Well, maybe not.

In 2024, worldwide gift card sales will pass a trillion dollars for the first time.

It’s a good grift.

Surveys show that the buyer spends about 21% less per gift than they do when they actually buy something, while the recipients of the gift find themselves spending 61% more than the value of the card when they actually redeem it for money. Most of all, the retailer comes out ahead–far fewer returns, lots of never redeemed cards, better cash flow and new customer accounts when people do show up to eventually buy.

In the current system, the recipient loses. They get a smaller gift, they often spend more money than the gift was for, they’re stuck with the store the giver chose (which is the only thing they actually chose) and there’s very little in the way of thoughtfulness or connection involved.

In essence, holidays become a circle of people, handing the same wad of cash around, except instead of ending up with the cash, they then spend even more money when they go shopping tomorrow.

Every cultural occasion and holiday has been commercialized by retailers in search of more. And the insatiable desire to consume is contagious, and gift giving is inherently viral, since you need to have someone to give the gift to. As a result, we’ve built a system that’s expensive and not particularly good at what it sets out to do.

Given the size and profitability of the cards, I’m surprised that they’re not a much better experience.

What might a better process look like?

• Go the the online store, find an item you think a friend would like. Instead of ordering it, choose GIFT CARD.
• The store asks you if you’d like to purchase a charitable donation add on as well.
• Now, the site produces a unique digital gift card, with a picture of the item and a link to redeem it. The QR code it generates also includes a thank you from the charity.
• Your friend simply has to scan the lovely page you printed out (or emailed them) to go to the redeem page. Once there, they can choose to get the item you carefully picked out, choose something else or easily get cash back.
• And so, they get delighted three times: When they get the thoughtful card. When they go to the site and discover they can get the cash back. And when the item arrives in the post and they unwrap it.

Now the thought really does count. This is a low hassle, high delight way to show someone you were thinking of them. If stores used their persuasive powers, it could also raise billions for worthy causes along the way.

Either that, or you could give cash and save everyone a lot of trouble.

Lousy tools are dangerous. They endanger our safety (physical or emotional) and undermine our work. Lousy tools are pretty easy to avoid, because they reveal themselves whenever we use them.

Great tools are magical. They multiply our effort, amplify the quality of our work and delight us, all at once.

It’s mediocre tools that we have to watch out for. They quietly and persistently corrupt our intent and force us to work harder on the parts that don’t matter as much.

If it happened to us, our memory of it is a story, our record of it with us at the center.

Even if it’s on video, even if other people were there, our narrative and the context and the play by play belong to us.

The useful question might be: “Is my story helpful?”

And the follow on could be: “Is there any other version of this story that might be more helpful?”

A bureaucracy recently asked me to submit a few documents. They were very specific and the person on the phone said that the subject line of the email I sent should be blank.

This is really unsettling. Almost like taking the labels off bottles at the supermarket. My email software didn’t even want to let me send it.

Sumerians created millions of clay tablets but never managed to invent the subject line. As a result, the only way to know what’s on a tablet is to read the whole thing.

And a restaurant menu evolved to be the subject lines for the foods we’re about to eat.

Centuries later, SEO became an arcane art designed to create a subject line for a website. YouTube is filled with linkbait, with subject lines labeling videos creating the expectation of the best video you’ve ever seen, followed by the inevitable disappointment once you’ve invested a minute or two. The race for attention has relentlessly reduced the trust we put into subject lines, because they’re easy (and tempting) to game.

Books have had titles since Gutenberg. The title, of course, is nothing but a subject line. That, together with the genre it’s filed in give us a set of expectations for what the book will deliver. I’ve been to bookstores with a shelf labeled, “Famous authors.” We’d like to know what to expect–we care about genre and provenance, and guard our attention and resources.

But AI can’t be bothered with a subject line. It’ll just read the whole thing, watch the entire video and listen to the song from beginning to end. And then it’ll create its own subject line, on demand.

This is going to be unsettling in many ways.

Creators often use the subject line to create. It’s something to lean against. The blog title often comes before the blog. And giving up authority over the subject line to a robot that might not understand is hard to do.

And consumers have come to expect a handle for the next idea they’re going to consume, and often over-trust their instincts about what’s worth their time or not (which is why stupid ideas like the flat belly diet or snakes on a plane come and go). How are we going to help an AI sort though all the choices for what’s next?

It’s probably more efficient than clay tablets, but the transition is going to be one more way our culture changes as a result of the dominance of AI intermediaries like Perplexity.

There will still be handles. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when they’re written by a system we don’t fully understand.

Writing a book is good for you. It clarifies your thinking and it’s generous as well. You might not publish it professionally, but sharing it with people you want to teach and lead is a useful practice.

The first draft can be challenging. We’re facing a blank page, trying to find our “voice” and it often ends up sounding stilted, fake or just plain boring.

Perhaps this alternative might help:

Get a cheap digital tape recorder. Go on a walk with someone you want to teach about your topic of expertise. Spend half an hour explaining, in the most cogent way you can, person to person, what they might learn from you.

When you’re simply talking and walking, teaching from experience and anecdote, your best voice arrives.

Go ahead and transcribe the recording and your first draft is done.

A generation ago, the Generals ruled. General Motors, General Foods, General Mills, General Dynamics… they were big, and they had a lot to lose. As a result, people trusted them to show up and keep their promises–it just wasn’t worth letting a few people down at the risk of their reputation. The same was true for folks like Mr. Peanut, Mr. Coffee and Mrs. Butterworth. They might not be royalty, but they had a valuable slot on the store shelf, and they weren’t about to blow it.

The path was difficult but simple: earn trust, generate word of mouth, gain market share and then fame. A few million dollars in TV ads couldn’t hurt.

Over time, we came to associate fame with trust.

Social media presented a shortcut to some. Hack your way to fame and don’t worry about trust. Assume that people will give you the benefit of the doubt simply because they’ve heard of you.

And now, people in many lines of work, people who were trained to know better, are finding the pull of this shortcut irresistible. It’s tempting to trade credibility for fame.

When the hustle increases, it goes from ‘trust leads to fame (sometimes)’ to ‘fame despite untrustworthy behavior.’

The simple question worth asking is: That piece of media or interaction or investment you’re making–is it to earn trust or simply find attention?

It’s a race to the bottom, and my guess is that you’d rather not win.

This is cyclical. The audience might not be smart in the short run, but over time, we figure it out. Well-earned trust might go out of style for a while, but it’s always going to be a useful tool.

Asymmetrical information creates real problems. And fixing the flow of useful proxies benefits both sides.

Cigarette companies knew a great deal about the addictions they were causing and the illnesses that resulted. If the public had known, they would have made different choices.

Car companies are required to report malfunctions and injuries to the government in the US. As a result, car designs improve, safety recalls are made and lives are saved.

Should a prospective college student be told the truth about placement rates, class sizes and the training their professors have? What about campus safety and student satisfaction and well being?

The companies that sell artificial turf travel from high school to high school, seeking to sell an alternative to grass. Each school committee is underinformed and rarely has access to the data that the company has. Who benefits?

Insurance companies and hospitals know, to the penny, how much surgical procedures cost. And they also know which doctors have the best (and worst) outcomes. How does keeping this a secret help the patient?

In issues of public health, how loudly do we hear anecdotal stories compared to how clearly are we presented with verifiable and relevant statistics? Is an intervention actually risky or does it just feel that way?

In the short run, economics appear to push businesses to keep information secret and to fight against community action. But history makes it clear that a well-regulated industry serving well-informed consumers actually creates more value (and generates more profit.)

The FDA was expanded in 1938 because eye and skin cream easily available at the drugstore was causing women to go blind. Armed with better information and more confidence from consumers, that industry is now 10,000 times bigger than it was.

It’s tempting to lurk in the shadows, conceal the truth and race to the bottom.

The race to the top requires a foundation of trust, and trust comes from relevant information. Sunlight makes it easier to see where we’re going.

Everyone needs more chances, more benefit of the doubt, more opportunity.

But what turns a chance into a big break is what we do with it once the chance arrives.

Like all good metaphors, it might be practical too.

Your ‘shoes’ are the point of greatest leverage. The spot where you have traction and engage with the world most directly.

For a freelancer, it might be the way you engage with customers, or your software tools. It might be the reputation (or lack of reputation) you have with your peers.

Organizations that struggle with marketing often seem to struggle with customer service, product design and supplier relationships as well. All places where a new set of shoes might help.

Customer traction is everything, and traction is something we can work on. It’s not as easy or direct as buying a new pair of shoes, but it’s worth it.

PS If you play competitive Frisbee or soccer, a pair of cleats will change everything.

And if your back or shoulders hurt, if you’re out of energy more often than you’d like, consider getting a pair of insoles. Pull out the disposable ones that came with what you’re wearing now and put these in instead. It might make an astonishing difference. And they’re a fabulous gift…

Forms are a convenient way for bureaucracies to collect information. They’re convenient because they offload the work to the patient/customer/taxpayer.

The shift in labor led to an explosion of self-serve forms, but the built-in inefficiencies punish everyone.

1. Organizations don’t see the cost of inefficient or badly designed forms, since the user engages in private.
2. Organizations continue to add more to the forms, since it doesn’t cost them much to do so.
3. Legacy systems and forms persist, because it’s expensive and organizationally challenging to upgrade them.

The fundamental inefficiency is this–the form creator has to imagine all the possibilities before printing the form that will be used for years. As a result, the user finds themself plowing through irrelevant questions, because the form is already set. You are 9 years old and the form wants to know how many kids you have. You live in Buffalo and the form asks about a New York City resident tax…

There are four problems here.

• The first is that time is wasted by every single user, every time.
• Because there’s so much nonsense, even alert users glaze over and skip over things that might be important.
• The form can’t check for errors and inconsistencies, and can’t prioritize the questions with the most important ones first.
• And most of all, the form is unable to intelligently dive deeper on the areas that matter.

When we moved to online forms and PDFs, almost nothing changed. By building an analog of the paper form, we captured all the kruft and waste and redundancy without adding much in the way of value. Tell me again why we need to sign this 24 page electronic document in 9 places?

Leaving technology out of this for a moment, imagine what intake might be like if, instead a form, you were talking to a human who could make decisions based on what you said? If you’re applying for a visa to Spain, they wouldn’t ask you questions that are irrelevant to this fact over and over again. But they might ask if you’ve had a travel vaccine yet.

This person wouldn’t keep asking you for your name and birthdate, over and over. You already told them.

Even more powerfully, though, a thoughtful person who heard that you had a problem with your spleen when you were a teenager would go on to ask you a number of clarifying questions about this issue, not simply instruct you to jump to the next box on the form.

AI is already capable of doing this, and with some training, I’m imagining it could do an ever better job than a human interviewer. It could have more domain knowledge, more patience and provide (some people) a greater sense of privacy.

A dialog (even by audio if that’s what the user benefits from) would take far less time and yield far more information, presented in a much more useful format. And it could highlight any missing information or discrepancies in the report it creates. It would also score the way it was trained, highlighting for the bureaucracy that they were asking for dumb things or creating user frustration.

It would save millions of hours of user time, but much more usefully, it would save lives.

If it’s worth filling out a form, it’s probably worth replacing the form with an actual gathering of information.