Shut up and sing

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Through the election cycle, a lot of were people upset that celebrities were using their fame to endorse various political candidates, with shouts to “shut up and sing” or “shut up and dribble” — stick to their profession and stay out of politics.

I agree in theory, as political endorsements from my friends and people that I trust are worth far more than who a celebrity or athlete chooses to endorse. However, I don’t think it’s fair to ask them to “shut up and sing”.

The issue I see is one of inconsistency. The people that most often post things like “shut up and sing” usually have that wedged between various political opinions of their own that they’re sharing. They have a small audience of a few friends, and they choose to spend that engagement on political commentary. What do you think would happen if they became far more popular? I highly doubt they’d “shut up and sing”. Instead, they’d undoubtedly use their leverage to reach even more people with their opinions.

I don’t get much of anything out of celebrity endorsements, and I’d certainly find it a bit more peaceful if they stayed out of politics, but almost all of us would use our wider audience to continue to share our beliefs. To expect different out of singers and athletes seems like a short-sighted view of the world.

The Six-Week Delusion

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Over the years I’ve gotten better about this, but the “six-week delusion” still gets me pretty often. What is it? Here’s Juliet Funt explaining it in “A Minute to Think“:

Sometimes we delay reeling in our tuna based on a thinking error I call the Six-Week Delusion. For example, if you’re asked to meet with a vendor for the third time, you may say, “Now’s not good but I can meet in August (about six weeks away).” According to your spacious, all-white future calendar, August looks like a cakewalk compared to the overstuffed month you’re in now. But if you really thought about it, you’d see that mid-June looked exactly the same at the end of April, yet somehow filled in. As future time always does. As future time always will.

It can be so hard to avoid unless you are specifically thinking about it.

This week is busy.

Next week is busy.

But six weeks from now? Sure, I’ve got plenty of time!

It’s tomorrow

A good way that I’ve heard this framed is to imagine the event being tomorrow. If someone asks you to do something in six weeks, pretend that they asked you to do it tomorrow? Would you still do it? Making it seem real can offer perspective that might make you inclined to turn down the offer.

The six-week delusion has been a tricky one for me to tame, but I’ll keep working at it. How often do you fall into this trap?

Finding the “middle place”

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Social media has some serious flaws, no doubt, but there is still a lot of good to be found on there. I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to and celebrating or grieving as we all go through life together.

The problem, as social media sites are specifically designed to do, is that we can get sucked in and spend way too much time on them. In her book “A Minute to Think”, author Juliet Funt offers a simple concept to fight this:

We need to find the middle place. Some way to take little compartmentalized sips in our social channels but not lose ourselves in the process.

In my world, thanks in part to that book, I’m noticing a pull in a few different directions. I’m generally pretty good about limiting my time on social media, but I often fill it all with different forms of learning — reading, Anki, Readwise, podcasts, and a bunch of other tools. Those can be great, but leaving some space for literally nothing can often be the best thing that we do.

Lately, I’ve been trying to spend some of my driving time in that “nothing” zone — no radio, no podcasts, just nothing. It’s a bit weird and unnerving, but can lead to some awesome trains of thought.

The balance between learning, social media, and doing nothing is a tricky one to balance, but it’s something I fight hard to do. I have great people in my life that are examples of all three, so finding the space between them can be magic in those times I’m able to do it right.

Strategy is a compass, not a map

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Defining the word “strategy” can be a tricky thing, and it often gets rolled into “tactics” a bit. In a recent podcast episode with Greg McKeown, Seth Godin laid it out rather well:

Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It is your way of thinking about who you seek to serve and the change you seek to make. Strategy is a compass, it’s not a map. When the world changes, your strategy might not.

The map certainly will, your tactics will. But a strategy is the thing you get to lean against that is your North Star, where you’re headed.

I thought that was a great way to look at things.

Your business has a strategy, and that strategy likely shouldn’t change very often. However, as the world shifts around us (new social media platforms, the growth of AI, etc), you can adjust the map and change your tactics. When the dust settles, you can pull out your compass and find your bearings to keep pushing toward the same goal in the new terrain.

Using Sectograph to visualize my day

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A few weeks ago I stumbled upon this article by Anthony Spadafora on Tom’s Guide, where he explained how he’s using a smart display alongside his main desktop computer. That led me down a trail of various similar ideas, and I ended up using my Pixel Tablet in a similar way. Here is a quick shot of how it looks with my setup:

Here is a closer look at the tablet itself:

I’ve added a few widgets in there to help with day-to-day, including Ring (to quickly view the front door camera), Google Home (for controlling lights and temp) and ChatGPT. The main piece of this, on the right side of the screen, is a new app I found called Sectograph. It’s little confusing, but seems to be quite brilliant. Here is a quick video I just made that shows how it works:

It’s a new setup for me, so it remains to be seen whether or not I stick with it. I really like it for now, so I suspect I’ll keep it going and make little tweaks to improve things over time.

Do you have a smart device of some kind that you use alongside your computer? I’m curious to hear how you use it and what tips you have to share, so leave a comment and let us know.

Blameless Postmortems

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The idea of a “postmortem” is something we try to do after every major project. We look back at how things went, be glad about what went well, and work on things to improve for the next one.

The key to a solid postmortem, and to leading a solid team, is to focus on the core issues and not lay blame on humans. If something went wrong, what really was the cause? Google’s SRE (“Site Reliability Engineering”) site explains further:

Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE culture. For a postmortem to be truly blameless, it must focus on identifying the contributing causes of the incident without indicting any individual or team for bad or inappropriate behavior. A blamelessly written postmortem assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had. If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the “wrong” thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment.

There certainly may be times when a human is at fault, but there is almost always a cause above that. It could be distractions, excessive workload, unclear procedures, or any number of other things.

As Google shares, if you immediately go to finger pointing you’ll get less and less feedback during future postmortems. These can be a gold mine of useful information, so treating them the right way for this one and the next one will help lead to increasingly great results down the road.

The Sunday Summary: Be a voter, lots of WordPress drama, random posts, and doing great things for the first time

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In an effort to help me keep up with everything I post each week, here is my latest “Sunday Summary” of my posts from the week.

Mon, November 4: Do you know why your side might lose?
“It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.”

Tue, November 5: Be a voter
One study found that when election campaigns talked about “being a voter,” instead of simply asking people to vote, they increased voter turnout by 15%.

Wed, November 6: The WordPress drama shows why WordPress remains the best choice
The WordPress community is a bit of a mess right now, but this drama is showcasing exactly why WordPress is such a solid decision for businesses to use.

Thu, November 7: Random posts
I used ChatGPT to help me write a simple plugin that adds a bit more value to my day by surfacing random blog posts from the past.

Fri, November 8: What are libraries for?
Are libraries meant to be warehouses of books, or a place to share information and learn? There’s a big difference.

Sat, November 9: People who do great things are doing them for the first time
“I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.”

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

People who do great things are doing them for the first time

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Having a fresh perspective on an existing system can be a great thing. With GreenMellen, I attribute part of our success to the fact that Ali and I never worked for another agency before starting ours, so we weren’t saddled with bad practices and messy ideas.

Related, this is why we love that fact that most of our hires DID work at another agency; they can help us find the gaps. The combination is great, and it allows our fresh approach to shine will still getting guidance from others.

In a recent Founders podcast episode about John D. Rockefeller, the host shared a quote from Marc Andreessen that talked about people trying things for the first time. He said:

“I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.”

The balance between “it’s our first time” and “we hire people with experience” goes back to the idea of Chesterton’s Fence. We make it very clear to our team that we want their ideas and suggestions, but only after they understand why we do things the way we do.

The right blend of those can be magic.

What are libraries for?

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What is the purpose of a library? Really, what is it?

There are two ways to look at it:

  • The library is a place to share information and learn.
  • The library is a warehouse of books to be lent out.

While the two are similar in practice, the philosophy behind each is very different.

In Seth Godin’s famous “Stop Stealing Dreams” article (which you should think of a free two-hour book, not just a super long blog post), he draws out the comparison:

“Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.”

I think most of us agree with the second concept of a library, and it’s a fantastic way to view them, but it comes with complications when it comes to copyright and legality. If we want libraries to be centers of learning, then e-books should be freely copied and given to all who want them. If we want to focus on the concept of a warehouse, then tight rules indeed need to be in place.

I don’t have the answer here. I’d love to see things given away with few restrictions, but authors certainly need to be compensated for their work. What do you see as a solution to this?

Random posts

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I’ve been slowly migrating my notes from Obsidian to Tana, and part of that involves essentially visiting every blog post on here again (inside of my notes) to get things properly tagged. It’ll be wildly useful when I’m done, but it’s rather tedious right now.

However, I’m getting a lot of value out of seeing those old posts again. There are a handful of old posts that I reference fairly often, but most posts are published and forgotten. This process has brought them back to light, and it’s been great.

I wanted to find a system kind of like Readwise that would take all of my posts and show me a random one every time I asked. As far as I can tell that system doesn’t exist, but please correct me if I’m wrong.

Instead, I had ChatGPT write me a simple WordPress plugin that does the trick, and it’s great! You can check it out here if you’re curious; every time you refresh the page, it shows another random post from my archive.

If I’m logged into the site, I also get a button on the screen that allows me to exclude that particular post from coming up again. There are a lot of posts on the site that are worth keeping on here but aren’t as valuable for me to revisit (like “new” WordPress features from years ago, or the various “Sunday Summary” posts). I’ll see them once, and then it’ll hide them going forward. The button just looks like this:

ChatGPT to write code

The experience of having ChatGPT write this code was mind-blowing. Here are the things I asked along the way in order to get what I wanted. Not only did it do a great job, but you can see my plans evolve as it came together:

  • Write code for a wordpress plugin that shows the full content of a random post each time the page is refreshed
  • This is good, but I only want the random post to show on a specific page, not on the main pages.
  • Excellent. Now I’d like to have it display the original post date on that page as well
  • Now include a button on the page that I can press that will exclude this specific post from appearing again in future random refreshes
  • When i click the “exclude this post from future”, have it load another random post once it’s done adding it to the exclusion list. Also, add a second button next to that one that simply refreshes the page to show a different random post.
  • When I click the “show another random post” button, the screen just turns white
  • It’s still showing a white page after I click that button (this time it solved the issue)
  • (for me, out of curiosity): Where are these exclusions stored in the wordpress database?
  • Only show the two buttons if a user is logged into the site

It was crazy to spend 10 minutes chatting with ChatGPT and getting a relatively complex plugin created. The refresh stuff I probably could have figured out on my own, but the “include a button on the page that I can press that will exclude this specific post from appearing again in future random refreshes” is way beyond my coding skillset these days.

This taught me a bit more about the power of ChatGPT, but it also gave me a page to visit from time to time to refresh my memories on those old posts. Win win!