WELCOME TO IDEA SURPLUS DISORDER

This is the first edition of Idea Surplus Disorder. I’m sending this via the old platform as I still have a few back-end plumbing things to do for next week’s edition that will come from our new newsletter hosting service.

As you can see, the newsletter format is mostly the same, but we’ll be adding a paid subscription option for those who want access to our meeting toolkit, monthly exercise downloads, and VIP in-person events. Look for more on those things soon!

In this edition: ridiculous prices, paper airplanes, monkish wisdom, liar’s dividends, dancing, red tape, Mah Na Mah Na, and more!

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

Want to make a big shift in your business in 2023? Raise your prices ridiculously high!

Your prices are where they are now because you found an equilibrium years ago and then you slowly and incrementally raised those prices over time, each time settling at a new equilibrium. It’s time to leap over the next decade or so of increments and price according to your future vision. You think the market won’t bear those new prices but that’s not what happens. What happens is your considerably higher prices let you create even more value for the client thereby forcing your own growth. 

You read that correctly: your new higher prices will do more than almost anything else to improve the quality of your firm. Charging the client more will allow you to create more value for your clients. It’s an upward spiraling helix of win-win for both parties. 

In my experience, agency leaders do not aim high enough on this front. As of today, new clients equals new prices. Much higher new prices. 

And here’s a related quote from Dan S. Kennedy:

“There is no strategic benefit to being the second cheapest in the marketplace, but there is for being the most expensive.”

Want another big shift? Cancel all your meetings with more than two people.

To start 2023, we're canceling all Shopify meetings with more than two people. Let's give people back their maker time. Companies are for builders. Not managers.

Wish your team would generate better ideas? Here’s a list of ten methods to try. My favorites:

Paper Airplanes: To kick off a meeting in a collaborative mindset, have people write down their name and a challenge they’re working on right now on a piece of paper. Everyone folds their paper into a paper airplane, then shoots it across the room. Now, pick up an airplane and write down a few possible solutions, including some silly ones. Then, find your person and share those ideas back with them. This helps people meet each other and bring more playfulness into the idea generation process.

Assumptions Envelope: Before a project kick off or brainstorm meeting, ask everyone to write down their assumptions or preconceived notions on slips of paper. You can either share these out loud or keep them to yourselves. Put the papers into an envelope as a sign that you’re putting these assumptions aside now. This activity helps surface concerns, release tension, and encourage people to come with an open mind.

If you’ve still not jumped on the ChatGPT bandwagon, this list of prompts might get you started with understanding all it can do.

What can you learn from meditating with monks? Check out these bits of wisdom:

• Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.

• Your mind doesn’t wander. It moves toward what it finds most interesting. If you want to focus better, become more curious about what's in front of you.

• Spend more time cultivating a mind that is not attached to material things than time spent accumulating them.

• There are 3 layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience, and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story.

Great icebreaker question: What's something unusual on your bucket list?

Check out all 40 of these useful concepts. Here are the ones I’m still thinking about:

• Nobel Disease: We idolize those who excel in a particular field, inflating their egos and afflicting them with the hubris to opine on matters they know little about. By celebrating people for their intelligence, we make them stupid.

• The Liar's Dividend: Teaching people about deepfakes and other disinfo doesn't make them skeptical of falsehoods as much as it makes them skeptical of reality. Amid such confusion, they default to believing what they want to, discounting anything they don't like as disinfo.

• Brandolini's Law (aka the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle): It takes a lot more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it. Hence, the world is full of unrefuted bullshit.

• Gurwinder's Third Paradox: In order for you to beat someone in a debate, your opponent needs to realize they've lost. Therefore, it's easier to win an argument against a genius than an idiot.

• Principle Of Humanity: Every single person is exactly what you would be if you were them. This includes your political opponents. So instead of dismissing them as evil or stupid, maybe seek to understand the circumstances that led them to their conclusions.

I loved this wonderful visualization from the NYTimes about Dancing on Stairs.

Why do we call it red tape?

And finally, Mah Na Mah Na.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“All real living is meeting.” — Martin Buber

“Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets.” — Cordelia Fine

“We think people judge us by a single success or failure, but they don’t. If you mess up one meal no one thinks you're a bad chef, and if you have one great idea no one thinks you're a genius. People just aren't thinking about you that much.” — Ethan Mollick

“The mind, like the parachute, is most valuable open.” — Dan S Kennedy

“Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit by the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.” — Kahlil Gibran

"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." — Robert H. Goddard

"If you never question things, your life ends up being limited by other people's imaginations.” — James Clear

IDEA SURPLUS DISORDER IS COMING

Welcome to the last Monday Morning Meeting! Next week, we’ll transition to a new platform with a new name: Idea Surplus Disorder. The weekly newsletter format will stay the same, but we’ll add a paid subscription option for those who want access to our meeting toolkit monthly exercise downloads, and VIP in-person events.

We’ll send a reminder out next week via this email address to check your spam folder for the new edition. Also, we’ll introduce our newest team member and unveil our brand-new website. We can’t wait!

In this edition: visible teamwork, change fatigue, loss chasing, forgetting, AI, AI, and cats!

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

Instead of “working out loud,” perhaps we should embrace “Visible Teamwork” instead:

• DELIBERATE COMMUNICATION: Mood, context, availability, everything that you experience as a person that affects how you work day to day.

• WORK VISIBILITY: Conversations in the open, workflow visibility, even cloud-based work that other team members can easily access

• PLANNED SPONTANEITY: Communicating that you're ok with being interrupted, organised social time and an ecosystem that allows you to “bump into each other" online as you're carrying out the work.

• TEAM ADVOCACY: Making your team visible in the organisation by regularly talking about your team's work, brokering relationships between team members and others in the organisation, and sharing not just your work, but how you work.

Already tired of all those resolutions? Might be change fatigue:

Change fatigue mostly arises when we feel like we’re not in control of the never-ending chaos that keeps on derailing our routines and forces us to constantly adapt. Very often, it is the case that change itself is unavoidable. What we have some control over, however, is how we react to change. Instead of resisting change, adding to the load we put on our adaptive systems, we can strive to accept, embrace, and even foster change in a way that leads to personal growth.

Artificial intelligence will not replace you, but a person better at using AI than you are will.

Wonder why those work projects keep going, even when it is clear they’ll fail? It’s because they haven’t failed, yet.

The reason is that as long as the project is still going, it has not officially failed yet. And as long as the failing project keeps going, the person leading it therefore won’t be a failure.

Think of it like the well-known problem in gambling called “loss chasing“, where a gambler begins to lose money and thinks the only way to get it back is to continue gambling larger amounts, with the hope that any one win could bring back what they have previously invested. Essentially, even when they have “failed” by losing a lot of money in one evening, they would not be deemed a “failure” until they stop gambling and leave the slot machine / roulette table / poker game, since then their ability to recoup their investment really has stopped.

Why we forget nearly everything we read (hint, it’s the internet):

The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.

Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.

In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.

Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to waste my time in small chunks, not big ones. That’s why this advice hit home for me:

For all the small pockets of time that come up during the day, be ready with small things to do. “Looking at your phone” easily becomes the default for so many of us these days. What else could you do? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe the point of life is to hyper-optimize every moment. That way lies madness, and a lot of typical productivity advice can be counterproductive. Still, it’s true that the average day includes lots of unscheduled time that can (sometimes) be put to better use. I never go anywhere without something to do: my journal, manuscript pages to edit, my Kindle for reading, and usually my laptop. If I’m meeting a friend who’s late, no problem! I can occupy myself without feeling stressed about the time.

Here’s a tool that will help you uncover your own guiding principles.

I taught GPT to invent a language. Freaky!

Related: you can now chat with historical figures.

Bumped from a flight? Here’s how to recoup some cash.

Cats take over a Japanese island.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“Instruction does much, but encouragement, everything.” ​— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Your legacy is not what you do. It’s what the people who you teach do.” — James Altucher

“When a flower doesn't bloom you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” — Alexander Den Heijer

“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.” — Isabel Allende

“The price you pay for your addiction to praise will be an extreme vulnerability to the opinions of others.” — David D. Burns

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." — Helen Schucman

“Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.” — W. Danny Hillis

 “Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.” — Werner Herzog

THE MONDAY MORNING MEETING IS ALMOST OVER

Welcome to the second-to-last edition of the Monday Morning Meeting!

In two weeks, this newsletter will transition to a new platform (ghost.io) with a new name: Idea Surplus Disorder. The weekly newsletter format will stay the same, but we’ll add a paid subscription option for those who want access to our meeting toolkit and a monthly exercise download.

But wait, that’s not all: in two weeks, you’ll also get to meet our newest team member and see our spanking-brand-new website (which is on its final shakedown cruise this week).

In this edition: a bucket list icebreaker, better resolutions, focus, kindness, vending machines, Zwicky boxes, and more.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

THINKSGIVING PHOTOS AND VIDEOS

We’ll open up the Thinksgiving application process for prospective business partners in the next few weeks. If you’re curious about what 500+ purpose-driven business leaders and nonprofit professionals can do in a day to improve our city, check out these overview videos (a long-ish one here, or the shorter version) and then take a look at the hundreds of great photos from Thinksgiving Day.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

Here’s a great icebreaker question for the next time your team gathers: What's something unusual on your bucket list?

Still looking for your new year’s resolution? There are some gems on this list:

• Say ‘I don’t know’ at least ten times a day. That will disqualify you for a career in politics but make you a better person.

• Introduce yourself to all the people at your job whom you see every day but haven’t met yet.

• Don’t laugh at things you don’t understand. Take the time and trouble to understand them first. Most likely, you will find that once you understand them, they either become even funnier than you thought in the first place, or not funny in the least.

• Stop walking with your phone in your hand all the time. Look up and see how strange and beautiful the world is.

• Never try to get other people to change their minds without first trying to understand why they think the way they do. Never do that without being open to the possibility that the mind that might need to change the most could be your own.

• When you’re having a bad day, call the closest friend you haven’t talked with in the longest time.

• Work harder at making the familiar strange. Walk or drive a different route than your daily routine; work away from your desk; read something flamboyantly irrelevant; call someone you don’t need to call; look up at the sky instead of the concrete. When you turn back to your routine,  it will feel freshened.

The Zwicky Box is a powerful method for creative problem-solving:

A Zwicky box is powerful but is not hard to build. Break your problem into categories and add values to each category. Then, create unique combinations by combining the values from each category.

The “consequences” of kindness:

[P]eople who perform random acts of kindness do not always realize how much of an impact they are having on another individual. People consistently and systematically underestimate how others value these acts.

Across multiple experiments involving approximately 1,000 participants, people performed a random act of kindness—that is, an action done with the primary intention of making someone else (who isn’t expecting the gesture) feel good. Those who perform such actions expect nothing in return.

[B]oth performers and recipients of the acts of kindness were in more positive moods than normal after these exchanges. For another, it was clear that performers undervalued their impact: recipients felt significantly better than the kind actors expected. The recipients also reliably rated these acts as “bigger” than the people performing them did.

Focus on the process, and judge on effort:

When you’re focused on the process, you win every time you apply your process or system. On the path from where you are now to where you want to be, you accumulate a large number of small wins along the way. And each small win counts as a success, making you feel good about yourself, creating a sense of accomplishment, giving you confidence to keep going, showing you the progress you’re making and so on… ah, this feels great!

When you’re focused on the outcome, things look a lot different. Now you only win once you achieve your goal (e.g. once you lose the twenty pounds). No instant success here. You first need to accomplish the goal, then you can be proud, happy, and feel like a success. No matter how much progress you’re making or how much hard work you’re putting in, all that counts is the ultimate outcome.

Even if everything’s going great. You’re depriving yourself of a sense of accomplishment, happiness, contentment, or pride. You find yourself in a constant state of “When I finally achieve my goal, then I’ll be happy and successful. Then I’ll feel proud.”

Your OKRs are not your strategy:

The other thing I don’t like about the application of OKR principles is the multiplicity of objectives. This leads companies to call each objective/key results loop a ‘strategy,’ so it sees itself as having multiple strategies — i.e., one ‘strategy’ is increase distribution, another ‘strategy’ is increase customer loyalty, another is to expand geographically, etc. I believe that an organization (at a given level) has one strategy, not multiple strategies. Whenever anyone refers to their ‘strategies,’ I know they don’t know what strategy is.

This is important because to be effective, a strategy needs to be an integrated set of choices, each of which fits with and reinforces the others. There may be various attributes to a given WTP choice. There may be various facets of the HTW choice, and various must-have capabilities (MHC) and enabling management systems (EMS). But all are encapsulated in one set of choices to win — your strategy. It is not a bunch of loosely connected ‘strategies.’

Give your team members (and leaders) the gift of focus this year:

Focus, the pure focus on the task in front of you, is when you do your best work. The important achievements of information management are essential but immeasurable. When you focus, intensely focus, you can see the one thing that must be said, to discover the critical assumption that transforms good design to great and to most efficiently transform your years of experience into small, understandable, and unintentional lessons for those sitting right there… focusing with you.

A day in the life of a vending machine.

Fifty GPT prompts to try.

Finally, you know I’m a sucker for these “things I learned in 2022” kinds of posts. Here’s another with some of these fun facts:

• Parents usually hold babies with the child’s head on the left, because both parent and child’s left eyes are controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, which governs feelings of empathy and connection. This is true for parents from every culture, and even true of children when they hold dolls.

• Compared to irritant-induced crying (e.g. caused by onions), the tears you cry when you’re sad contain 24% more protein, which means they roll down your face more slowly and are more likely to be noticed by others, who, in turn, can comfort you.

• In 1810, nails accounted for roughly 0.4% of GDP in the United States, equivalent to the role of the airline industry or computer manufacturing in today’s economy.

• When an Apple store opens in a mall, foot traffic goes up 10% in every other store.

• People reveal about 26% of other people’s secrets.

• All the gold that has ever been mined in all of human history could fill about three Olympic-sized swimming pools.

• The F-word is 29% easier to pronounce thanks to the agricultural revolution. Humans developed overbites in response to diets made up of softer foods, which affected speech.

WONDERFUL WORDS

"Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

"The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others." — Connie Mac

"It is nearly impossible to have your best idea the first time you think about something." — James Clear

"The purpose of today’s training is to defeat yesterday’s understanding." — Miyamoto Musashi

“To bear trials with a calm mind robs misfortune of its strength and burden.” — Seneca

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” — Marilyn Monroe

“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small.” — Lao Tzu

“The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they're right.” — John Cleese

“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” ​— Jack Kornfield

"There will always be someone who can't see your worth. Don't let it be you." — Mel Robbins

“When we feel as though we have too little time, we end up living a smaller life.” — Cassie Holmes

Welcome to another Monday Morning Meeting! I’m writing this edition from Miami as I knock out a few end-of-year biz meetings before shutting things down next week.

In this edition: advice for difficult conversations, bat signals and tiered huddles, soft skills, design principles, prioritizing disappointment, the importance of immediate kindness, indie holiday music, and more.

But first, I promised last week I’d give a preview of Filament’s 2023. In the spirit of working out loud and embracing the shitty first draft, here are some of the big things we’re focused on in the next 90 days:

• The Grand Opening at Cortex: We’re finally getting situated into our new digs at Cortex (doors were finally installed last week!!) and will be having a grand opening party sometime soon. Look for details here soon, but I expect we’ll target February.

• Filament’s Master Your Meetings Training: We’re launching a new full-day training session for both individuals and teams. We’ve been piloting this training for several months now, and the reviews have been off the charts. Participants will get access to our suite of meeting tools and I expect we’ll build half-day and virtual options as well.

• N.S.F.W. (New Skills for Work): N.S.F.W. is “Filamentized” job-skills training for all those job skills that aren’t explicitly taught (like whiteboarding an idea, dumping the powerpoint in meetings, delivering effective feedback, etc.).

• Facilitator’s Open Mic Night: This is an experiment for us, but we want to build a community of amazing facilitators and give everyone a chance to nerd out about facilitation, learn from their peers, and — this is where the “open mic” part comes in — find a safe place to practice new tools and methods they may be reluctant to use at work until they iron out the kinks.

• Last-Minute Meetings: We’re going to offer discounted, turn-key meetings when we’ve got a few open dates on our calendars in the upcoming month. Still trying to figure out the mechanics of this, but I expect we’ll share open dates 2-3 weeks out for customers to grab if they’ve wanted to engage with us, but our full price was too high.

• Half-Day Sketch Sessions: Sometimes, all you need is some time to think through a challenge with a group of your peers. These agenda-free facilitated mini-workshops will help your team discuss and visualize a discreet challenge or opportunity in a creative way.

• Website Launch: We’ve promised this for a while, but we’ll launch the new website in January.

• Newsletter Revamp: I’m going to move this newsletter off of Squarespace to a new domain. It might also get a new name. Stay tuned!

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

Talking Points for Life has all the advice you could ever need for all kinds of uncomfortable conversations and inappropriate questions. For example, here are a few ways to encourage someone to answer your question instead of saying, “I don’t know”

• Just because you answer doesn't mean you need to do anything about it.

• What if you secretly knew the answer?

• What is it like for you not to know?

• How do you feel right now as you think about answering this question?

• If I were to snap my fingers and you knew… (snap fingers)

• OK, so what if you were to give me an approximate answer or a range?

• Take a deep breath and let your unconscious mind create the answer as a picture instead of trying to make it happen.

An online community isn’t like a garden, it’s like a bar:

The important part is, each bar cultivates its own culture and you can’t walk in to a bar and expect it to be like every other bar you’ve ever been in. And the bars themselves come up with ways to differentiate themselves and reinforce these differences, some overt and some subtle.

Bartenders are the original community managers. In addition to knowing how to make drinks, they’re the person who can listen kindly when there’s no one else to talk to. They’re also the person who’ll clock the problem patrons the moment they walk through the door.

In the 25 years I’ve been studying communities, the most depressing part is that people still start communities (social apps, sites, any company that lets people talk to each other) without thinking through who, exactly, is going to manage the community and how. But it would be ridiculous to start a bar without a bartender.

And bartenders are not alone! A successful bar will need a whole staff. Servers, hosts, busboys, cooks, cleaners, bouncers. Especially bouncers! We’re nearly 30 years into the web and people are still starting community sites thinking they can just outsource all the messy people stuff to AI or poorly paid contractors, often in other countries.

There are two good tips in this article about why productivity starts with processes (vs. people) that you might try:

Tiered Huddles: Many highly productive organizations have instituted a system of tiered daily huddles, with a clear escalation sequence for all problems. The first huddle, consisting of front-line workers, begins at the start of the workday. The next huddle, consisting of supervisors, follows 30 minutes later. Managers meet 30 minutes after that, followed by directors, VPs, and finally the executive team. Problems are addressed at the lowest possible level. If a decision can’t be reached, the issue is escalated to the next level. This system improves the linkage between the C-suite and the front lines; it accelerates decision making; and perhaps most importantly, it improves productivity by reducing the number of scattershot emails about a variety of problems.

Bat Signal: Batman fans will remember that the police summoned Batman with the image of a bat projected in the night sky. The bat signal was reserved for times of crisis, like when the Joker was on the loose, not when a scofflaw failed to pay a parking ticket. As Marshall McLuhan argued, the medium was the message. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t have a similar way of indicating an issue is a true emergency. With no agreement on what communication channel to use, workers are forced to check all digital messaging platforms to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. That’s toxic to productivity. Companies can make work easier for people if they specified channels for urgent and non-urgent issues.

In the workplace, “soft skills” need a rebrand:

“The narrative around soft skills must change. Call them strong skills, brave skills, or leadership superpowers,” says Norman. “It takes courage and vulnerability to use these skills in the workplace, but doing so results in organizations in which employees feel valued, included, and engaged.”

By reframing how we think and communicate these types of skills, we can broaden our perspective of who might have them and how we can train for them, thereby creating leaders who are flexible, resilient, and enduring — anything but soft.

Principles.design is a compendium of design principles and methods. I really loved a few of internet pioneer Tim Berners Lee’s:

• It is not only necessary to make sure your own system is designed to be made of modular parts. It is also necessary to realize that your own system, no matter how big and wonderful it seems now, should always be designed to be a part of another larger system.

• Be liberal in what you require but conservative in what you do.

• If someone else had already invented your system, would theirs work with yours?

If you’re struggling to get into the holiday spirit, maybe you need some new holiday music.

Speaking of the holidays, perhaps focus first on not disappointing yourself:

Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.

And if you’re looking for a good topic for discussion around the extended-family dining room table, try this question: What's something new that you appreciate because you took the time to notice it? 

Finally, I’ll close with this great advice:

If you think something nice about someone, always tell them right then. It's a shame that we often wait until a person's funeral to say all of the nice things we thought about them. The next time you have a positive thought about someone—no matter how small or insignificant it may be—tell them right then. Give them the flowers while they can still smell them. It's a simple, free way to spread positivity and joy.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“Execution pays your salary. Innovation pays your pension.” — Steve Blank

“There’s only one age: alive.” — Agnes Varda

“Err in the direction of kindness.” — George Saunders

"Caring about what others think of you is a waste of time. Most people don’t have a clue what to think of themselves." ― Zane Baker

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” — John F. Kennedy

“What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do.” — Dan Pink

“The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.” — Joan Didion

“The ideas that move industries forward are not the result of tremendous creative insight but rather of masterful stewardship.” — Scott Belsky

“To the child, as to the artist, everything is relevant; little is unseen.:” — Alexandra Horowitz

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.”― Louis L’Amour

Welcome to another Monday Morning Meeting!

We’re in end-of-year planning mode at Filament before the holidays arrive. Next week will be the last edition of 2022 where I’ll share some of the big things we’re working on at Filament for 2023, including a new website, moving this email newsletter to a new platform, launching a brand-new meeting training offering, introducing four new recurring events you’ll want to attend, and more.

In this edition: AI writing, pouring gasoline on already-difficult situations, the seven levels of busy, the myth of urgent, secrets of magic tricks, toys from your youth, and more.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

If you’re not playing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT3 yet, you’re missing out. It is mind-blowing (even if it is not always right). Here’s what it generated when I asked it to create an agenda for a 45-minute team meeting:

Here is an example of an agenda for an amazing team meeting that lasts only 45 minutes:

1. Welcome and introductions (5 minutes)

2. Review of last meeting's action items (5 minutes)

3. Discussion of current priorities and projects (20 minutes)

4. Open forum for team members to share updates and concerns (10 minutes)

5. Review of next steps and action items (5 minutes)

This agenda is designed to keep the meeting focused and efficient. It begins with a brief welcome and introductions, followed by a review of last meeting's action items to ensure that progress is being made on previous decisions. The majority of the meeting is dedicated to discussing current priorities and projects, and there is also time for open discussion to allow team members to share updates and raise any concerns. Finally, the meeting ends with a review of next steps and action items to ensure that everyone is clear on their tasks and responsibilities moving forward.

I joined my friend Steve Harper on his Ripple Effect Podcast. We talked Filament, Thinksgiving, meetings, and more. Check it out and give him a follow!

Is the four-day workweek working?

Participating firms reported increased revenue, plus reduced absenteeism and resignations. Workers said they felt less stressed and burnt out, and reported higher rates of life satisfaction. No firms said they would go back to the five-day week.

This was a fun rabbit hole to fall into during the holiday season: the most popular holiday toys from every year since 1920. So many memories!!

I love this approach to difficult situations: Are you using gasoline or water?

Something I try to teach the kids: Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. When they engaged in ineffective behavior, I used to ask them if what they were doing was going to help them get what they wanted. Now I ask them if they're using gasoline or water. The visual is a powerful (and often humorous) way for them to pause and ask themselves if what they're doing is making things easier or harder.

When you ask your team if they’re “busy” or not, maybe you should be more specific. Like the seven levels of busy specific. Here are the last three:

Level 5: CRACKS IN THE FACADE I tell myself I’m on top of all the things, but there are early signs of excessive work. This is when Inbox Zero fails. I know daily surprises could be avoided if I had… just a bit more time. I start saying “I’m sorry” a lot. Stuff isn’t getting dropped, but execution becomes sloppy.

Level 6: CRUSHING COMMITMENTS The incoming amount of things are beyond my ability to triage them. Change is constant. Just saying “No” to inbound things is not enough. Stuff is falling on the floor, and I’m not noticing. Work hours spill into life hours. Tired.

Level 7: UNSUSTAINABLE I live minute to minute. Eating and other necessities are shoved in-between things, but eating and other necessities are frequently neglected. To-do lists do not help me here because I do not have time to maintain them. My calendar changes from hour to hour. It is clear by how I walk how busy I am. I get a lot of unintentional “He’s screwed” looks. Zero work-life balance. This is not sustainable.

Speaking of busy, is it really “urgent” instead of just important?

[W}hat we call “urgency” is actually just another kind of importance – not some separate, stress-inducing quality that attaches itself to certain tasks, demanding their immediate completion. And definitely, time-sensitivity is one of the factors that can make a task worth prioritising. Deadlines do matter, whether you’re paying a bill, launching a product, buying a birthday present or leaving for the school run. But time-sensitivity is one factor among many. There’s no need to think of urgency as some uniquely powerful force that gets to muscle its way in front of everything else.

If this strikes you as a purely conceptual distinction, I can only respond that, for me, it’s been transformative. It helps me see the truth of my situation, which is that every day, when I wake up, there are thousands upon thousands of genuinely important ways I could spend my day – certainly incalculably more than I’ll have time for. So much matters! Meaningful work matters. My relationships with my wife and son and friends matter. Paying the bills matters. Cleaning the house matters. Rest matters. Fun matters.

Tired of not being able to export HEIC photos on your iPhone? It is simple to take photos as JPEGs instead:“

Here are the instructions: Settings → Camera → Formats → Select “Most Compatible.” To switch back to HEIC, simply switch from “Most Compatible” to “High Efficiency.”

If you really want to know how classic magic tricks are done (like sawing a person in half), here’s your guide.

Sim City only looks “real” because there aren’t as many parking lots there as in real life.

The Evolution of Trust is a fun way to learn about game theory, trust, and human behavior.

​The Need to Read:​

You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things. People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can't afford to.

WONDERFUL WORDS

"The goal of life is to die young — as late as possible!"​ — Ashley Montagu

"What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else." — Hal Boyle

“We try to become successful so we can be happy, instead of making sure we’re happy so we can become successful.” — Jesse Tevelow

"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them." — Edwidge Danticat

"You want to pay attention to the language you use not because you want your audience to think you're a fantastic wordsmith, but because you want them to be more likely to behave the way you hope they will." — Nancy Harhut

"Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things." — Robert Brault

“There is usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much it’s getting done.” — David Allen

“More is lost by indecision than wrong decision. Indecision is the thief of opportunity. It will steal you blind.” — Cicero

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” — John Dewe

“The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.” — Jay Samit

"The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think." — Marc Andreessen

Welcome to another Monday Morning Meeting!

In this edition: Price’s Law of Organizational Ineffectiveness, rules for public speaking, the link between failure and invention, blogs, great films, how to leave Twitter, why to draw ideas, why three is (still) a magic number, and more.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

Feeling like you’re doing more work than your peers? It may be Price’s Law in action:

The square root of the number of people in a company do 50% of the work, [so] in a company of 10 employees, 3 of them do 50% of the work. The remaining 50% of the work is done by the other 7 people.

Competence grows linearly. Incompetence grows exponentially:

• 10 employees, 3 of them do 50% of the work

• 100 employees, 10 of them do 50% of the work, the other 90 do the other 50%

• 10,000 employees, 100 of them do 50% of the work, the other 9,900 do the other 50%

Jeff Bezos believes failure and invention are inseparable twins:

To invent, you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.

Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right.

Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs.

The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.

There are some really solid tips in these 10 Rules for Public Speaking. I particularly like the first two:

(1) The Podium is Death: I may start my talk at the podium, but I get away from it at the first opportunity. I see others who hold on to the lectern for dear life, almost as if they’re rodeo cowboys on a bucking bronco. But unless you are a father confessor, you shouldn’t keep a big wooden slab between you and your listener.

Speaking is more than just words. Your movements and physical location reinforce the message you’re delivering, or undermine it if you don’t do it right. When you do stand still—as you will from time to time—it creates high drama, and focuses everyone’s attention on what you are saying. And when you move, the energy moves with you. Which leads to my second tip . . .

(2) Invade the Audience’s Space: At a key juncture in your talk, actually move into the audience. This is easiest to do if you are off the stage and on the same level as your listeners. There will usually be a middle aisle in the room, and when you start walking up it you will feel the energy rising all around you.

Humans are mammals and always pay closest attention when others invade their space. At that juncture you will have everyone intensely focused on your presence and totally aware of everything you say—so you only do this at the most significant moment or moments in your talk.

Swurl.com is a web search engine that is optimally designed for mobile that searches Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, Amazon, YouTube, Images, News and Reddit, and all results are viewed by scrolling or swiping.

One size doesn’t ever fit all. One size fits one:

I also think the idea that “one size fits one” is a really important guiding principle that I’ve used in how I serve people and how I lead them. It could apply to how you deliver service and hospitality to your customers, which is to contour the experience to the person that they are. As a leader, it means that you need to manage people not as just another number on your team but as individuals—getting to know them and tailoring your approach to how you lead them in a specific way that will be most effective, most investing, and most loving to them.

Futurepedia.io compiles all the AI tools available. Really mind-blowing to browse what people are doing with this emerging technology.

I love this tutorial on how to draw ideas!

Tom Whitewell has another compilation of the 52 things he learned this year. Some favorites:

• Using ellipsis in writing signifies the writer is Gen-X or Boomer and can read as confusing, passive-aggressive or even weirdly flirtatious to digital natives.

• 37 per cent of the world’s population, 2.9 billion people, have never used the Internet.

• 40% of global shipping involves moving fossil and other fuels (oil, gas, wood pellets) around. More renewables (solar, wind, nuclear, geo), means fewer ships.

• A man’s partner’s competitiveness increases their future income. Their own competitiveness makes little difference.

Remember blogs? The OOH! Directory is a collection of over 1,000 of them sorted by topic.

I’ve seen remarkably few of these 100 Greatest Films of All Time (though, to be fair, many aren’t in English).

Schoolhouse Rock’s Three is a Magic Number turned 50 this year.

Thinking of ditching Twitter. Here’s some good advice:

If you deactivate/delete your Twitter account, your @ handle will be publicly available in 30 days. The chances that you will be impersonated with no recourse is very high! Don’t do it — especially if you had a fairly popular account.

To wipe things, deactivate your account, then go to bird site /login and reactivate it. All of your followers will be gone. Now lock the account and let it rot. @semiphemeral is a great tool for wiping data, including DMs...

Finally, if you’re looking for some quirky books to read (or to give to others), check out this list from Do.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.” — Lily Tomlin

“One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.” — Brian Eno

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible.” — Richard Feynman

“If you’ve got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you’re learning to say it better.” — David Mamet

“One of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.” Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming. Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible.” — Naval Ravikant

“The most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word no.” — Shane Parish

“The health of an organization is directly proportional to the speed at which truth travels within it.” — Luke Burgis

Happy Thanksgiving week! This newsletter is taking a vacation next week, so you’ll get a double dose of cool ideas today.

In this edition: clearness committees, decision deliberation, bad meetings, terrible endings, complexity theory, shopping cart handles, ear AI, and … pigweed.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!  Drop us a line

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

When you’ve got a big decision to make, convene a “Clearness” Committee:

Clearness committees are composed of five or six members who convene with a decision-maker, fully focus their attention on his or her problem for a couple of hours, and ask that person questions about the problem. “The members of the clearness committee are forbidden from saying anything, except to ask the focus person open, honest questions that will help that person have a deeper conversation with himself or herself,” Palmer said. “The core rule is: there shall be no fixing, no saving, no advising, and no correcting, because what you think the focus person ought to do is irrelevant. What counts is what the person is hearing from within, which will constitute his or her guidance for better or for worse.”

Speaking of decisions, deliberate once:

If you have a big decision to make, set aside some time to do some serious thinking. Ask people you trust for the obvious advice, and then actually do it. Set some five-minute timers, spend time describing the problem before you spend time describing possible solutions, brainstorm a wide variety of solutions. Figure out where you're highly uncertain, find the places where your decision turns on a critical piece of information you're missing, and add actions like "run thus-and-such an experiment" to your set of available actions. Build models. Make your best guesses about the probabilities of various outcomes in response to your actions, make your best guesses about how good those outcomes are, multiply out an expected value calculation, throw the numbers out, and consult your updated intuitions. And so on.

Surprise! Most meetings are terrible:

If you, like many people, think work meetings are a huge waste of time, that might be because most meetings keep employees from, well, working: One survey of 76 companies found that productivity was 71 percent higher when meetings were reduced by 40 percent. Unnecessary meetings waste $37 billion in salary hours a year in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the software company Atlassian. And in case you’re wondering, COVID made things worse: The number of meetings required of employees has risen by 12.9 percent on average since the coronavirus pandemic began.

But the real problem with meetings is not lack of productivity—it’s unhappiness. When meetings are a waste of time, job satisfaction declines. And when job satisfaction declines, happiness in general falls. Thus, for a huge portion of the population, eliminating meetings—or at least minimizing them—is one of the most straightforward ways to increase well-being.

“Zoom Fatigue” is disproportionately suffered by women.

More than twice as many women as men reported serious post-call exhaustion — perhaps because women’s meetings tend to run longer and they are less likely to take breaks between them. Add to that the increased focus on women’s appearance and it’s clear this is not a simple “no one likes video calls” situation.

So what should you do? Take short breaks.

I’d never heard of Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity:

The total complexity of a system is a constant. If you make a user’s interaction with a system simpler, the complexity behind the scenes increases.

The grips on your shopping cart impact how much money you spend:

• Upward grips increase spending. Customers spent more money while pushing a shopping cart with an upward (vs. overhand) grip.

• Handheld baskets increase unhealthy purchases. Shopping baskets activate the muscles in pulling, which strengthens desire for products.

The Surgeon General’s Report on workplace well-being is worth a look.

We can build workplaces that are engines of well-being, showing workers that they matter, that their work matters, and that they have the workplace resources and support necessary to flourish.

Maybe doing things IS the reward vs. resting after doing things:

The actual reward state is not one where you're lazing around doing nothing. It's one where you're keeping busy, where you're doing things that stimulate you, and where you're resting only a fraction of the time. The preferred ground state is not one where you have no activity to partake in, it's one where you're managing the streams of activity precisely, and moving through them at the right pace: not too fast, but also not too slow. For that would be boring.

And yet, most people have this model of the world where whenever they're not resting, they're taking damage. When the homework isn't done, they're taking damage. When they're reading a textbook, they're taking damage. When they go to sleep with work unfinished, they're taking damage. When they're at a large social event, they're taking damage. Some part of them yearns to be in the rest state, where they don't need to do all these things, and insofar as they aren't, they're suffering a little.

Rest isn't something you do when everything else is finished. Everything else doesn't get finished. Rather, there are lots of activities that you do, some which are more fun than others, and rest is an important one to do in appropriate proportions.

This is a great reminder: You are replaceable at work, but not at home. Always keep that in perspective.

Why do we stick to what we know?

As we get older, our preconceived ideas of how things should be done become more rigid and harder to challenge. Although functional fixedness offers useful heuristics that help us save time on simple tasks, it can be detrimental to our creative thinking.

Like many creative processes, the more you practice finding new ways of problem-solving, the easier it will become. Rather than automatically following the same processes, try to develop the habit of regularly looking for answers outside the box, or even outside the system.

Making a conscious effort to let go of rigidity in favour of finding new ways of doing things will foster more innovative thinking; letting go of the status quo in favour of branching out to generate alternative solutions will lead to more creative solutions.

AI can guess what you look like by a picture of your ear. Scroll down to the pictures for the freaky proof.

You chose wrong collects terrible endings from choose-your-own-adventure books.

Be more like … pigweed?

As we seek to survive in an age of ecological collapse and cultural chaos, perhaps it is to the weeds we should look for advice. I think of Pigweed, invading Europe as Europe colonized America. As Europeans took over America, Pigweed flowed back on the ships, into the countries that were invading its original ecosystem. It performed a reverse colonization. Pigweed originally only from the Americas is now dispersed across Europe and Asia. Pigweed says plant me in disturbed landscapes, dirty soil, chemical sludge. Plant me where the pain lives and I will learn how to survive. I will learn how to turn this poison into greenery, into stalk and seed and a tap root so long and sturdy it is almost a sword, capable of sucking up water not available the shallow rooted soy and cotton plants. My body needs to learn how to adapt to an increasingly chaotic environment. It needs a saint that teaches me how to get I touch with the wily, cunning knowledge of place. My saint is a seed on the wind. A vegetal plague. Pigweed.

WONDERFUL WORDS

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” — André Gide

“Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else.” — Shane Parish

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” — Anne Lamott

“Whether something is complicated is in the mind of the beholder.” — Donald A. Norman

“You must be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way.” — John Wooden

“Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.” — Austin Kleon

“Advertising works best when it tells us things we already believe.” — Byron Sharp

"Life completely unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity.” — Kosho Uchiyama

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” — George S. Patton

In this edition: creating a hybrid culture, wandering for insight, walking for creativity, planning vs. planners, powering down, P.T. Barnum, bubble-blowing, and more.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!  

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

How can you revitalize your culture in your newly hybridized workplace?

Shift from diffusing culture through the office to diffusing it through the work itself.

Managers often worry that remote workers’ productivity will suffer because of interruptions and distractions at home. In fact, just the opposite happens: People often have more time for deep work, and productivity soars. This points to a valuable opportunity for employers to instill culture through daily tasks. “When you’re home, you have a more intimate relationship with work,” Cambon says. “Every time you engage in a task, you should see the corporate culture reflected in it.”

Leaders should start by auditing the firm’s work processes to make sure they are compatible with the intended culture, the researchers suggest. “Say you want your firm to be innovative, forward-thinking, and fast-paced,” Cambon says. “If your methodologies are bureaucratic and your systems have constant technical glitches, that will undermine the culture.”

Companies should help employees see that their value comes from the role they perform, not their physical location. For example, Virgin Money, a financial-services company, identifies its call center workers as the “voice of the company.” Employees use an app to pinpoint what they most value in their work and then talk with their managers about how to adjust their roles to reflect those priorities. Companies should also encourage teams to set the rhythms for how work gets done rather than operate under manager-directed norms.

Put down your device and let your mind wander:

[R]espondents valued thinking time far more than they had anticipated. This held true regardless of whether participants were seated in a barren conference room or a small, dark tent area with no visual stimulation, regardless of whether the thinking period lasted three minutes or 20 minutes, and regardless of whether participants were asked to report their enjoyment in the middle of the task as opposed to at the end. In every case, participants found thinking to be more enjoyable than they had predicted.

Speaking of wandering, if you want to generate more novel ideas, start with a walk!

Walking substantially enhanced creativity by two different measures. For the three alternate uses studies, 81%, 88%, and 100% of participants were more creative walking than sitting. For the BSE, 100% of those who walked outside generated at least one novel high-quality analogy compared with 50% of those seated inside. Walking worked indoors on a treadmill and outdoors at a bustling university. Walking is an easy-to-implement strategy to increase appropriate novel idea generation. When there is a premium on generating new ideas in the workday, it should be beneficial to incorporate walks.

Repetition, repetition, repetition:

If you want to get your point across, especially to a broader audience, you need to repeat yourself so often, you get sick of hearing yourself say it. And only then will people begin to internalize what you’re saying.

Do you have plans or planners?

Do your plans ever change? Do you know which assumptions or conditions the plan is based on create the most sensitivity and upend the plan? Do you regularly check your assumptions and conditions and update plans as the conditions change? Are your plans gathering dust on the credenza in your office? Planning is an art, a verb and creates value. Plans are an artefact, a noun and are useful in a moment. It's important to know the difference.

We’ve been running this literature clock on our television at home. Would also be fun for an office display.

One way to fix social media? Maybe everyone should just shut up:

They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.

Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. Deep.

P.T. Barnum probably didn’t say “there’s a sucker born every minute,” but he did publish his 20 rules for making money way back in 1880. Here are my favorite 10:

5. Whatever you do, do it with all your might 
7. Use the best tools 
9. Learn something useful 
10. Let hope predominate but be not too visionary 
11. Do not scatter your powers 
12. Be systematic 
17. Be polite and kind to your customers 
18. Be charitable 
19. Don’t blab 
20. Preserve your integrity

The Design Thinking Bootleg from Standford’s d.school is a set of facilitation tools and methods on printable cards.

Should you have a “power down” ritual to end each work day?

Finally — and I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit this — I close down my computer and say the magic phrase: “schedule shutdown, complete.”

Here’s my rule: After I’ve uttered the magic phrase, if a work-related worry pops to mind, I always answer it with the following thought process:

I said the termination phrase. I wouldn’t have said this phrase if I hadn’t checked over all of my tasks, my calendar, and my weekly plan and decided that everything was captured and I was on top of everything. Therefore, there is no need to worry.

A great icebreaker question:

"What's something you own that people would be surprised to know you have?"

I played with this bubble-blowing simulation for much longer than I should have.

Extremely deep bass (the kind we can’t actually hear) makes people dance more.

WONDERFUL WORDS

"Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up." — Michael J. Gelb

“Isn’t it wonderful to be alive? You know, you can forget all about it. Then suddenly you remember, and think of all the things you can do. Here I am. I can walk around. I can talk. I can see things and remember things. I am alive. How wonderful.” — Sophia Loren

"Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful." — Warren Buffett

"It takes courage to say yes to rest and play in a culture where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol." —Brene Brown

“Much of your failure, and your success, is not your fault.” — Scott Galloway

“Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.” — Elizabeth King

“‘As soon as possible’ is a trap if you focus on soon instead of possible.” — Seth Godin

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” — Jacob Riis

“The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.” — James Clear

“We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches.” — Rene Girard

"A good apology is like antibiotic; a bad apology is like rubbing salt in the wound." — Randy Pausch

"Every artist was first an amateur." — Ralph Waldo Emerson