The systems that worked reliably five years ago become expensive habits. I have watched it happen four times, and I still got caught.
Chapter 9
1988
In 1988 a group of us at high school produced a newspaper entirely on a computer. As far as anybody around us knew, it was the first one.
I need to explain why that was not a small thing, because from here it sounds like nothing.
Producing a newspaper was a trade. Typesetting was a skilled job that people trained for and did for a living, and paste up was a craft with its own tools, its own vocabulary and its own quiet professionals who were very good at it. If you wanted a page laid out, you went to somebody who knew how, and you paid them, and you waited.
We were doing it in a room at school because we thought it was interesting.
By 1989 I had turned it into a business, on a Macintosh SE and a laser printer.
It did not start with an ambition. I had a job at a church. I was helping people with their materials and their branding for nothing, because I liked doing it and they needed it and nobody else was going to. It became a side business by accident, which has happened to me more than once. Almost everything I have built started by being given away.
Here is what I want you to sit with, because it is the whole argument of this book arriving early and in miniature.
The skill I had in 1988 was gone by the middle of the nineties. Not devalued. Gone as a distinct skill. It became a menu command. Anybody with the software could do the thing I had been paid for, and the specialists I had watched with something close to awe as a teenager mostly had to become something else.
I was seventeen and I did not understand what I was looking at. I thought I had found a clever way in. What I had actually found was the first of five times I would watch the same thing happen, and the only reason I came out ahead that time is that I was young enough to have nothing invested in the old way.
The people who lost were not worse at their jobs than I was. They were considerably better. They had simply spent twenty years becoming excellent at the exact thing that was about to stop being scarce.
Chapter 10
Four Times
The skill I had in 1988 was gone by the middle of the nineties. Not devalued. Gone as a distinct skill. It became a menu command, and the specialists I had watched with something close to awe mostly had to become something else.
Then websites did it again. Building a website in 1998 was a specialist act, and by 2010 it was a template and a weekend.
Then search did it. There was a period when knowing how search actually worked was a genuine edge, and then the knowledge spread, the tools got cheap, and the edge went where edges go.
Then content did it. Then AI did it, and it is still doing it, faster than the others and to more categories at once.
Continue this chapter in the free book →
Chapter 11
The One I Got Badly Wrong
I was working at a high-tech firm in Santa Barbara. We sold website builds, hosting, and T1 lines, which tells you roughly when this was. I was inside the industry. Not adjacent to it, not reading about it, inside it, with a decent view of who was actually buying what and how the money moved.
Four months before the crash, I took money that had been set aside for something important and personal and I put all of it into technology stocks.
[VARIANT A] The money was set aside for infertility treatment. My ex-wife and I had it earmarked for exactly one thing, and I moved it. [/VARIANT A]
And I did not buy the big safe names, which is the detail that matters. I bought the risky ones. The companies I thought had genuinely great ideas, because I was in the industry and I could see which ideas were great.
Continue this chapter in the free book →
Chapter 12
I Screamed Shark
Santa Monica Beach, 1987. I was in eleventh grade, Donnie Flaig was in ninth, and Don Kick was out there with us. Neither of them had surfed before that day, as far as I know, which is a hedge I have been using for nearly forty years and neither of them has ever bothered to correct.
I brought the boards. I brought everything. I was the one who knew what he was doing.
The three of us were sitting out past the break when I saw a fin.
I screamed at them to paddle in. Then I paddled in, which I want to be clear about, because in the version I would prefer to tell I stayed out there shepherding my friends to safety. I did not. I went, and I yelled at them from the beach.
Continue this chapter in the free book →
Chapter 13
What a Platform Says
One habit has served me better than any framework, and it is not sophisticated. When a platform announces something, I treat the announcement as a claim rather than as information, and I go and measure what actually happened to the accounts I can see.
I did not arrive at that from principle. I arrived at it from being wrong. Early on I took product announcements at face value, adjusted budgets around them, and told clients things I had not verified, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that the company that built the thing presumably knows what it does.
They know what they built. That is a different question from what it does to your money in your category this quarter, and they are not measuring that on your behalf.
Continue this chapter in the free book →
Chapter 14
Sixty Thousand Dollars Back
Google announced a new release of broad match at our franchise conference, which was held at Google's own offices.
Broad match is the setting that lets Google decide which searches your ads should appear for, rather than you deciding. The pitch for the new release was the usual one: give the system more freedom and it will find you customers you would not have thought to bid on.
I went and checked what it was actually doing to our accounts.
What I found was wasted clicks. Bogus traffic. Money going out against searches that had no plausible relationship to a commercial cleaning contract, at a volume that only becomes visible when you add it up across roughly a hundred locations rather than looking at one account and shrugging.
Continue this chapter in the free book →
Chapter 15
The Truck
I was built slightly wrong and nobody knew what it would cost.
My right leg is shorter than my left. The foot on that side is a size eight against a size twelve on the other. There is no hamstring on the short side. None of it stopped me playing volleyball at a level that got me a partial scholarship, and none of it was treated as a problem at the time, because I was young and it did not hurt yet.
The summer after my senior year a commercial truck rear-ended me.
I never played competitively again.
I have told that in one sentence because that is how it happened. There was no arc, no decision, no moment where I weighed my options. There was a truck, and then there was a different life, and the second one arrived without any warning that it was starting.
Continue this chapter in the free book →
Chapter 16
The System Was Moving
Stand completely still and you are still moving.
The planet is turning under you. It is carrying you around the Sun, and the Sun is carrying the whole arrangement through the galaxy. You will never feel any of it, because everything you can see is moving with you at the same rate. People only know it is happening because somebody built instruments to check, and then checked.
That is the entire use I have for the astronomy, so I am going to leave it there. What it buys is one sentence, and the sentence is the reason this chapter exists.
A company can repeat the same marketing motions and never return to the same market.
Continue this chapter in the free book →
Chapter 17
Why Waiting Is So Reasonable
Most businesses do not miss a shift because they are lazy or stupid. They miss it because the old system still works. It just works slightly less well than it used to.
Revenue is still coming in. The team is busy. Acquisition cost has crept up but not alarmingly. Organic traffic is down a bit, and there are always reasons for that. None of it presents as an emergency, and the pressure to change is diffuse instead of acute.
Continue this chapter in the free book →
That is a preview of Part Three.
The digital edition is free. Read substantial excerpts here or download the complete book. No email, no gate, nothing to sign up for.
Continue reading in the free book ↓
