There was some technical difficulty with the prior email, so I’m re-sending it…
I was looking for a small-batch olive oil, and my reaction to what I found surprised me.
I came across a lot of websites that looked like this.
At some point at or after peak industrial-food, it would have been striking to see a food company with a design like this. The colors evoke nature, the typefaces are friendly, and the layout says no-frills and hand-made.
But it made me suspicious because there was something pretentious and self-conscious about it.
The design was clearly “signaling.” It was careful in how it communicated carelessness, like when you’re in L.A. and everyone has “bed-head” on which every hair is carefully in-place.
The website of the olive oil I bought looked like this.
The typography is sloppy and not so easy to read. There’s no rhythm or intention to the white space and alignment of elements. The logo and label could have been made in Microsoft Word.
As a former international-award-winning designer, I feel confident in saying this company’s design “sucks.”
I want to call it anti-signaling, but that again implies there was something intentional about it.
The greatest irony of the contrast between these two olive oil brands was that the first one has a logo that’s “hand-written.” But this hand-written logo is made from an electronic font, and not even a good one. So the two “e’s” are the exact same.
And the olive oil I ended up buying has the harvest date literally hand-written on the label.
Notice when you’re feeling the urge to be someone else, and consider being yourself.
Aphorism: “I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them.” —Karl Popper
Cool:Jeff Han’s 2006 Ted Talk shows you how blown away people were the first time they saw an iPad-like touchscreen.
Best, David P.S. Anti-signaling could be another reason why AI can’t bake.
I was looking for a small-batch olive oil, and my reaction to what I found surprised me.
I came across a lot of websites that looked like this.
At some point at or after peak industrial-food, it would have been striking to see a food company with a design like this. The colors evoke nature, the typefaces are friendly, and the layout says no-frills and hand-made.
But it made me suspicious because there was something pretentious and self-conscious about it.
The design was clearly “signaling.” It was careful in how it communicated carelessness, like when you’re in L.A. and everyone has “bed-head” on which every hair is carefully in-place.
The website of the olive oil I bought looked like this.
The typography is sloppy and not so easy to read. There’s no rhythm or intention to the white space and alignment of elements. The logo and label could have been made in Microsoft Word.
As a former international-award-winning designer, I feel confident in saying this company’s design “sucks.”
I want to call it anti-signaling, but that again implies there was something intentional about it.
The greatest irony of the contrast between these two olive oil brands was that the first one has a logo that’s “hand-written.” But this hand-written logo is made from an electronic font, and not even a good one. So the two “e’s” are the exact same.
And the olive oil I ended up buying has the harvest date literally hand-written on the label.
Notice when you’re feeling the urge to be someone else, and consider being yourself.
Aphorism: “I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them.” —Karl Popper
Cool:Jeff Han’s 2006 Ted Talk shows you how blown away people were the first time they saw an iPad-like touchscreen.
Best, David P.S. Anti-signaling could be another reason why AI can’t bake.
Even if you started a relationship with your crush, you’d have to share household chores and discuss bills. In the best-case scenario you get old and one of you dies.
Creative crushes are the same. You can fantasize about writing your memoir or opening a cafe, but if you actually did it, it wouldn’t be as great as you had imagined.
So it’s more comfortable to imagine being with your crush than to tell them how you feel. It’s more comfortable to imagine pursuing your creative crush than to risk failure, or maybe just as bad, success.
Crushes and creative crushes are dangerous because when you have them, some part of your heart or mind is marked “taken.” You can’t take action on one thing when you’re already committed to another.
The sooner you try to turn your crush into something real, the sooner you can leave your fantasy world and make contact with reality.
Painting was really exciting during the Impressionists’ movement, which gave way to cubism, then abstract expressionism. Once Mark Rothko painted a canvas black, everything interesting that could be said with paint on a canvas had been said.
You can still be a painter today, and even make a living, but you aren’t going to rock the world with a canvas.
There’s been a last great marble sculpture, a last great Catholic cathedral, and a last great radio program.
You can still be a sculptor, a church architect, or a radio host, but the chances you’ll do anything significant in those media are nil.
The time to make your mark in a medium is while there’s still something to be explored within its qualities and constraints.
I wonder what other last greats we’ve already seen. For example, the past sixty-ish years we’ve been recording music with such fidelity it could’ve been recorded yesterday, so why listen to The Weeknd when there’s Michael Jackson? Maybe we’ve heard the last great pop song.
Language, ideas, and human thought at-large seem like such complex systems, it’s hard to imagine a last great idea, or story. But much of what you think could probably be found in the corpus of Aristotle or Buddha, Gilgamesh or Homer. But maybe we have or, through LLMs, soon will encounter those last greats.
This isn’t to say you can’t adapt old ideas to new things and have influence and gain attention. If Robert Johnson were recorded with the same fidelity as Fleetwood Mac, the lyrics would still sound from the 1930s, so there’s still room to sing about being the throat goat or whatever.
But if you really want to have a chance at doing paradigm-shifting work, some places are easier than others.
If you can, stay away from where we’ve already seen a last great.
Aphorism: “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify…into every corner of our minds.” —John Maynard Keynes
Book:How to Sell a Book shares everything I’ve learned selling 100,000 copies.
When you’re watching the clock, you can’t be present. Yet time makes modern life possible.
To be present without fighting the clock, use time feathering.
Here’s how it works: Imagine you run into a friend you want to catch up with, but you have only 10 minutes.
What many do is keep checking the time until they have to go. Some might set a timer on their phone for 10 minutes, aka “time boxing.”
To use time feathering, instead set a timer for, say, 7 minutes. (On iOS, all you have to do is activate Siri and say, “7 minutes.”)
If you set a timer for 10 minutes, you have more low-level anxiety during the chat. Did I just hear my alarm? What if it doesn’t go off? Then, when the timer goes off, you have to cut off the conversation abruptly. Time “boxing” has a violent connotation, and that’s how it feels to use it.
By using time feathering, you can be completely present and relaxed throughout the conversation, then when the timer goes off, you have a few minutes to wind down.
Try time feathering, and instead of racing against the clock, you’ll be strolling along with it.
Book:Ask the Dust (Amazon) was one of Charles Bukowski’s favorite novels.
Cool:AntiRSI is a Mac app that reminds you to take breaks.
Best, David P.S. I’ve set up with Readwise a 60-day free trial for Love Mondays subscribers.
When I started my business, I didn’t think of it as a “business.” To me, I was doing a bunch of projects, hoping something would work out.
I came to understand nearly all businesses share one thing in common: process.
When you follow a process, you can do it cheaper, at a higher level of quality, and you gain information to keep improving.
And so, a business is a series of processes you can follow, profitably.
In creative business, there’s another factor that makes the equation more complex: your creative appetite. You can start a business selling socks, but if you get sick of knitting socks, it ceases to be a creative business.
When building a creative business, your processes must allow you to produce a product or provide a service at a profit, but they must also feed your creative appetite. If you can only stand to knit so many socks, maybe you also want to knit stuffed animals, and hold workshops teaching others how to knit. You have to find the mix that keeps you excited and inspired.
So a business is a series of processes you can follow, profitably. A creative business is a series of processes that satisfy your creative appetite, profitably.
Can you ship work that doesn’t meet your standards?
As Ira Glass says in a famous video, your work disappoints you because you have good taste. When you’re first starting out, you can’t live up to that standard.
That space between your abilities and taste has become known commonly as “the gap.”
I think it looks something like this:
Glass’s remedy for closing this gap is to “do a huge volume of work.” The challenge is, as you can see from this diagram, your abilities improve throughout a creative project, but never close the gap.
So you can’t ship your project, and so can’t get on to the next, and the next.
The solution is to split your standards. One half will heretofore be known as your standards. The other half, your “vision.” Your vision for what you’d like your work to one day be.
Your vision stays at the level your standards once were, and your standards are now attainable.
In one sense, you’re “lowering your standards,” which never sounds inspiring. But it can be, so long as you keep your vision in mind.
Book:Dopesick (Amazon) tells how America was swindled into an opium epidemic.
Cool: These plant-based sponges are biodegradable, and won’t leave microplastics on your dishes.
The universe is in constant flux, and to finish, you must for a moment hold matter in place and declare, It is done.
But finishing doesn’t require superhuman discipline. It merely requires experience.
If you want to be someone who finishes what they start, start by finishing the fun stuff. Pick a project, any project, as long as it’s fun, and finish it. Then do that again, and again.
Maybe it’s a blog post about your favorite subject, a song that’s an inside joke with your friends, or a social media account run by your dog.
An under-appreciated benefit of doing fun projects is you eventually gain the confidence to finish things that aren’t as fun.
If you want to learn to do a pull-up, do a weight-assisted pull-up first. If you want to finish stuff, finish fun first.
Aphorism: “Men [get glory and riches] by various methods; one with caution, another with haste; one by force, another by skill; one by patience, another by its opposite; and each one succeeds in reaching the goal by a different method.” —Niccolò Machiavelli
Cool: The Flint Router (Amazon) makes it easy to set up a router-level VPN.
Best, David P.S. I’m giving away twelve paperback copies of Mind Management on Goodreads Giveaways. Enter to win.
If you can’t finish what you start, look at your project approach.
You can see a poor project approach in one of my favorite movies, Office Space.
Tom Smykowski is obsessed with his idea for a Jump to Conclusions Mat. It’s just a mat with different “conclusions” written on it, that you can “jump” to.
When Tom first tells his coworkers this idea, he’s a needle-shaped creator.
Think of the flow from ideas-had to projects-completed as like a funnel. Needle-shaped creators have a needle-shaped funnel.
The top of their funnel is thin. Tom has only one idea. The bottom of their funnel comes to a point. Tom has never executed that idea.
The main problem a needle-shaped creator has is they’re too quick to fall in love with their first idea. Like Tom, they spend years fantasizing about that idea, and never taking action.
Tom eventually makes the first Jump to Conclusions Mat, but executing the idea hasn’t made it any better. Now he’s a straw-shaped creator. He has one idea, and one execution.
Chances are, the Jump to Conclusions Mat fails. Would Tom be better off had he never executed it in the first place? That depends upon whether he changes his approach after that failure.
When you’re first following ideas, it’s normal to be a needle-shaped creator. You’ll follow better ideas if you widen the top of your funnel.
Aphorism: “Always start with too much material. Then give your reader just enough.” —William Zinsser
Some people say writer’s block doesn’t exist. It does, but it doesn’t have to.
If you don’t know what to write, the most common root cause is, you don’t know the information. So if you don’t know what to write, it’s usually because you don’t know what you’re trying to write.
That begs the question, What makes you think you can know what you’re trying to write before you write it?
There are two kinds of writing: deductive, and inductive. Deductive writing is writing what you know. Inductive writing is writing to find out what you know.
Imagine you have two pens: One is blue, and you know it writes in blue. Another is white, but you don’t know in what color it writes.
With the blue pen, you can write, “This pen writes in blue,” because you already know that. But with the white pen, you can’t say what color it writes in, because you don’t know. If you wait until you know the information to start writing, you’ll be waiting forever. Once you write, “This pen,” you’ll know what color it writes in. Then you can write the rest.
Writer’s block is often caused by trying to take a deductive approach to what’s better served by an inductive process.
You’re expecting to write something true. But to get to the truth you have to be willing to first risk writing something false.
Aphorism: “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” —Thomas Edison
