That ladder you’re climbing: just where is it leading?

Does it have a top?

Would you like it if you got there?

Wabi-sabi is a wonderful Japanese term for the little imperfections that let us know in an instant that something is handmade.

Amidst the constant search for both perfection and authenticity (whatever each of those mean), wabi-sabi is often a good guide to what’s real — and it’s something most people can spot almost instantly.

At a concert last week, I experienced 900 people recognizing wabi-sabi all at once. About halfway through the show, the singer missed an entrance right at the beginning of a song. He stopped the band a few bars into the music, laughed, and stepped back up to the microphone. “I messed up,” he said with a laugh, then launched back into the song from the top.

No one was disappointed by the mistake. Instead, we all applauded the quick recovery and looked around at each other, eyes glowing with the recognition of being in the presence of something real.

Little blips like that aren’t produced. And that’s what makes them perfect.

In one of the many aphorisms attributed to him, Mark Twain is supposed to have said that the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Re-reading some of Pat Conroy’s writing recently, I was struck again by how powerfully early influences can shape the way language sounds to our inner ears. Dipping back into a flow of language I’d learned by reading nearly every word Conroy had written was like slipping back into a comfortable old suit of clothes — and a lesson in the influences that shaped my taste to this day.

Once you’ve seen the lightning, the lightning bug is never the same.

A lesson re-learned once again lately: when you really care about something, you eventually have to move beyond caring so much.

A certain kind of indifference — which is to say, of freedom — has to inhere even and especially in the deepest kinds of caring.

I recently read the evocative phrase “a life of moral consequence,” and I’ve been stewing on it ever since.

To live such a life — a life that matters, in every common-sensical sense — is a deep need and driver of so many lives.

Paradoxically (but as philosophers like E. F. Schumacher and Wendell Berry have long recognized) increased automation is not the benefit but the bane of the industrial worker. Where once his (and it usually was his) identity and sense of self-worth was tied to his work, automation has “liberated” him into the terrible freedom of idleness and isolation.

Technology has come a long way since Pascal’s day, but humanity hasn’t gotten much better at sitting still in a room alone. (Perhaps we’ve gotten worse.) One way or another, we’ve got to find and plug into a sense of purpose, or we’re likely to harm ourselves and each other in the attempt.

The hard thing about perfect is that it takes too long. And, as a result, it’s usually not perfect — or not perfectly useful — by the time it arrives (if ever it does).

Nothing is perfect, but some things are better than others. Some of those are even remarkable.

Too often, though, perfect means waiting, hiding, and being brittle. After all, if you can’t ship till it’s perfect, you’ll never ship. And if you’re marketing the thing you’re shipping as perfect already, how can you innovate or improve it?

You can’t get perfect, and you certainly can’t get perfecter. Somewhat more perfect might be OK for the industrialist seeking to make mass-market products incrementally better, but it’s not going to make things better in a meaningful sense.

The solution is to think organically rather than industrially. Try lots of experiments before they’re ready, learn from all of them, and build on the ones that work.

Evolution through experimentation rules out perfect. But it paves the road toward better.

***

For an extraordinary investigation of brittleness vs. suppleness, check out last week’s episode of Seth Godin’s podcast, Akimbo. “Supple” is well worth 30 minutes of your weekend.

The seductive thing about platforms is the idea that they allow you to serve people at scale. One-on-one office meetings are hard and inefficient; if only you could get everyone on a platform, it would be so much easier.

Sometimes that’s true, and it’s easy to spot the massive examples. But many of those examples are called unicorns for a reason: those platforms met existing felt needs, which aren’t as common as the desire to build a platform.

Sometimes the difficult emotional labor of the one-on-one meeting is precisely what’s valuable about it. Even more often, a platform designed to make your life easier meets a culture that’s not ready for it, and goes nowhere.

If you want to connect everyone, you’ve got to build a culture of connection first. That’s the hard part. Do that, and life will be easier and better on the platform — but only because you did the hard part, in person, beforehand.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Seth Godin’s “linchpin” concept. Making yourself indispensable — to the organization, to the boss, to the bottom line — is a good idea.

But, as with any good idea, it’s important to recognize the shadow side. For aspiring linchpins — especially early in their careers — it’s easy to conflate the drive to become indispensable with the desire to please everyone and say yes to everything.

Saying yes is important, especially early on when the path is still broad and opportunities are the best currency. But one of the real points of being a linchpin is to increase your freedom along with your value. In other words, the point is precisely not to get sucked into the idea that to be indispensable means giving up your own agency.

The point of opportunities, of creating value, of becoming a linchpin, is to keep doing more of what Michael Bungay Stanier calls great work, not more grunt work. Each is self-reinforcing, so it’s worth choosing wisely.

Today’s the last day of class-passing.

Not the last day of learning, but the last day of trying to prove I’ve memorized enough material to regurgitate some of it (with the help of an index card and a generous curve).

When you think about it that way, it’s odd to think we call this learning, isn’t it?

Rationally, it seems clear that we’d want smart people in power.

Trouble is, we’re not rational — especially in a crowd.

Those of us who really appreciate smarts tend to forget this. We also tend to forget that no one likes to feel stupid.

If the way you’re talking about your great idea makes others feel stupid, or like your idea is happening to them, don’t expect them to thank you for it.