User Education

I noticed the lid to the jar of Natural Peanut Butter I ate last night had this little tidbit:

"Oil separation is normal. Just mix back together and enjoy!"

In other words: "It's not a mistake- it's how you know you're eating the good stuff".

If your product has an aspect that appears to be an error, but is really a feature, educating the user can move beyond eliminating a perceived mistake and move towards a signal of quality.

Second Life

Our new media environment allows for unprecedented recycling of content. With so many channels to fill, content can easily be used in multiple places without too much overlap of audience. This raises the stakes for making quality content rather than lowering it.

I hear too often the call do a project on the cheap because it's "only for the web", even though a successful web segment, if pushed to multiple channels, can have as much viewership as a high profile "non-web" project. Just because the viewership comes further down the Long Tail doesn't diminish the value of those views.

Because online content has multiple lives the effort should be raised because you never know where the content is going to show up down the line. What if by chance it does go viral? Do you want your best work out there, or something you just threw together?

Prima Donnas

Genius talent often carries baggage. Sometimes being really great requires mental wiring that is just different from the rest of the general population, but sometimes it comes from being coddled and pampered in order to continue the production of genius.

But the baggage can easily outweigh the benefits of the genius. At that point a negative reputation is formed, potential work is lost, and a career declines prematurely and for unnecessarily. Genius is wasted.

Everyone needs a jester on their life, the person who is always allowed to speak the unvarnished truth, and keep the genius in check. Without it, genius can become a burden rather than a blessing.

The Tempation Of Cheap

I've worked on many projects where I had to overcome someone's decision to go the cheap way, yet when starting my own projects I'm tempted to go the cheap way.

The profit margins using cheap inputs can be enormous.

Yet those cheap inputs and methods create standards and expectations, which future clients and colleagues will measure you by.

This isn't about being expensive- its about being on the good side of the value equation between you and your client. Even if their budget is $50, you deliver (in their eyes) $51 of content. Going the cheap route too often delivers only $45 worth of goods- and eventually the client will figure it out.

In the long run, being known as "the guy/company/organization who does things on the cheap" will cut into future profits.

Appraisials

If you really want to know what your organization thinks about you and your skills, give yourself a lousy self-review.

Your supervisor then has two choices- A) argue that, no, you are a great employee, or B) agree with your lousy assessment and leave it at that.

It may be one of the few times you get honest feedback from your review, even if you have to read between the lines.

Scale Of Enjoyment

I've long suspected that the pricing of books and music backwards.

Most books are only read once, yet are often priced north of $15, $25 for a hard cover. Books are a great value when you divide the cost by the hours of entertainment that book provides, but the initial cost can be steep.

Music, however, strikes me as absurdly cheap, even at $12-$15 for a full CD. If that CD turns into a favorite, you will play it dozens of times over its life. I have a few recordings that I am sure I have listened to over one hundred times. My marginal cost per listen is somewhere around ten cents.

If anything, the pricing should be reversed: cheap books, expensive music.

Death By Slide

No slides is infinitely more interesting that using bad slides.

There's a special place in hell for those who read bad slides to their audience.