool will reshape work. In Average is Over, Tyler Cowen writes about how the most successful chess teams are not computers or humans but humans using computers. Similarly, Chat GPT will not replace ‘knowledge workers’ but the best knowledge workers will use Chat GPT. 

That analogy makes sense.

Good organizations use leverage like people, money, and intellectual property to scale their operations. Technology companies are easy examples, but we’ve looked deeply at why Disney had to buy Pixar for the same reasons. 

That analogy makes sense. 

Except when it comes to writing. 

Patterson’s collaborations were icky, were too processed. But that’s the wrong analogy. 

Patterson writes an outline and has his collaborators fill it out. But don’t think “middle school notes”. Instead, think about a manager asking someone to start a new product. James starts the car, the collaborators run the race. 

It works because Patterson is mostly hands-off. Peter de Jonge wrote, “One of the best things about working with Jim, and this may be the key to why he is a publishing juggernaut, is that he is almost pathologically open-minded. If an idea adds stakes or drama or weight or in any helpful way propels the story forward, he’s game. As he told me once, you can tell any story you want, but it has to be a story.”

It reminded me of how Apple built the iPhone. Steve Jobs told the team what to do, they built it, reviewed it with Steve, got feedback, and built more. Jobs didn’t tell them how – well, sometimes he did and sometimes he was wrong – he just told them what. The same with Patterson. 

And this is great. Patterson’s book was fun. Reading should be fun. More Patterson books, more fun!

Pump Up the Incentives

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One human mistake is psychological myopia – thinking our view of the world is the world.

When Andy Galpin trained future NFL players for the draft he noticed something “odd”. These players stood to earn huge sums of money, achieve the highest success in their lifelong pursuit, and had all the resources in the world behind them – yet they skipped workouts.

Rather, they skipped Saturday morning workouts.

Our view, as a non-NFL player is, “C’mon focus!”

Their view as NFL players is, “C’mon, Friday night!”

Fortunately, we can design our modern environment for our evolved brains.

Galpin wanted Saturday mornings to be recovery: massage, yoga, stretching. Hence the low attendance. But once he added biceps and triceps attendance increased. The guys loved the pump. After the athletes were in the gym it was easy to tack on the recovery session.

Galpin’s (3-hour!) Optimize Your Training Program for Fitness & Longevity podcast is about intentionality and that takes design. Want to live your best, strongest, healthiest life? Design it.