No. 539 — Aug 27th, 2023 — Read on FS — Free Version

Insight(s)

"I am completely obsessed. And the audience wants that; they pay for that. I don’t want to see someone who’s kind of into it. ... That’s what I care about. That’s all I care about. I don’t care what you do—I just want to see people and talk to people and be around people who are into it."

— Jerry Seinfeld

TKP

Rey Flemings:

"The easiest way to think about what we do is this five-step spectrum, where to the left, things are simple, and to the right, they’re difficult to impossible, so one, two, three, four, five. On the left, anything that you can purchase on a web browser. You want to rent a home to stay in when you go to LA. Well, there’s Airbnb for that. You want to buy a ticket to Coachella, go to Coachella dot com; you’ve got a VIP pass. Number two is hard. These are things where maybe they’re available online, but they’re still difficult for you to get your hands on. So these would be things like booking a private jet. You can book a private jet online, but it’s so confusing and so much brain damage from a booking. Most people use a broker or a travel person to do it. Number three, we call “off market.” So these are things that sellers want to sell, but they never list or make [them] available on a website—artist credentials to go see your favorite band and all sorts of other things that are never on public sale. Category four would be stuff that’s hard—walking on the red carpet at the Met Gala or being on stage with your favorite artist, et cetera, et cetera. Then the fifth category [has] the impossible requests, like the ventilator chase or all of these other sorts of wild and interesting things that we get called on to do."

— Listen and Learn

Tiny Thought(s)

1.

If you want me to go all in on you, you better be all in on what we're doing together. If you're not all in, if you are only kinda into it, I don't want to work with you.

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2.

More often than not, the person is the problem, not the incentive system. No incentive system turns mediocre into extraordinary.

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ETC.

Tackle the Monkey First:

"Let’s say you’re trying to teach a monkey how to recite Shakespeare while on a pedestal. How should you allocate your time and money between training the monkey and building the pedestal? The right answer, of course, is to spend zero time thinking about the pedestal. But I bet at least a couple of people will rush off and start building a really great pedestal first. Why? Because at some point the boss is going to pop by and ask for a status update — and you want to be able to show off something other than a long list of reasons why teaching a monkey to talk is really, really hard.

I get it. It’s human nature to want the boss to say, “Hey, nice pedestal, great job!” and think of your authentic Elizabethan-era carving techniques when you’re up for promotion instead of the long list of monkey-training techniques that have failed so far. It takes a lot of faith in your boss (and the bosses above) to think that he or she will say a hearty thank you for helping to figure out whether and for how long your organization should invest resources in advanced monkey education."

— Source

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Thanks for reading,
— Shane

P.S. The first job opening at Amazon.