The Overton Window (E)

0:00Hey, it's Seth, and this is an Akimbo announcement.

0:08I know I've been gone for a while. I've missed you. I've been writing. My new book, This is Strategy, comes out in October 2024, right at the end of the month at a local bookstore near you. Starting in September, we will be back with new episodes based on the audiobook, based on the Udemy strategy course and a special Q &A series where you can volunteer to go over your strategy as part of the show. If you'd like to share your journey, what you're up to, what you're challenged by, visit akimbo.link and press the appropriate button and we will be in touch. Thanks for holding on. Thanks for the work you do.

0:57Keep making a ruckus. We'll see you at the end of September. In New York City, on the corner of 6th Avenue and 14th Street, is a bookstore. A bookstore that sells spiritual items, mostly from the East. Things like singing bowls. And if you go there, you'll notice that they have dozens and dozens of different kinds of singing bowls, all handmade from all over the world. And what you might notice is that most of them look exactly the same. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

1:39The longest bridge in the world is the Danyang Kushan Grand Bridge. It's 102 miles long. For those of you doing the math in your head, that's 538 ,000 feet of railway bridge. However, it is not the longest single span. It's not even close. The longest single span with no supports in the middle of the bridge, because the water is too deep, is the Bosiden Bridge, also in China. It's 1 ,700 feet long. In essence, it's 1 ,500th the length of that big, long bridge. It turns out that making a big leap with a bridge is difficult indeed. That if we're willing to do lots of little steps, we can build a bridge for as long as we want.

2:32But to do it all in one leap, that's difficult. A scholar named Joseph Overton died young, just 43 years old, killed in a tragic airplane accident. But before he died, he coined something called the Overton Window. And the Overton Window is a simple idea that needed a name. And basically what it says is that regardless of how a politician feels personally, there are limits as to what he or she can propose and get away with. That window of opportunity is based on what the culture is willing to accept. Joshua Trevino broke it down into six steps. Unthinkable, radical, acceptable, sensible, popular, and policy.

3:25Just think about any of the changes that have happened in our culture over the last decades, and you will see that most of them couldn't even be said out loud 100 years ago. Gay marriage? What are you talking about, gay marriage? We're going to have to lock you up even for saying it. But the window shifts over time, bit by bit. Noam Chomsky, the great political thinker, said this in 1988. The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum, even encourage the more critical and dissident views.

4:07that gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. Now, in his case, he might have been talking about intentional limits put on by those that would like to stay in power. But what Overton points out is that the window is largely driven by the culture, that what makes it so that we can argue vehemently about how the Mets are going to do this year, or whether or not a particular thing on cable news was okay, is that we like to do things in small steps. Mostly in this riff, I'd like to talk about creativity.

4:54Let's start with Mad Libs. You probably played Mad Libs as a kid. And the way it works is pretty simple. There is, in a little booklet that you bought at the bookstore, a story, a sort of dumb story about a kid walking a cat or someone going to school. But in the middle of the story, words are missing. And where that word is supposed to be, there'll be a line, and under it will say something like noun or verb or name of someone in the room. And so the person holding the story challenges everyone else in the room with a prompt. Give me a noun. Give me a swear word. Give me a kind of food. And you dutifully write down the answers within the story.

5:37And then the person who wrote everything down reads the story out loud and hilarity ensues. On his shiny new sorcerer. He always thinks his avocado tastes really swampy, but I think they taste like squirting moccasins. It ensues because the group, without trying very hard, without imagining that they were being particularly creative, while working within the Overton window of how 11-year-olds are supposed to hang out with each other, have written something that's actually sort of profound, that's brilliantly funny, that's filled with non-sequiturs, that is the funniest thing that's happened to them all day.

6:27Now, if I had said to people, quick, you bunch of 11-year-olds, write me a short story that's so funny we will crack up laughing, it never would have happened. Ironically, Mad Libs, which were invented by Leonard Stern and Roger Price in 1953, did not see the market for five years. And the reason is the two people who invented it couldn't agree on what to call it. Fortunately for them, they were eating one day in a diner in New York City. And at the table next to them, an agent and an actor were having a loud argument. What were they arguing about? The actor was about to go on an audition. And he wanted to ad-lib his way through the audition.

7:11The agent thought that was crazy. And yes, the irony runs deep here. He told the actor it would be mad to go and ad lib on this audition. And thus, Mad Libs were born. And now, harking back to previous episodes of Akimbo, in which I've talked about carriage and promotion and the short head, it turned out that one of the inventors of Mad Libs was a writer for the Steve Allen show. And the Steve Allen show was the most popular talk show on television. And somehow he persuaded Steve Allen to introduce Bob Hope by using Mad Libs as a way to make the intro. You guessed it. Within five days, every copy of Mad Libs in every bookstore in America was sold out.

7:58It's gone on to sell 102 million copies so far. If you lined up all of the copies of Mad Libs that have been sold, it would go back and forth across the Dengang, Kushan, Grand Bridge in China many, many times. So back to this idea of incremental creativity. Here's an interesting question that you can ask anybody if you go on a job interview, that you can ask anybody at a dinner party. You can say to them, so how did you get that job? That's it. How did you end up working here? and almost every single time the person you are talking to will say, well, it's a funny story and then we'll tell you a story that is not actually funny.

8:40But if you went to them and said, please tell me a story that you think is funny, they'd say, I don't know. But with that little tiny prompt, something begins. On the Serious Eats podcast, the opening question is often, what was dinner like at your house growing up? That's another prompt, another Mad Libs-like prompt, another prompt that fits easily into the Overton window. What was dinner like at your house growing up? Everyone has a story about this. Everyone feels comfortable telling a story about this. So now let's think about people who actually get paid for doing something that's supposed to feel creative.

9:22How is it that almost all pop music feels sort of interchangeable within its genre. That you could swap out one line of lyrics for another, one chorus for another. That songs like American Pie or Tangled Up in Blue stand out particularly because they don't match the genre. So bye-bye, Miss American Pie Drove my Chevy to the levee But the levee was dry And them good old boys would drink and whiskey and rye Singing, this'll be the day that I die So what's the difficult part? Is writing about the jester or bending over to tie the laces of her shoes the hard part? Is that the act of genius? Well, I just said those lines.

10:19They weren't that hard to say. So which part is hard? The part that's hard is the span. The part that's hard is getting across, going outside or right near the edges of Overton's window, because culture might be outside of us, but culture is also internalized. We don't want to go too far out on a limb when we do that thing we are calling creative, because Pressfield's resistance is running rampant in our brain, and mostly it doesn't want to be ridiculed. It doesn't want to be held up as an example of someone who is doing things that are unthinkable or even radical. That we are much more likely to exercise our creativity when we are certain it's going to be accepted.

11:13That doesn't mean it has to work. It doesn't mean it has to be a home run. But we need to know it's going to be accepted. So if I'm playing Mad Libs with you and I say, tell me a noun, you don't have any trouble saying tomato because you know tomato is a noun. If you're particularly good at comedy, you might say noodle because noodle is a funnier word than tomato. Not a lot funnier, but a little. And so we say noodle. It's defensible. But then when we need to make the span a bit longer, when we need to invent a new way to do online file sharing, when we need to invent a different sort of way to approach a political problem, we hold back.

11:59We don't hold back because we're not creative. We hold back because we are creative, but we also desperately want to be seen and understood and successful, that we don't want to be ridiculed, that we don't want to go outside the boundaries of what we're, quote, supposed to do. When you read time travel stories and you hear about people going back to the 1700s or the 1500s or the 1900s, they almost never talk about the fact that the typical time traveler would be too afraid to say anything. Even if you know what the world was like in your branch of time, you know if you speak up, you're going to be ridiculed that people are going to look at you when you talk about, I don't know, flying cars, when you talk about the internet, when you talk about video on a tiny device in your pocket, they're going to lock you up.

12:54And so we seek to stay within, within the range, because we don't want to be a crank. And so now here's the challenge. The challenge is if we go too far out of the window, internally or externally, we will be seen like a crank, that great ideas before their time are not great ideas, that every once in a while a Goya comes along painting paintings that were a hundred years ahead of their time, but not very often. Usually what happens is we are just enough ahead of our time. The exercise that creative people have to do, though, is not to rein it in and to figure out how to be just enough. It's to push it out, to realize that we need more from the creators in our world than another noun, that what we need is another American pie, something that will shake us up, that 50 years later, people will remember.

14:07because it was just enough out of what everybody else was trying to do. Some people call this genius. It's not genius. It's simply guts. It's the guts to say no one's ever built a 102-mile-long bridge, but I know how to put each one of the small spans together, step by step, persistent, incremental creativity, all in service of making things better. That opportunity to go outside what people expect and just enough outside that it makes an impact, that is the hard work of the professional who seeks to be creative. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

15:06Hi, Seth. Alicia from Charleston here. Hi, Seth. This is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. As you know, I do love to hear from you, and I hope you will contribute a question. To do so, just visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and click the appropriate button. Hi, Seth. My name is Rae, and I'm local to Windsor, Ontario. In last week's episode, you talked about a book that you collaborated on with other writers for a charity and addressed the topic of payment by proposing that, quote, maybe the increase in their reputation, maybe being part of the circle, being insiders instead of outsiders, was value unto itself, end quote.

16:00In a separate episode, you talked about the way that money allows us to keep playing the game, to keep making the work that matters to us. You spoke about the importance of being thoughtful with how we use money to keep our work alive. So my question is, how is what you proposed in last week's episode different from our larger cultural practice of offering creatives exposure instead of money, a practice that makes it difficult for creatives to keep doing their work? How can we better identify the line between monetization and privatization as something that's self-serving and monetization and privatization that allows us to keep playing the game and to keep sharing our gifts?

16:35Thanks for everything you do, Seth. Thanks for this, Ray. It gets to the heart of what does it mean to work for free? Why should we work for free? Who should work for free? Is it work if we're doing it for free? What are we trading in an economy that's based on scarcity? Often, freelancers, creators, people who live by their wits, are asked to work for free. This is because there's an imbalance of power. There are many, many providers and not enough buyers. And so the buyer starts to make trade offers, trade offers that don't feel fair. that if you do all of your work for free, if your band plays at my wedding, if you take pictures of my event, if you do some writing for my magazine, I will pay you in credibility.

17:28I will pay you in promotion. And it feels wrong. It feels wrong partly because it's our work and we toiled over it, and partly because we can see where this leads. It leads to an infinite road of free. How then to move past it? Because working for free highlights our imposter instinct. It makes us feel like the work we are creating isn't worth very much. So I have a simple way that I've thought about it, simple but difficult, which is this. The work you do for money, you always do for money. The clients you charge, the kind of clients you charge, you always charge. So in the case of the big moo, I didn't ask anybody who wrote three-page essays for money to write a three-page essay for free.

18:22Also, in this case, the client was Room to Read, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and Acumen. These are charities, and I think working for a charity is different than working for a wedding or a corporation. So, in my case, if I'm going to get on an airplane and give a speech, it doesn't matter how much promotion you can offer. This is what I charge for. If you're a photographer and you take pictures and put them in albums, then if someone wants pictures and they're going to go into an album, they have to pay for it. On the other hand, if Oprah asks an author to go on one of her shows, the question is, how much should the author charge?

19:05And the answer is obviously zero because the author's job is not to go on talk shows and because the promotion that will come from being on Oprah is so dramatic that it is worth paying her to be on the show if you could. So it's a distinct opportunity. It's a distinct form of your craft. So that's the fork in the road. Now, the thing that must go with it is this. If you make something or do something where there are easy and free substitutes, you don't have a moral right to get paid. That if you are one of a hundred choices, then good for the buyer to say, I'm going to pay less. Because if it's all the same, you haven't given me a good reason to pay more.

19:59That the way creatives get paid is by being the one and only. When you are the one and only, when there is no easy second choice, then your pricing takes care of itself. So that means that now that everybody has a camera in their pocket, if your work as a photographer is simply to take a picture that anyone could take, no one is going to hire you and pay you to take a picture. Back in 1910, And that's all photographers did. They owned the camera. Owning the camera was what you got paid for. Today, of course, that's not the way it works. And the same thing goes for just about every creative act that we can imagine getting paid for.

20:44If you believe that there is scarcity because of the tools you have, I think you will discover that that won't be true for long. It has to be scarcity based on reputation, scarcity based on impact, Scarcity based on the fact that there aren't that many canvases that have been signed by you. And so if there's a canvas signed by you and that makes it worth something, someone may pay for the canvas, not just the idea. And one more question as a bonus. I actually heard from a few people about the Gift Economy podcast because they may have misunderstood what I was getting at. But first, let's go to this one.

21:25Hi, Seth. This is Dan from New Jersey. I've been a long-time reader of your blog, and I was thrilled when you launched a podcast I could listen to as well. I have a question on the Gift Economy podcast you just released. It sounds like a really good idea in theory, but I think I'm missing something in how you presented it. I'm thinking, how does one give generously when you're focused on putting food on the table? For example, you described how writing a book chapter for free, is that simply the province of the wealthy? Or how do you do that when you need to work for the income? Or how art was initially, you said, created for the sake of creation as a gift.

22:07When I think back to artists in history, although they're known as terrible businessmen, they were creating art to be paid. Perhaps the Catholic Church was the patron, or they had their patron through a family like the Medicis. I'm just curious to clarify some of that. Thank you very much. Yeah, there's a lot to dig into here, and I'm glad that you are bringing it up. I think it's worth noting that the idea of rock stars flying around in private jets is an artifact of a magical 30 years that were driven by an imbalance between scarcity, hits, radio, record stores, and big arena concerts. Before that, the number of people who could expect to become multi-multi-millionaires or possibly billionaires by making music, there weren't any.

23:06It just showed up. That in the 1500s or the 1700s or the 1900s, if you were a composer, you had very few illusions that your work would turn you into a rich person. And you are right that the Catholic Church sometimes paid people to make art, but most of the painting that existed was painted because people wanted to paint it, wanted their paintings to be seen, not because they expected to get rich doing it. And Leonardo and the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, Well, his royalties from the Mona Lisa have always added up to zero because it became famous after he was dead. The point of all of this is that there's a long history of people creating ideas, doing medical research, sharing their insight without getting paid for it.

24:07But, and it's a huge but, nowhere in my writing or in my podcast am I arguing that people should take the creative work of others without asking first. That there is some sort of right that we have to steal people's intellectual property. No, I'm not saying that at all. But what I am getting at is this. There's a difference between the substrate, the canvas, the thing that scares, and the idea itself. Because ideas that spread win. I did not invent the idea of a podcast. Dave Weiner did. But here I am making a podcast. You might be listening to a podcast. The idea of the podcast transcends any right one has to monetize the fact that you invented it.

25:01Let's add to that the fact that, as Tim O 'Reilly has said, the enemy isn't piracy, it's obscurity. The people who decided to donate a chapter to the Big Moo, I think most of them did it because they're good people, because it was a way to give to a charity they cared about. But I also know that except for the few famous people whose names were on the cover of that book, every other author got way more than they contributed because being seen next to the others was priceless. So no, I would never have taken their work without their permission. But also, there are plenty of people I didn't ask who wish that I had.

25:48Because giving is its own reward, not just because it makes you famous, but because you can. And so if we can solve an interesting problem by showing up and sharing our insight, I think that is a good reason to get out of bed in the morning. But also, if you are a creator hoping to make a living, you're going to have to do it by creating something that someone in the market wants more than it costs and that you have a scarce number of them so that you can sell it. Intellectual property has been good to me and lots of people that I care about. It enables us to create a cycle of being able to do it as a professional.

26:33But what's also true is that the very engines that we built to spread our ideas so that we could sell more of something have created a dynamic where we have too many ideas. They are not scarce anymore. And what that means is if you want to make a living, please go make a living. But realize you may not be able to do it by fencing in an idea that is easy to share. I hope that helps. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.