A suite at a New York Knicks game costs more than $30,000. Is that a donation to the team?

Why do we differentiate between the money spent on a Super Bowl ticket and the check we write for a worthy cause?

Does calling it a “donation” make it more valuable or less valuable to us?

Fundraisers can fall into the trap of believing that they’re asking for a favor or begging for a donation. But human beings, like all creatures, exchange time, money or risk in return for something. When that exchange is insufficient to cause action, we don’t do it.

The anonymous donor gets something. Something priceless, memorable and worthwhile: peace of mind.

The public donor, whether it’s the neighbor buying a raffle ticket for the scout fundraiser or the bigwig on the board of a museum, they get something as well. The status and connection they buy is a bargain, worth more than it costs. In fact, if it wasn’t worth more than it costs, they wouldn’t buy it.

The fundraiser isn’t asking for a favor. They’re offering an opportunity.

Endless, unlimited and more. These are building blocks of capitalism.

Starbucks knows that they can’t get you to drink three coffees every morning, but their stock price is built on the idea that they can continue to get more customers and make more money from each one.

The Wedding-Industrial complex is built on the simple idea that your wedding should cost the same as your best friend’s wedding did (plus a little more).

The status ratchet is real, and it’s easy to be seduced by it. “Compared to what” is a fundamental component of marketing.

One reason this works is that a little progress gets you positive feedback, which makes you eager to find a little more, a cycle that doesn’t end. Infinity, all the way up.

And, for those seeking social change, the opposite is worth noting:

When asking for penance, self-control and good behavior, infinity is not a useful tool. When someone shows up and tries to do better, “that’s not good enough,” is not a particularly useful motivator.

The useful process begins by earning enrollment in the journey toward better, but it’s not amplified by our criticism of each action being imperfect.

Go-up infinity is about ‘more.’ But too often, social-good infinity is about ‘pure’. And pure is difficult to embrace, because anything less than pure feels like failure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

When an organization is known for speed and quality, it’s likely that if times get tough, quality will suffer before speed does. That’s because customers notice speed right away, but it takes a while to come to a conclusion about quality.

If a musician or politician is known for showmanship and wise insights, the showmanship will probably outlast the wisdom.

When we measure and compare the easily visible, we may be setting ourselves up for disappointment.

You’re at the Zoom meeting, on time, and no one is there. Are you the ghost or is everyone else?

We needed a word for this existential minor dread, and now we have one.

Coordination is hard.

PS the Ides of March are overrated as a threat. It’s the chronic conditions that really get us in the end.

Colleagues you care about are coming over for dinner. What should you make?

Some people don’t care if it’s delicious, as long as it’s interesting.

Some don’t need it to be interesting, but it needs to start on time.

Others define delicious differently than you do.

One couple doesn’t care at all about the effort you put into it.

A few don’t care if you’ve worked hard to create a spectacular meal, they’ll notice that the kitchen is a mess.

One person is really concerned that the food match their dietary needs.

And many are paying attention to the sustainability and cost of what you prepared.

Some are uncomfortable if you put in too much of effort.

The lesson is simple: empathy matters and empathy is hard. The more diverse the group’s interests, the more you’ll need to let them know in advance where you’re heading.

Get clear about what it’s for before you start doing the work.

We were taught to look out for red flags. Little signs that something is wrong, that we should be careful or even turn around.

Don’t let that distract you from being on the lookout for green flags.

We might need encouragement to leap forward. If you look for the green flags, you’re more likely to find them.

It’s tempting but useless.

The skin is unblemished and the perfect color. It’s well displayed, promoted widely and on sale.

But there’s nothing inside. It’s not worth eating and certainly not worth sharing.

This is the streaming series with great lighting and talented actors, based on a beloved novel, but it’s empty and we fade after one or two episodes.

This is the book with a polished author photo, pre-written blurbs and plenty of footnotes, created by a ghostwriter and edited by committee.

And it’s almost any content created by AI without care or oversight.

The solution to hollow oranges isn’t more of them.

Tonight, when you’re off the clock, what will you listen to, watch or read?

I imagine that most of us would agree that this is a free choice. To watch a silly video on YouTube, read a book on Greek philosophy from the library or scroll your feeds. We have time (surprisingly called “free”) and we allocate it to focus our attention on something.

While it might seem like a free choice, well-paid people and powerful forces are working to shift our focus. Many systems are built to manipulate us into focusing on things that benefit them, not us.

If you’ve ever felt lousy after doomscrolling, you might question how free your free time actually is. It takes effort to regain our freedom of focus.

We can take this one step further. We not only make choices about the media we consume, we also make choices about our internal focus. Until you got to this sentence, I’m guessing you weren’t spending much time thinking about your high school graduation.

We don’t need research to show us that the internal narratives we focus on shift our attitude and soon become our reality. We’ve all experienced it. Soon after we stop the broken record, things get better.

Perhaps it’s not a free choice, though. Perhaps the stories we relentlessly focus on are simply the byproduct of our brain’s chemical reactions, a reaction to the world inside us and around us.

And yet… many people have learned to shift the stories they rehearse.

The first step: change the external focus. Change the people we interact with, the media we consume, the attention we offer. Not all at once, but as a habit, a persistent practice of being mindful about the triggers and amplifiers we consume. If you’re not happy with what your attention is bringing you, you can change it.

Aristotle said that we become what we do, but before we do, we focus.

And the freedom and responsibility of that focus belong to us.

Is there something you can do right now that would impede progress, degrade quality or simply mess up the current situation?

Is there a way you could shift perceptions to make people more distraught, less hopeful or even panicked?

If it’s so easy to accomplish worse, why do we persist in believing we don’t have the power to make things better?

You wear a hat, you’re not a hat.

State nouns are verbs that we talk about like they are nouns. Hurry, panic, frenzy, rage, funk, stupor, daze, fog, rut, bind, pickle, fix, slump, tailspin, tizzy. Notice that they’re almost all negative…

You’re in a hurry.

Really? I get that you’re hurrying. There might be good reasons for this. But the hurry hat isn’t what you are, it’s what you’re doing.

We can own our agency and our choices, not announce (to ourselves or the world) that we’re trapped in a container, unable to escape.

Until we start saying, “I’m in a joy” perhaps we should find the grace to choose what sort of verb we’d prefer.

The essential thing about a hat is that it’s easy to take off.

This is the slogan of so many industrial behemoths and existing bureaucracies.

It’s in quotation marks for a reason: it’s not true. Not in the long run, not even in the medium run.

One way to highlight the hollowness of this edict is to say it out loud.

For a while, it might make the stock price go up. But it doesn’t last. It never does.

How does the ball know?

In tennis, golf or just about all ball sports, the follow-through determines the flight of the ball. Great players always have a complete and confident follow-through.

But the ball is long gone before that happens.

So, what’s the point?

It turns out that the ball can tell that you intend to have a serious follow-through. A weak or non-existent follow-through requires that you start slowing down before your racquet ever gets to the ball.

The metaphor should be pretty clear.

If you show up for the audition, your first TEDx talk, your early blog posts, the job interview or your start up hoping to see what happens (“I’ll commit if I get picked”) we can tell.

On the other hand, when it’s clear that you’re going to keep on showing up, it’s an invitation to get aboard now.

Follow-through doesn’t always work. But it always works better than the alternative.

If you tell me your ID number, your phone number or the wiring instructions for your bank account, not only will I forget them, I’ll need you to repeat it a few times so I write it down without making a transcription error.

When we first started using serial numbers (the Roman Legion did this thousands of years ago, and the British Board of Ordnance required it by law in the 1700s), it made perfect sense. Issue the next number on the list and move on.

But numbers alone are difficult for humans to error check and handle. So we use computers to help. The problem lies in the pesky humans who are still part of the chain.

So, here’s a simple hack. It’s unlikely to catch on worldwide, but I think it’s fascinating enough to consider…

If you had a list of 150 three letter words, all selected to be easy to say, spell and discern, you could use them to replace numbers in a productive and useful way.

So, big bob zap car cat is five words next to each other. There are 75 billion combinations of five words, which means that it replaces a number like 4839450381 with room to spare.

For ATMs that are four or five digits, you only need three words.

Think about that the next time you need to tell a customer service person your order number or serial number, or share a wifi password.

Let the computer do the work.

That’s a great reason to dumb things down. It’s also a trap that leads us to stasis and mediocrity.

Let’s break it down:

People: Which people? All people? The majority of voters? Day traders or institutional long term investors? Every VC or just this one?

Pick your people, pick your future.

Complicated: If it can be made simpler and just as effective, then by all means, please do so. If you can tell a more compelling and actionable story, do that as well. But ‘complicated’ just might mean, “we don’t understand it yet.”

Understand: Few people understand how the iphone works, or even the refrigerator. But that doesn’t mean we can’t effectively use it. The people who were moved by The Rite of Spring or Miles Davis or Esperanza Spalding might not have understood the music but it still succeeded.

People walk away when it’s not worth the effort to pay attention. People ignore innovation when the network effect is insufficient to overcome their fear. People rarely understand something the same way the creator does, but that’s okay.

Our first job is to do work that matters for people who care. It helps to follow that up with the scaffolding needed to cause cultural change, so the idea spreads.

But don’t dumb it down to reach people who don’t want to be reached in the first place.

You can be fashionable without reading Vogue. You can be informed without watching the nightly news. You can be smart about science without going to MIT. It’s possible to be a great chef without buying a cookbook. In fact, you can probably thrive without reading this blog. There are millions of songs on Spotify that have only been listened to a few times each.

Not only are more humans publishing more often on more topics, but we’ve built LLMs that are always ready to create even more content, on demand, for an audience of one.

For generations, content has created the demand for more content. A few movies increased our desire to watch more movies. AM radio created the demand for FM, which sold more records, and then Napster magnified our desire for even more music.

Until we hit the wall of enough.

The ennui of infinite content is reversing our spiraling desire for more of it.