Who is Nicole Bennet and why does she keep calling me? A few times a day, a voice pretending to be someone named Nicole rings my cell, and in a petulant, entitled voice, insists she's calling me about a loan that I never applied for. I've never interacted, I block each number, but the calls keep coming. AT&T certainly has the technology to block calls like this, but they don't have an incentive to do so.

52 years ago, Apple's 1984 ad ran on the Super Bowl. Once. It's generally considered the most effective ad of its kind, creating a legend and also a trap. Was this ad the reason the Mac is still around? Or was it Regis McKenna's work in getting Steve on the cover of more than 20 magazines the month it launched?

Why do books and records have standard pricing? You'd think that a record from Miles Davis or Patricia Barber would cost more than one from the local garage band. Economists tie themselves into knots trying to explain why wine and handbags have such wide price variation, but tickets to movies do not. They invoke "credence goods" and "focal point coordination" and "transaction utility" and "cost disease." Darby, Karni, Schelling, Baumol, Thaler—a parade of Nobel-adjacent thinkers building elegant models to explain what's sitting right in front of them.

It's difficult to write directions. A user interface, a map or a recipe all require empathy. That's because the person writing it knows something the reader doesn't. In fact, that's the only reason to do it. But because instructions exist to bridge this gap, we benefit by understanding and focusing on the gap. The instructions aren't there to remind you…

We are story-processing creatures, and the most effective stories are often embodied in people. Living examples of the lesson we're trying to learn and the posture we hope to model. Heroes, mentors, martyrs, examples, icons, avatars, archetypes, and even villains. Sometimes those people are fictional, living in an anecdote and refined to form a legend. The leverage of media, though, has made history more powerful than any made-up story ever could be.

Celebrity gossip, fortune-telling and superstitions are the original forms of fake news, but now it's increasingly widespread. In every field from science to world affairs, it's troubling to see. People who are familiar with reality can't understand why it's popular--in a low-trust world, why would people engage with made-up noise disguised as information? The irony is that it's easier to trust fake news.

Until you look at the system. Kevin Wilson wrote a great short story about the workers who have to sort the tiles that go into a Scrabble box. The hero is responsible for searching through the pile for the letter 'q'. All day. On commission. At this absurd level, it's clear that the game isn't made this way. They'd never produce all 26 letters, mix them up and then sort them.

Once a company hits a plateau in its market share, the pressure begins to mount. Investors want more of a return, shareholders want the stock price to go up. Managers pay attention to the metrics they're held to, and the squeeze begins. At first, the squeeze focuses on efficiency. Cut obvious costs without diminishing customer delight or the conditions that the employees work under.

Pop culture is spiralling. I had no idea what "mad magazine autostereogram, cutecore" meant, but it was enough for Midjourney to create this: Older generations have always been left out of the codewords and trends of the makers of pop culture, but the gatekeepers and lack of shelf space kept pop, popular. There are only 40 songs in the Top 40, only a few hit network TV shows.

Nothing important is for everyone. When we encounter a thoughtful critic, we need to quickly understand who is speaking to us. If the work we made was intended for someone just like this, and they don't like it, we need to do a better job next time. The criticism will help us understand how to improve. But if the work we made wasn't for someone with the hopes, needs and expectations of the person we're hearing from, we can forgive ourselves (and them) by acknowledging who it's for and why.

This is the first rule of safe driving. Don't hurtle your car into a jam where you have no options. But the first rule of management and human interaction is to leave other people an out. When you give people a chance to take action that helps them get to where they're going, they'll often seek to go there.

This is not the same as not working very hard. In fact, they're very different. We've been indoctrinated to avoid trying hard (too risky and emotionally fraught) and to resign ourselves to working hard (held up as a virtue). People who work in productivity-focused jobs where they follow the manual work very hard. If you buy a Subway franchise, you're buying years of hard work--the more hours you put in, the better your profits.

In a world of automation, AI and outsourcing, what exactly do we do for a living? Perhaps we make decisions. And what's in short supply? A willingness to take responsibility. If you choose to sign up to make and take, there have never been more tools or more leverage available to you.

Left alone, a cup of coffee will gradually cool until it reaches room temperature. Stable systems regress to the mean. Things level out on their way to average, which maintains the stability of the system. The same pressures are put on any individual in our culture. Sooner or later, unless you push back, you'll end up at room temperature. (As I write this, the built-in grammar tool has made suggestions to every single sentence, pushing to make it sound less like me and more like normal.)

Here's a useful writing breakthrough that has made a difference for me... Set up an account at ElevenLabs. Create a custom voice by uploading some recordings of yourself speaking. It's not perfect, but it's eerily close. Now, when writing an essay, a book or even a report for work, upload the text and have the site convert it to your voice.

Of course it's not going to work the first time. You'll need to fix errors in the code. Adjust errors in measurement. Deal with changing conditions. Perhaps there are systems effects no one could have predicted. If we begin a project with the high school mindset of getting a good grade (and avoiding the red check), then not only won't we be eager to find bugs, we're less likely to invest in projects that might not lead to flawless results.

Those are harsh words. They imply agency, responsibility and failure. The response might be, "I did everything I was supposed to do." Or perhaps, "What should I have done? I followed all the instructions." Agency and freedom go together. We have more choices than we want to admit. When Ahab decided to become a whaling captain, everything that happened after that was related to his initial choice.

Even though yeast is far more reliable than it used to be, many bakers still proof it before investing the time and materials to bake a loaf of bread. The extra few minutes waiting for it to bloom is cheap insurance to avoid a failed loaf a day later. If you need to be sure there are no pits in your chopped dates, it makes sense to avoid mechanically de-pitted fruit.

Consider the role of status in just about all human interactions. It begins at a primal level--every species cares about access to food and resources. We share a prehistoric history of status based on strength. But civilization is about awarding status on something other than violence. So there is the status that comes from being the breadwinner, the hunter, the matriarch.

Consider beginning the new year by subscribing to purple.space. It's a private online discussion group that I started several years ago. A practice keeps a promise. A community of people who support, respect and encourage each other makes it far more likely we'll find our way forward. Purple Space is a worldwide community of creators, leaders and the curious. There's no hype, no selling, no dark patterns.

Are entrepreneurs professionals? In professional fields, like law, medicine or accounting, it's expected that you've done the reading. A professional has seen what has come before, understands the best practices and eagerly duplicates effective methods that have been shown to work. As our understanding of marketing, management and tech has grown, there's been a rise in intentionally naive wannabe entrepreneurs who decide that energy and authenticity are far more important than knowledge.

Every year, on the first weekend of the year, it's probably worth replacing the dried spices in your pantry. The best, freshest spices still taste like the spice that's on the label, but they taste more like themselves. That's what successful brands and freelancers do as well. They relentlessly do the work to act more like themselves. First, we have to figure out what we are, what we stand for, and what people expect. Then we get a chance to be more like that.

By the time you get around to embracing the fashion of the moment, it's almost certainly too late. The leading edge is defined by the fact that most of us aren't on it.

An essential feature of every bottle is the neck. No neck, no bottle. There are bottlenecks in every process, every project and every method. Something is limited. We can pretend that's not the case and avoid the discussion. Or we can see it as an opportunity. Successful organizations are good at embracing and working with their bottlenecks.

If you went back 45 years, the built world would be eerily similar--the clothes, the cars, even the haircuts. Except you'd quickly notice that there were no personal computers and no smart phones. That for seven or ten hours a day, every day, people were interacting in real life, not with their screens. Many of us can't remember what we did all day.