Did you ever have that word that you’ve been misspelling since junior high school, and just figured it out?
So, I’m wandering Manchester-by-the-Book, one of my favorite small bookstores (where I discovered one of my favorite books ever, James Salter’s Burning the Days), and I stumble on The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan.
Wait, isn’t it ‘The Medium is the Message‘?
Well, no. All my life I’ve thought the book was named after his famous saying, but no. Apparently, it’s a semi-intentional pun. The Medium “massages” us, manipulates us. Sound familiar?
But this is 1967, the internet is not really a thing, there are faint stirrings of Arpanet, but no Twitter, no web browser, no Facebook, no TikTok. There’s really just TV and Radio. I open to a random page and find:
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.
OK so that is ahead of its time. The book is attractive in a 1960-ish way, all strangely formatted text, black and white photographs, illustrations on every page, pages you have to read in the mirror because they are printed backwards….sold.
I take it home and start reading more seriously.
The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions-the patterns of mechanistic technologies-are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank-that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes”.
Ever posted something on TikTok/IG/Facebook you wanted to take back? Ever worried about the ever-growing Surveillance State, or Surveillance Advertising? McLuhan is on the case, in 1967 before it all existed.
I’m about halfway through the book, and so far, here’s the money quote:
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
….
It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.
The 24×7 outrage machine we call the internet: do you understand how deeply your worldview is shaped by what you read? Or don’t read? The news sources you visit, or don’t visit? The media you consume, or don’t? How deeply what you see is impacted by the monetary imperatives of the media? (ALL of them, not just the bad guys, whoever they are for you!).
As Ryan Holiday says, “If you start your day with social media, the news, or email, realize: you’re starting your day at the mercy of others.“
A lot of people are coming to realize that much of the modern internet really just isn’t good for us. And yet, can you get away from it?
The first step is being aware. That pretty much everything that comes at you has an agenda. Question it. Why am I being told this now? What is the (economic/political/marketing) motivation for them to tell me? Does it resonate with my worldview? If so, maybe it’s false – just a re-enforcing echo chamber? Question all that you read, watch and hear, especially if it re-enforces your worldview or agrees with your intuition.
And read a book now and then :). The Medium is the Massage is a fun way to start – fast, thought-provoking, and fun. If you want to really embrace the ambiance of this book, throw on Philip Glass’s soundtrack to the cult film Koyaanisqatsi.
So, I’m having shoulder surgery in January, for a torn rotator cuff. Too much tennis, not enough outside strength training. I basically won’t be able to use my right arm for a month after the surgery, it will be in a sling. And tennis is probably 1 year away after rehab.
The shoulder really hasn’t been right for some years now. While this surgery is seriously inconvenient, and likely painful for awhile, I’m looking at this at the path to getting my shoulder back to full health and full strength. Rather than looking at the downsides. As Ryan Holiday says, The Obstacle is the Way.
To get myself ready, I’m collecting some of my favorite Marcus Aurelius quotes from The Meditations, the “bible”, if you will, of Stoic philosophy. These from the Gregory Hayes translation. (This is more for me than you :)).
The first one seems a bit too literal 🙂
Practice, even things you don’t expect to need.
Practice even what seems impossible.
The left hand is useless at almost everything, for lack of practice. But it guides the reins better than the right. From practice.
I’m going to be practicing left hand stuff for awhile!
Control your mind and attitude:
Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.
Shorter, my adaptation: Never be overheard complaining – even to yourself.
How not to feel a victim:
“It’s unfortunate that this has happened.”
No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it. Why treat the one as a misfortune rather than the other as fortunate? Can you really call something a misfortune that doesn’t violate human nature? Or do you think something that’s not against nature’s will can violate it? But you know what its will is.
Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all the other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself? So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.
It’s not what happens to you. It’s how you respond.
Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed.
Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
Control your mind, as well as your outward behavior.
From Apollonius I learned: to be the same in all circumstances—intense pain, the loss of a child, chronic illness.
Looking at events as opportunities, not problems.
That every event is the right one. Look closely and you’ll see.
Not just the right one overall, but right. As if someone had weighed it out with scales.
Keep looking closely like that, and embody it in your actions: goodness—what defines a good person.
A visual to help you
To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.
Managing pain
[On pain:] Unendurable pain brings its own end with it.
Chronic pain is always endurable: the intelligence maintains serenity by cutting itself off from the body, the mind remains undiminished. And the parts that pain affects—let them speak for themselves, if they can.
Mental vacations
People try to get away from it all — to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like.
By going within.
Other people
What’s there to complain about? People’s misbehavior? But take into consideration: • that rational beings exist for one another; • that doing what’s right sometimes requires patience; • that no one does the wrong thing deliberately; • and the number of people who have feuded and envied and hated and fought and died and been buried.
. . . and keep your mouth shut.
and
Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.
The big picture
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
Peace
The tranquillity that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. (Is this fair? Is this the right thing to do?) < . . . > not to be distracted by their darkness. To run straight for the finish line, unswerving.
Focus on essentials
Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?” But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow.
Maintaining control of your emotions and reactions
The best revenge is not to be like that.
How the mind conducts itself. It all depends on that. All the rest is within its power, or beyond its control—corpses and smoke.
Have purpose and chase that
Then what is to be prized? An audience clapping? No. No more than the clacking of their tongues. Which is all that public praise amounts to—a clacking of tongues. So we throw out other people’s recognition. What’s left for us to prize? I think it’s this: to do (and not do) what we were designed for.
The Obstacle is the Way
In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them.
But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us—like sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.
I am always fascinated by the paths to discovery, the chance happening onto something you didn’t know existed yet always wanted. It’s been a thread, without my really realizing it, of much of my career, from leading the team building the Endeca discovery engine, to the goby “things to do” discovery app, to The Hawaii Project, a book discovery engine, and to an as-yet-unnamed music discovery system I have been building in my head.
Yesterday’s discovery path was sufficiently amusing I thought I’d write it down.
I have a thing for cocktails. And books. And cocktail books :). I have a cocktail book running around in my head I want to write some day, so I’m periodically surfing the web looking at or for interesting cocktail recipes. I was looking for a recipe for homemade Grenadine (pomegranate juice and sugar, basically) and stumbled upon the following article.
Drink like Hemmingway with his most intriguing cocktail invention: the Death in the Afternoon Cocktail.
Amongst other interesting tidbits, I found this interesting cocktail:
Journalist, explorer, occultist, and infrequent cannibal William Seabrook created the Asylum, consisting of one part gin, one part Pernod, and a dash of grenadine (poured over ice, but not shaken). He said it would “look like rosy dawn, taste like the milk of Paradise, and make you plenty crazy.”
Wait what? sometime-cannibal? WTF? I had to go read more about this person. (yes, I made this Homeric-sounding cocktail, and…one ounce of Pernod is A LOT. VERY anise flavored. The things we do in the name of science….Interesting cocktail, not an everyday drink, but interesting. )
So, a quick glimpse at Seabrook on Wikipedia yields a very intriguing character. Turns out he was a writer and occultist, a friend of the well-known Aleister Crowley. And yes, a sometime-cannibal. With an apparent penchant for bondage.
William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 — September 20, 1945) was an American occultist, explorer, traveler, cannibal, and journalist, born in Westminster, Maryland.
and
…In the 1920s, Seabrook traveled to West Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook writes about his experience of cannibalism in his novel Jungle Ways; however, later on Seabrook admits the tribe did not allow him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he obtained samples of human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself.
His book The Magic Island, based on his travels in Haiti, is credited with the introduction of the “zombie” to popular culture (the undead creature, not the cocktail!).
Later in life, he committed himself to an institution for the treatment of severe alcoholism, and wrote a book about his experience called (you guessed it) Asylum, whence the name of his cocktail.
And then I found the real nugget: “In Air Adventure he describes a trip on board a Farman with captain Renè Wauthier, a famed pilot, and Marjorie Muir Worthington, from Paris to Timbuktu, where he went to collect a mass of documents from Father Yacouba, a defrocked monk who had an extensive collection of rare documents about the obscure city at that time administered by the French as part of French Sudan. The book is replete with information about French colonial life in the Sahara and pilots in particular.”
Now, one of the best books I’ve ever read is Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, simultaneously a philosophical exploration as well as an exciting adventure story, describing his flight through the Sahara, his eventual crash and escape. So Air Adventure is ringing some bells…I track down a copy of Air Adventure. Here’s the opening paragraph:
It was only when the sandstorm rose up from the Great Sahara, ripped us down out of the pretty sky, and taught us that it could make skeletons out of airplanes as easily as camels, that we really began to get acquainted with the desert, or to take it or ourselves seriously.
Pretty promising. And such a strange path to discovery, of a book I should have known existed! Air Adventure was published in 1933; Wind Sand and Stars in 1939, so Seabrook pre-dates Saint-Exupéry, but cannot find any evidence they knew of each other.
In 1945, Seabrook died by suicide — an overdose of sleeping pills. Maybe I won’t be making more of those Asylums after all.
So, my sister was digging through the archives and discovered that our 6th great grandfather, Evan Watkins, built and owned Watkins Ferry which crosses the Potomac River where it divides Maryland and West Virginia (which I did not even know were adjacent). We have been up and down the east coast with family stuff, and yesterday we decided to detour over and take a look.
There’s no ferry any more obviously – there is a bridge which crosses from Williamsport, MD, into West Virginia. On the (now) West Virginia side, there’s an historical marker, which you can see in the photo, as well as what’s left of the house, known as Maidstone-on-the-Potomac.
It was raining pretty hard, and so after a few quick pictures we sat in the car at the side of the road looking around. I was startled out of my reverie by someone tapping on my window. It was a local woman who stopped to see if we needed any help – a reasonable guess, why else would anyone be sitting here?!). And isn’t it nice to know there are people like that still around! I explained why we were there, and she said “oh my goodness, I can’t believe it!” and launched into short speech, she was really into the history of the area and really seemed impressed that we had come.
I felt briefly and absurdly famous.
It got me thinking about what lasts. In philosophical approach I’m a Stoic – “memento mori“, Marcus Aurelius, and all that. So, I do think about death, and recent events have me thinking about it more. What will people remember about me? about you? If you have a family, you live on through your family, and they remember. But that usually only lasts a few generations. I remember my grandfather, but I expect nobody alive remembers much of my great grandfather. That Ferry, well, people remember. It was there. It’s marked. It’s a piece of history.
I write software. I look at it as a creative act, not unlike writing a novel. But software is ephemeral. Rarely does a piece of software matter for more than, say, a decade. The writer James Salter (whose work I admire very much) said:
There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
Last night from midnight to 2am, I listened to eight passionate, innovative teams sharing their journey through the Purple Prize, an indigenous innovation competition in Hawaii where I am a mentor (BTW join us for the finals online!).
Even though it was late, the passion of these innovators meant I never got the least bit sleepy! Purple uses the now-common fast pitch format common to many accelerators – 5 minutes to introduce your company to potential investors and stakeholders. The fast pitch is really an art form – a performance art form. As both a performer and a consumer of this art form, I wanted to share a few thoughts on how to give a great performance. It is a performance, by the way – be yourself, but the “big stage” version of yourself. Passionate and confident. And practice!
Longer than an “elevator pitch”, shorter than a real VC pitch, it’s tricky. In just a few minutes you must concisely explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, why you will be successful, and what you are asking for (and not much else in 4 minutes!).
The first thing is to remember your audience. Assume they know nothing (and about you, it’s true. They know nothing. Assume nothing. Start at the beginning). On a demo day they’re likely to hear 10 of these pitches, or more. They’ve never heard a word about your company before. Their phone will buzz. Their attention will wander. Your internet/zoom will get glitchy at the wrong time. People can only consume so much information in short time. Avoid “cognitive overload” – keep it simple. Less is more. Nuance is not your friend here.
Here’s a formula:
Start with a story
Use your story to introduce your product. Simply and explicitly.
Explain how you make money. Simply and explicitly.
Explain how the world will be different when you are successful. Finish strong.
No more than 1-2 slides per minute. 5 minutes ~ 5-10 slides.
Your presentation should arc from the general down to the specific and back up to the general. Let’s unpack this a bit.
THE STORY
Your very first words need to bind people to you and your mission, and explain what you are up to. People remember stories. Please, read Mike Troiano’s https://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/how-to-tell-your-ventures-story. They won’t remember market positioning or value propositions or any of that other stuff. Tell them a story. They’re looking for a reason to like you. Give it to them. Get their attention with a story, an insight, an experience, a feeling. Don’t waste your first words on anything but your story (don’t make jokes about being last, or explain how nervous you are, or anything else).
I build Bookship, a social reading app. Here’s how I introduce myself and my product. My very first sentences, verbatim.
“Hi, I’m Mark. When my son was 16, I got him a copy of Dune for Christmas. Like most gift books, it sat on the shelf unread for a decade. A few years ago he told me he was going to read it (he’s grown now). I said, “I’ll read it with you”. What followed was a month of genuine engagement with my son. Priceless. I had a similar experience with my daughter shortly thereafter, (different book) and I said to myself, “I’m going to bottle this experience into an app so other people can get that same feeling”. And that’s how Bookship was born.
Notice: almost nothing about the product or features – it’s about the feeling, the emotion, the experience. Even better, the story is actually true. If you don’t have a good true story, remember Rule 19.
As Simon Sinek says, Start with Why. Your “why” might be a story, or it might be some phenomena or metric that speaks to you. Last night I heard the spark of many interesting stories. But often these sparks were buried in the middle of the presentation. I want to share them (with permission) because the stories are powerful, and to use them to illustrate how to make the most of them – by starting with them.
Sheila at MAGHugs is building a system for teachers to share positive news about things students did with the student and their parents (“I see you. You are valued“). Halfway through her presentation, she showed a slide with metrics illustrating the psychological challenges students face, starting with drop-out rates and culminating with a gut-wrenching statistic that every day 8 students commit suicide. Now I’m paying attention – what can we do to change that awful statistic? I’d advocate a pitch narrative that goes something like this: “Hi, I’m Sheila, and I was an educator for N decades. I can tell you many of our students are in trouble. Did you know that every day …… so, we’re building a system for positive feedback for every student through virtual hugs.“. That’s a narrative that grabs my attention and no matter what else she says, I’ll remember what she’s trying to do.
Polu Energy is building an innovative new power generation system. After hearing about the extremely powerful scientific team behind the company, and the general approach to the business, around slide 5 I learn that when salt water and fresh water come together, they make electricity. WTF? Really?? I had no idea. I’d suggest that as the opening line. “Hi, I’m Tate. Did you know that when salt water and fresh water come together they make electricity? We found a way to harness that at industrial scale. We’re Polu Energy. Blue energy from water…“. I immediately get the crazy insight that led to this company. I’ll remember that, and I want to hear more.
Preston & Gabor at Box Farm Labs are building a home hydroponics appliance. A Keurig for plants. Three or four minutes in, I hear that they started with a NASA project to grow plants in space in an automated way for long space voyages. That’s crazy shit. Hit me between the eyes with that in your first sentence. Hi, We’re Preston & Gabor. We learned how to grow plants in space for NASA, and we want to bring that to your kitchen. OK, that sounds pretty cool. Tell me more!
People remember stories. As Sinek says, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it“. But don’t belabor it. You don’t need four slides of “why”. You don’t have time. One slide. Less is More.
PRODUCT
Your Story should lead to your product. “Because of X, we built our product Y“. Explain Y (your product) in two or three sentences. Simple enough a high schooler can understand it. If you sell Carbon Offsets to Hawaii Visitors so local farms can plant food trees, like Kanu Offsets does, tell me that, just that simply, and at the beginning, so I am ready for everything else you tell me. That’s a mission I can get behind.
People can only take in so much – don’t make them work for it. Remember cognitive overload. If you want to give more detail (and you should!), do so – but only after you’ve given me a one sentence summary of what your product does, that I can internalize.
BUSINESS
Explain how you intend to make money. Tell me like I was in high school – simple and straightforward. The fancy term for this is business model. It’s surprising to me how often I hear a pitch where it’s unclear who pays for the product. For example, consider products sold into an educational context – who pays for it? The student? the parent? the teacher? the principle? the school district? Don’t make me guess. If you aren’t sure yet, that’s ok – just say so. But in a short pitch, ambiguity is more your enemy than error. If you are vague, I’ll assume the worst. But if you are precise but wrong, well, no harm no foul. Every startup makes mistakes and learns. Better to present with conviction, while offering up the chance you may learn and change in the future.
CLOSE STRONG.
The arc of your presentation is:
here’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Here’s what we do.
Here’s how the world will be different when we are successful.
You move from the mission to the product to the business to the vision. General to specific to general.
I’ve seen so many pitches (not last night though!), that end in a morass of details and business plans and profit margins and …. don’t do this. Close strong. Explain how the world will be different when you are successful. Leave me with a clear memory of who you are and what you stand for.
You will face some temptations when you build your pitch:
You will be tempted to tell me everything you know.Don’t. Make sure I get a clear understanding of what you do. The details can follow.
You will be tempted to cram everything onto the slides.Don’t. Complicated diagrams and paragraphs of text in 12pt font will never be understood. You might as well not show them. Big font, simple pictures, simple diagrams. There will be times later to deliver all that wonderful detail and learning you have done. Now’s not the time.
You will be tempted to glam things up – use large words and jargon to make your initiative sound sophisticated, even if it’s straightforward. Don’t. Simplicity is your friend here. Simple is good.
You will be tempted to use metaphors and generalities.Don’t. I love me a good metaphor, but in 4 minutes it’s too easy to be misunderstood, or not understood. Simple and explicit is the ticket.
