Month: July 2024

Wednesday, 9.07pm

Sheffield, U.K.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed. – Kurt Vonnegut

Every so often in a game of football you see a straightforward foot race. The ball is kicked forward and then there are just two players on the pitch. For a brief moment in time what happens next hinges on who gets there first.

I saw this moment play out again and again in a game today, between children, where the faster kid won out time after time.

Speed matters in football.

And it matters in other areas as well.

Take b2b marketing.

I recently tried posting more often on LinkedIn. I had some posts that got some traction. And some that didn’t. Some that felt well written. Some that were garbage.

Very quickly I found myself in an echo chamber. The same voices, commenting on the same things, turned up again and again. It’s like finding yourself trapped in a vortex, or maybe a tornado, with a surprised looking cow and you bouncing around the sides of the funnel.

If you do shout into the darkness you hear echoes.

If you are quiet, you still hear them, just different ones.

Drucker once said that “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer”.

I liked that definition, and it led to Drucker’s next point that only two activities: marketing and innovation helped achieve this purpose.

So, one might ask, what is the purpose of marketing?

The purpose of marketing is to start a conversation with a potential customer.

And where do conversations start?

The best ones probably start in bars. The second best ones from an introduction.

Not many start from cold calls. Probably none. I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has ever created real business from a cold call.

Yeah, they say they have. But I don’t know.

The value of a platform like LinkedIn is, on the surface, as a place to have business conversations.

Its real value is as a list of people doing jobs.

And some of those may be ones you can advertise to.

Consider two futures.

In one you start a posting habit and serve the algorithms to create content and build a following.

In another, you pay money to advertise to your target customers.

Which one do you think will work more quickly?

Which one will you choose?

Okay, that was a trick question. I learned from one of my children that you never choose.

You take both options. And some that aren’t on the table.

Take every chance you get. And be quick.

That’s the secret.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 9.17pm

Sheffield, U.K.

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. – James Salter

Do you pay for any of the media you consume? I don’t. At least, not in the sense that I pay for the news. I pay for internet access and entertainment subscriptions, but I don’t get a newspaper. I used to read the Economist, for example. I even paid for it for a while. But now I don’t. Why is that?

The big technology firms have conditioned us to think everything is free. They’ve changed our behaviour. They’ve taught us that we don’t need to pay for things like news. We can simply tell each other what’s going on. Social media is gossip on a planetary scale.

At the same time, technology allows us to create more than ever. The number of journals and papers have exploded. There is more “thought leadership” being produced. We are incentivized to create more to serve the algorithm. We work to serve algorithms.dd

Why do we behave the way we do? Landsburg wrote in “The Armchair Economist”, “People respond to incentives. All else is commentary”. There are three incentives: pain, pleasure and effort. We try and avoid pain, seek pleasure and minimise effort.

It’s all about the high. The algorithm is carefully designed to dose you with pleasure and pain. Keep posting, and each like delivers a shot of dopamine – which gives you the same feelings as having a cigarette, alcohol or drug. The algorithm knows that you need an unpredictable dosage, so sometimes lots of exposures and likes to make you feel good, and sometimes low impressions to punish you – keep you oscillating between a state of “high” and “wanting more”. We are now increasingly digital media dopamine addicts.

The solution is to slow down and do hard things. Thinking is hard. Going for a run or exercising is hard. Swiping through posts on a phone is easy. We have to do more of the former, and less of the latter.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 8.37pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Automation is no longer just a problem for those working in manufacturing. Physical labor was replaced by robots; mental labor is going to be replaced by AI and software. – Andrew Yang

A month ago I started to use AI as a research assistant.

I used it to read long reports and give me a list of key points. I then read those points and selected the ones that looked interesting, wrapped them in posts and published them.

This is what I found.

1. AI doesn’t make boring stuff more interesting

Some of the reports were about important but dull things. What’s happening in the metals and minerals sector? How are hotels decarbonizing?

These topics matter, but if you’re going to read a post like that you’re probably already interested in the subject.

This showed up in the viewing statistics. The posts didn’t get too many views. There was some interaction but that was mostly from experts. And experts in what you do are not your target market.

I did notice on someone else’s post that a unwary end user talked about her experiences. She was promptly buried by an avalanche of sales requests.

2. It does make you, the writer, more informed

It’s funny how often someone would talk to me and ask a question related to something I had just written about using this process.

As a professional you need to be informed about what’s going on in your market whether you use AI or not.

Writing regularly forces you to look things up and that discipline is valuable.

3. Summaries are ok but detail is magic

AI summarises material but detail is what connects us to the idea.

In a recent post, for example, the AI summary was “reducing BIC Cristal barrel weight from 4.4g to 3.1g through value engineering”.

But I had to read the detail to learn that they did that by making the interior profile of the pen a hexagon to match the outside.

It was previously circular.

That detail is more interesting than the phrase “value engineering”.

Specific and concrete details matter and that leads to the next point.

4. AI is useless with well written work

Some books are a one sentence idea stretched over 40,000 tortured words.

Others are 5,000 carefully crafted sentences.

The first type of book is not worth summarising.

The second cannot be summarised.

AI’s true value may be in improving mediocre work so that it is at least average.

I think we quickly start to recognize the difference between manufactured words and human ones – there’s a sameness to the output, a ultraprocesed quality to the taste of the words that puts us off.

Of course, it’s going to get harder to tell the difference, just like a plant-based burger is really no better than a mean-based one.

There will be, I suspect, a flight to quality.

This happened to me with Kindle Unlimited. The idea of lots of books was great but you only found rubbish on the package while the good writers kept their books off and you still had to buy them.

People we already trust will get more of our business.

In commercial writing, however, the stuff you don’t read on websites for example – all that will be AI generated.

Because no one cares about that stuff.

5. Why do you write anyway?

I don’t know about you, but I write to think.

A first draft is me telling myself the story.

This is often rough and rambling. Most of it is rubbish.

But…

There’s a sentence or two that might be interesting. A fragment that makes it into a second draft. An idea that sparks a question that needs more research to answer.

You could spend time with a prompt engine to do this or you could just do the work because it’s interesting and because you want to understand it better.

The key point is that all this “stuff” has to make its way into your brain for it to be of any value.

You’re the consumer. And so you’re the most important person in the room.

Final thoughts

There are some tasks, like coding, where AI has changed everything.

Programming jobs are the easiest to automate because you don’t need a large team when a small team with AI can produce more and better code.

I don’t think AI is going away. I do think individuals and teams that use AI to help them create better work will do well.

People that try and simply use AI as a replacement for great people or teams will end up with mediocre and average results that will be ignored.

And, in today’s world, being ignored is the worst thing that can happen to your business.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 7.46pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Quality without results is pointless. Results without quality is boring. – Johan Cruyff

It’s amazing how quickly stopping a routine can derail you.

I’ve had a few weeks away from the keyboard. Away from a digital first approach. And there are pros and cons. Here are some.

The pros of getting away from the computer

You get to slow down. Experience the feeling of pen on paper. That leads to a different kind of thinking.

You can write rubbish, pour out anything on the page knowing that it won’t make it to the next edit. You get a chance to focus on what’s good.

You have a thing you can look back on, a real manuscript which may one day have historical value.

The cons

It’s slow. You need more time to get through the process. Writing it by hand first and then typing it up means you have more to do.

It’s locked on the page. If you move on, then it’s harder to come back and find where you were. A notebook is not searchable.

You don’t produce. Production is important. It’s too easy to see that there is extra work and move onto something else instead.

The fixes

I recently bought ‘On Quality’, a collection of Pirsig’s unpublished writings. He writes in there that all methods have problems. If you just write, it’s rambling. If you use an outline, it’s dull. If you add some excitement, then it’s artificial.

The answer is to just add quality, just make it good.

If only it were just that easy.

The real thing that matters is to get something out. Quality comes from working on that again and again.

Pirsig’s book ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’ took 6 years to get out. 2 to write. Then 2 to be depressed about it. Then 2 more to write it again.

But what mattered was the writing.

I need to remind myself of that every once in a while.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh