I worked with Arthur C. Clarke at the very beginning of my career. He’s most famous for saying, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Magic isn’t such a bad thing.

And we certainly have plenty of advanced technology around. Advanced in the sense that we can’t be bothered to take the time to understand it.

A friend showed me his electric water bottle. A tiny USB charged battery is in the lid. “It gets rid of the impurities.”

I wondered–where do the impurities go?

It’s probably a more powerful placebo if you simply accept that something magical is happening inside the bottle, but no, it doesn’t get rid of the impurities. There’s a chance that it creates a light that kills some microorganisms, and there’s an even better chance that in New York, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about, battery or no battery.

Perhaps it’s more useful to say, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is worth understanding.”

If we understand it, we can use it well. We can improve it. We can share it with confidence.

AI, rice cookers and vaccines are not magic. They’re understandable technologies we can learn about and improve.

Do you see the defaults?

The question, “What are things like around here?” has two possible answers.

When a new idea or opportunity arrives, your organization says yes, unless there’s a really good reason to say no.

Or your organization says no, unless someone makes a powerful argument for yes.

In the no organizations, everyone has veto power. If it’s inconvenient or feels risky, it doesn’t happen. The bias is for the status quo.

And in the yes organizations, someone needs to make a very strong case if they want to impede the new work.

If it’s working for you, keep at it. If not, it’s worth naming and changing.

Every founder, leader, sales rep and person on a dating app has heard this.

Why did the Wizard ask Dorothy to bring him the broomstick of the Wicked Witch? It’s not because he needed a broomstick.

It’s because he wanted Dorothy to go away. If you send someone away to get something ungettable, if you articulate a need that violates the rules of physics or possibility, then you’ve said no without saying no.

For his own concealed reasons, he wasn’t sold. It’s usually fear. Fear of the unknown, or fear of going first, or fear of being seen as a fraud. There are lots of reasons we don’t want to fund a company, offer a job, go on a second date or buy something.

But sharing the real objection is painful. It might expose us. We might have the objection ‘overcome’ and then we’re on the hook.

When we ask for a broomstick, we’re sending the well-meaning person on a fruitless mission, hoping that they won’t come back.

When someone asks for a broomstick, the first thing to do is to find enough empathy to imagine why the person actually needs a broomstick. Because sometimes they do (and if that’s the case, it’s not a ‘broomstick objection’ and you should either find new people to call on or fix what you’ve got).

But if they don’t need a broomstick, realize that the only thing you’ve learned is that the person you’re sitting with is afraid of something. For their sake, and yours, it pays to patiently and generously discover what it is.

It’s not junk.

No, the opposite of perfect is:

Meets spec

Useful

On time

Productive

Valuable

By definition, good enough is good enough. If the spec isn’t what you need, change the spec. But perfect is unattainable and perfect is a place to hide.

Optimizing a device or system means squeezing every drop of productivity out of it. In the short-run, optimization works as long as the world stays the same.

We can optimize a device to work at capacity. However, something working at capacity blows up if you step on the gas when you need 5% more out of it. It’s brittle.

Smart leaders build for resilience instead. Power plants, transit systems, careers–they’re built to be sub-optimal some of the time, with slack built in, so they can thrive all the time.

And the paradox?

If you’re a competitive capital-driven market where little head starts can become bigger leads which can lead to lock in and monopoly, the obvious strategy is to optimize early and often.

Outperforming your more resilient competitors is possible in the short run.

And if you’re lucky a few times in a row, you get access to more capital or more customers and you can do it again, at a bigger scale, leaving your thoughtful, slack-enabled competitors in the dust.

Until you crash.

And you always will. Because optimized systems cannot thrive in a changing world.

If you don’t want to crash, don’t compete in marketplaces where optimization is required.

PS Britain shut its last coal plant yesterday. 140 years ago, coal began its conquest of the world in Britain, and now it’s over. Change is possible.

On October 22, around the world, I’m helping to organize hundreds of in-person get togethers.

A chance to share your work and have a conversation about your strategy with others. Mutual support and peer connection.

All the details are on this page.

It’s free. A chance to connect and make an impact.

Looking forward, together.

Your next project might feel like a calling, but it’s a choice. A choice that will have an impact on each day you spend on it.

There are no right answers here, but before you fall in love with a business or an organization, it may pay to think about these and other options that are built in:

• Are you selling to consumers?
• Are you raising money?
• Do you serve one person at a time or does a committee have to agree?
• Is there a network effect to the work you do?
• Is the margin on each item low?
• What’s the lifetime value of a new patron, customer or partner?
• Is the work time sensitive?
• Do you meet with people in person?
• Are you answering RFPs or are people seeking you out by name?
• Is price or yield or efficiency the dominant metric in making a choice?
• Will you create value with your personal effort or by managing others?
• How will people find out about what you do?
• Is accuracy the most important part of what you deliver?
• Can a competitor who works far more hours have a big advantage over you?
• What’s the effluent, waste or side effects of what you create?
• Are you likely to spend time working with peers you like?
• Are you likely to respect your customers?
• How much time after you begin before you expect your metrics to be positive?
• Is the learning curve steep?
• After you’ve learned how to do this, does it become boring?

Pick your customers, pick your future.

PS Joel recommended this post from fourteen years ago.

Isaac Newton didn’t invent gravity. It was there all along. He simply named and explained it.

The same is true for planets, continents and obscure species. They’re discovered, not invented.

Michelangelo talked about removing all the parts of the marble that weren’t the statue on his way to creating great art. Discovery is like that.

Often, we put ourselves on the hook to invent something, when it might be simpler and more direct to act like we’re exploring on our way to discovering something instead.

Emotional enrollment is at the heart of performance, learning and connection.

A coach can quickly tell when someone is committed to changing their approach in order to change the outcome–it’s easy to tell this person apart from someone who simply wants what they’re already doing to be more effective.

“I want to become someone who’s shift is over,” is very different from, “I want to become someone who knows how to write copy that earns a sale.”

Bonnie Raitt partnered with producer Don Was to make her 10th album. If she had insisted that it simply be the tenth album, another shot at being discovered, it wouldn’t have become the album of the year. Instead, she and Was worked together to bring a new approach to the studio. After the album hit, she was still Bonnie Raitt, of course, but she was also a different sort of performer.

Being validated for who we are today is great. But it’s more likely that we can achieve our goals by choosing to become someone who can solve problems that the people we serve need solved.

Residents leave a town because of a lack of services, which cuts the tax base, which leads to more services lost, which leads to more residents leaving…

A hip new brand attracts a few opinion leaders, who flash the logo, which attracts more hipsters, who then establish a status standard, which attracts more customers…

The key variable in both spirals is time.

The rise or fall happens day by day, not all at once, and normal interventions rarely make a difference. Instead, it’s the apparently irrational overinvestment in the moment that can change the dynamic going forward.