Shun the non-believers (E)

0:00Hello, Peter. What's happening? Uh, we have sort of a problem here. Yeah, you apparently didn't put one of the new cover sheets on your TPS reports. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry about that. I forgot. Mm, yeah. You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out. Did you see the memo about this? Hey, it's Matt, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:33In 1986, my very first book came out, and it was reviewed in Publishers Weekly. They liked it. They said, these maxims convey worthwhile wisdom. I was on a roll, 100 % positive reviews. It's been all downhill since then. Last week, I got into a Lyft, and I noticed as I was getting in, the driver had a perfect five-star rating. I realized soon after that the reason he did is he'd only been driving for about a week. Later in the day, I got in a different Lyft. This guy had 2 ,000 reviews, five stars. What an amazing accomplishment. Not one person who had rated him had given him less than five stars.

1:22I gave him a high five. gave him a little bit of a tip, congratulated him on his perfect score. And I felt a little badly for him as well. Because when he gets that three-star review, it's really going to hurt. Leonard Maltin, the movie reviewer, regularly publishes a book, big, thick book, filled with movie reviews. At last count, there were more than 10 ,000 movies reviewed, which seems like a Herculean effort, but not compared to YouTube. YouTube sees 300 hours of videos uploaded every minute. Since this podcast began a minute ago, another 300 hours. By any way you do the math, they've got to have more than half a billion videos.

2:11And most of them have reviews. Reviews are everywhere. The 120 books I did as a book packager, at least half of them never got reviewed before Amazon started reviewing everything. Suddenly, when we do some work, when we do something that's in the world, other people are going to comment on it. Sometimes, not so nicely. Daniel Radcliffe is one of God's most unattractive creations since the aardvark. When I grow up, I hope I can be as ugly in as many different hairstyles as Jason Schwartzman. I swear on Crip, if I see Michael B. Jordan, I'm going to slap that mini feather duster he calls a mustache off his lip, bro.

3:04Julianna Margulies is one of the finest ugly women I have seen. Thank you. Jordana Brewster is the next Meryl Streep, if Meryl Streep was the worst actress in the world. If you run a restaurant or a car wash, it's busy being reviewed on Yelp. If you're a seller on eBay, someone's giving you a review. If you've got a podcast like this one, there's a mythology that you should push your listeners again and again to go to the iTunes store and give you a review as if something magical will happen once you hit 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 or who knows how many. And these reviews, these reviews are all over the map.

3:49So how are we supposed to learn from them? Patricia Barber is an extraordinary artist, a musician. Her magnum opus is a record called Cafe Blue. Here's a review from Tom Sanders. I found her voice, which I had heard on the Lady Sings the Blues compilation, to be absolutely wonderful. I found the material, and especially the instrumental arrangements, to be quite awful, sometimes droning on in repetitive long stretches that remind one of machine music rather than creative movement where ideas are explored. Often, they are in discordant sounds that seem to seek strangeness rather than musical meaning.

4:28Listen carefully before ordering this if you are not familiar with her material. It goes straight to my cell pile. Well, that tells us a lot about Tom, but it doesn't tell me anything about Patricia Barber, about this magnificent work of art. And if I compare his review to the dozens and dozens of five-star reviews, now I'm even more confused. Patti Smith wrote and recorded what I believe to be the most beautiful e-book I have ever listened to. Looking up, we were struck by the ingenuous humanity of this New York City tableau. Robert took my hand, and as the snow swirled around us, I glanced at his face.

5:12He narrowed his eyes and nodded an affirmation, impressed to see artists take on 42nd Street. For me, it was the message, for Robert, the medium. Here's what Robert Kane had to say about her book. I went into this book knowing nothing about her or Mapplethorpe, spelled wrong, wanting to know more and highly predisposed to be impressed. Page by page, I liked her less and less and found Mapplethorpe to be a foul creep. Hell, even Andy Warhol couldn't stand them. It goes on for paragraphs, but I can't read it to you. What should Patti Smith do? What should she do when she reads this? What should each of us do when the work we create is put into the world and somebody we didn't make it for hates it.

6:02One thing we can do is organize our fans and write something that doesn't get any negative reviews. Consider Nikki Brown's I Deserve Your Love, Part 3, Good Girls Love Bad Boys, which has 121 five-star reviews on Amazon. I did a sort of all the books on Amazon, sorted by the number of positive reviews compared to negative ones. Mo Willans, the great children's book author, is up there. But everybody else on the first dozen pages that I looked through, they weren't well-known. They hadn't written books for the ages. They hadn't written books that spread, that mattered, that made an impact. No, they were niche titles for a small group of people.

6:46All the great books, all the books that sell lots of copies, that made an impact, that people remember, all of them have one-star reviews. what should the author learn from this? My real concern for somebody who is working to do something that's going to go into the world, whether you've put your name on it because you're an author, or whether you're part of an organization, what I'm worried about is that you will censor your work, that you will change your work before it hits the market, because you're afraid of the person who isn't going to get the joke. that what you're going to do is dumb it down, average it out, make it mediocre, because that's the definition of mediocre after all, so that someone won't hate it.

7:36But I'd like to argue that someone hating it is really important. It's really important that someone hates it because it means you've made it for someone else, someone specific. And all of the great work we are capable of doing now is for someone specific, not general, but specific, but precise, someone who wants this, believes this, dreams of that, that work, that work of showing up in a way to say, here, I made this and it might not be for you, is fundamentally different than the work of, this is going to be sold at the cash register of every Walmart or every Macy's or every Bloomingdale's, so I better make something that everyone is going to like.

8:21There are very few slots left to make something that everyone is going to like. There are few items in the supermarket that everyone is going to like, but not many. Because you've got people who are gluten-free or dairy-free or hate cilantro. You've got people who are on high-protein or low-protein diets. You've got people who don't like white foods or only like white foods. So pleasing everyone, that's a fool's game. The alternative is to please someone, not just to please them, but to delight them in an over-the-top way, to push them to the point where they are delighted you took them somewhere.

9:03So when someone says my work is insufferable, when someone says that they violently disagree with the point I'm making, I can say to them, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this. Thank you for taking the time to care enough to work your way through it. Thank you especially for choosing to speak up in a way that I'm sure you thought would be helpful. But no, I'm not going to listen to that. Because if I do, I'll make something else. Though before I go on, I hope you'll indulge me. I want to read you five reviews. You name the movie. Kubrick leaves himself wide open to ridicule from the minute he picks up Dr.

9:44Floyd's space investigation of the mysterious monolith. The setting is a technical marvel, but advertising funds make it a super commercial and destroy its impact. New York Daily News. The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science fiction detail, that it's somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring, The New York Times. It's a monumentally unimaginative movie. Kubrick, with his$750 ,000 centrifuge and in love with gigantic hardware and control panels, is the Belasco of science fiction. There's little more that's good in the movie when Kubrick doesn't take himself too seriously.

10:29The New Yorker. A major achievement in cinematography and special effects, 2001 lacks dramatic appeal and only conveys suspense after the halfway mark. Kubrick must receive all the praise and take all the blame. And my favorite from the Washington Post. A crackpot Looney Tune, pretentious, abysmally slow, amateurishly active, and above all, long. So if this is what Stanley Kubrick heard after making one of the 10 greatest movies of all time, what are you hoping for?

11:12So here's the thing. We have a two-pronged situation. All of us, every one of us, did not wake up hoping to be inundated with negative feedback, with bad reviews. with cutting criticism from anonymous people. None of us. So what do we do? Well, some of us will respond by hiding, by not showing up with our full selves, by not putting it out there, by not shipping the work, by hiding behind a wall so that we can't be criticized. Or if we are criticized, it can't possibly be personal because after all, we didn't expose our emotional labor. We didn't do our best work. So that's one path. The other path that's so tempting is to dumb it down, average it out, make it more for everyone.

12:08Not just deniability, but setting ourselves up to try to please anyone who could encounter us, anyone who might walk into our shop or our meeting room or encounter something we wrote or cooked or produced. The problem with that, as you've already heard, is that the market doesn't need more average stuff for average people. Average stuff for average people blends in. It's sort of invisible. It's a commodity. It's a race to the bottom. And when you race to the bottom, as I've said before, you might win or worse, come in second. So what's the alternative? The alternative is to shun the non-believers, to address the smallest viable audience.

12:55Viable, because if it's not big enough or eager enough, it's not worth the journey, but smallest, because if we act like we only can serve a few people, it will require us to focus obsessively on those people, the people who want to go where we're going, the people who want to do what we're doing, who want to do it with us. If we make something for them, for the fans, for the people who are yearning for the next, and they don't like it, we better listen to them because we've got to make it better. But if we make something for them and others don't like it, Well, then thank you, but it's not for you.

13:40Thank you for checking this out. I'm sorry it's not for you. It's not defective. It's not inferior. It's not wrong. It's simply not for you. Shun the nonbelievers. and there's an endless list of creators who do this, who do it all the time. In this post-industrial world, you don't have to be Bob Dylan or Patti Smith, who worked so hard to go against the grain, who fought with agents and promoters and middlemen and record labels to bring their art to the world. You don't have to do that now because we live in this long-tail universe. The number of people who are pushing you to be magic for everyone is very small.

14:26It's mostly you. It's mostly a side effect of trying to fit in, to not get that negative review. The alternative is to do work you're proud of, work that matters, work that we would miss if you hadn't created it. Not all of us. In fact, most people wouldn't miss it at all. But the people who would miss it will miss it. shun the non-believers. So when I say go make a ruckus, what I'm trying to say is this. The non-believers, the skeptics, the disinterested, will always view your next project as a little bit of a ruckus, as a little bit of something they weren't anticipating or waiting for. But the people you seek to serve, that smallest viable audience, they can't wait.

15:15So please, Go make a ruckus.

15:46On your recent episode, you talked about how Zappos sent a huge box to a woman to help her return a bunch of shoes that her mother had purchased before she had passed away. I thought, wow, that's really nice. And then when you said they sent her a huge bouquet of flowers, I immediately started crying. Don't tell anybody that, though. So anyhow, as a small business owner and a coach, that touched me because I want to do that for all of my clients. I feel that way about all of these people. But as a small business owner, I don't have the time to do those kinds of things all the time. And I certainly don't have the money.

16:30How can I put my level of caring and love for my clients and readers out there in a time and cost effective way that can help everyone? Thanks. Exactly. What a great goal to have. To matter to your customers. To use the position you've got, the leverage you've got to make the lives of your customers better. to not simply make them go away. Because as companies get bigger, that's what they want us to do. Please go away. They optimize the line on hold or the line at the information desk or the line at the refund desk so that someone who doesn't care that much will simply go away because it's cheaper to get them to go away.

17:27But what if you want to do the opposite? it? What if you want to matter? Well, that's what last week's episode was about. And I need to clarify that the woman who got the flowers from Zappos, and I get a lump in my throat every time I tell that story, wasn't moved because the flowers were expensive. She wasn't saying to herself, wow, I really got those guys. I hit them up for at least$90 of dyed carnations. No, that wasn't what it was about. It was about the humanity of it, the emotional labor of showing up for this customer who might otherwise have been treated like a stranger. Emotional labor isn't expensive.

18:12Emotional labor is simply difficult. And humans can smell it. They can see it. They know it when it's in the room. The reason organizations don't push their people to exert emotional labor is because it's risky. It's risky because it might not work. It's risky because you can't quantify it. It's risky because there is no obvious manual. As soon as you put it in a manual, it's not emotional labor anymore. So if you want to wonder why a nurse might get burned out after 20 years of working night shifts and you find him outside smoking a cigarette, maybe it's because the system sucked out of him all of the emotional labor he wanted to bring to the job, but they gave him bureaucracy instead.

19:00So our opportunity as small business people is not to give a discount because often people don't even want a discount. It's not to give away the farm and it's not to be the cheapest. And maybe it's not even to spend an unlimited amount of time with people. It might simply be being willing to be open, to hear, to care, to connect, To say, I don't know if I can solve your problem. To recommend somebody to a competitor. To tell them honestly that your software isn't going to solve their problem, not today. To be a human. If we can do those things, that's way better than trying to buy the affection of those we seek to serve.

19:45The problem is I would never think that people would rather order things online and not speak to a person. But what I'm seeing is more and more every day, people do not want to speak to a person, but they would rather order online. So for example, people may call me up and I will say, hey, would you like to take my order? And they say, no, I would rather do it online. So I guess my question to you is, as a business owner and the way I see people no longer wanting to actually communicate with people, should we focus on trying to actually break through that barrier, still do it the old-fashioned way?

20:20Or should we actually go in the other direction and focus and streamline our businesses and our software and our websites so that people no longer can speak to humans? What do you think about that? You nailed it, Paul. There are two extremes, and the middle is a dangerous place to be. On one extreme, and this is happening more and more, will be devices that order their own parts. We're already seeing that you can get a printer that can order its own toner cartridge. Inevitably, I think right around the corner, we'll find cars that not only diagnose when they're running low of something, they'll order it, set up their own appointment, and get themselves fixed.

21:03Why not? Technically, it's easy to do. So if you've created this sort of no-touch environment, this one-click universe, then what you've done is sold people on the idea that there should be no clicks. And that's one direction. Make it effortless. The other direction, which doesn't replace the first direction but sits right next to it, is to make it effortful. It's the difference between buying sushi in the refrigerated case at your local grocery store that's made from packaged rice and frozen fish to buying it across the counter omakase style from a trained chef who will make a face if you put soy sauce all over the creation that you were just served.

21:49One side or the other. The middle is not a good place to be. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.