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Happy International Clash Day!

One of the first cassettes I owned was London Calling by The Clash. I don’t remember exactly how I ended up purchasing that white tape. Still, I like to think that a snobby record store employee like Barry in High Fidelity turned to me with a shocked look on his face and intoned harshly “You don’t own London Calling?!?!? It’s going to be ok.” while I blushed, grabbed the cassette from his hand, and rushed to the cash register.

When I first acquired the album I was obsessed and listened to it constantly. London Calling was a key that unlocked so many doors for me. Not just musically, but creatively. I was 12 or 13 years old and for the first time, I realized that an artist was both influenced by the things that came before them *and* capable of influencing the things that came after them. I came to London Calling over a decade after the album was first released. I saw that The Clash had been heavily influenced by musicians who came before them, while simultaneously having an enormous impact on the 90’s punk and post-punk music I was hearing on the radio.

A few years ago I was researching London Calling and discovered that it wasn’t just the album’s music that was influenced by earlier artists. The album art for London Calling – the black and white photograph of bassist Paul Simonon smashing his bass on stage with the pink and green lettering – is borrowed from Elvis Presley’s 1956 self-titled debut record.

There’s a Jim Jarmusch quote about creativity, influence, and inspiration that I return to every so often:

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.”

– Jim Jarmusch

Whether being influenced, borrowing, or stealing, the artists who create the art we love all rely upon and build upon those who came before them. Creativity is culmination.

What piece of art first inspired you at a young age?

++ Brett ++

Further Reading:

The Story Behind The ‘London Calling’ Cover in Retroavangarda

KEXP’s International Clash Day

25 Quotes To Help You Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon on his blog

This week’s inputs:

• London Calling by The Clash
• Moonstruck, the 1987 film

OpenAI and Anthropic just saw their competitive advantage in generative AI change drastically in the last few days. Their billions of dollars in spending (and funding) aren’t turning out to be quite the protective moat around their business like they thought.

The TL;DR of the DeekSeek news is this: DeepSeek developed a significantly cheaper method to do generative AI. DeepSeek’s new models have come out of left field to shock and disrupt the Silicon Valley status quo, catching the entire generative AI industry in the US flat-footed. Kylie Robison and Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge summed up this development succinctly: “DeepSeek’s successes call into question whether billions of dollars in compute are actually required to win the AI race.”

This news has me thinking a lot this week about competitive advantage. The visual of a moat – a body of water surrounding and protecting a castle from would-be invaders* – is a powerful one. As business owners, we should all aspire to build and maintain moats around our brand and service offerings. A durable and sustainable competitive advantage is a powerful tool for growth and we should focus on regularly and consistently updating our systems and businesses to reflect this.

How does a small business sustain its competitive advantages?

Two small recommendations.

1 – Your company’s brand is amplified by you and your employees. Leverage your people and their passion for your business. Give your people the time and tools to create something, improve a process, or interview customers. Guide them on their journey, but allow them to take ownership and share their findings with the company (and if appropriate) with your customers.

2 – At the end of every sales cycle (successful or not) you should be asking your customer for constructive criticism and feedback. Not because you want reviews, though social proof is very powerful, but because you want to learn and get better. Was something confusing for the client? Will they recommend you to colleagues, friends, or family? If they chose to go with a competitor, why? You need to be asking these kinds of questions in order to continue to iterate and improve your services in alignment with your customer needs.

See you next week.

++ Brett ++

* “If you will not show us the grail, we shall take your castle by force.”

Further Reading:

Deep Impact by Ed Zitron in his newsletter Where’s Your Ed At?

5 Sources of Competitive Advantage to Drive Growth by Catherine Cote in Harvard Business School Online Business Insights

How An Economic Moat Provides a Competitive Advantage by Peter Gratton in Investopedia

What Is Social Proof by Shubham Gupta in Gartner Digital Markets

TikTok

TikTok has had an eventful January. After a bit of back-and-forth over the weekend, TikTok went from normal – available to use and download on the App Store and Google Play – to completely unavailable. Then it came back online, but with a bit of a hiccup which has persisted for several days now, and TikTok currently sits in an uneasy limbo where users are able to access the platform via web browser or if they already have the app installed, but the app is unavailable for download. The upheaval and uncertainty about the platform’s future are causing headaches for marketers and creators.

Rented Land

What is rented land? I was introduced to the idea of rented land by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose on the podcast This Old Marketing a few years back. Rented land, in this context, means a marketer or creator building an audience on a platform where they do not have direct access to their audience. On the other hand, owned land includes things like a customer database or email list that facilitates direct audience access.

Most social media platforms are rented land. What is the downside of building your audience and distributing your content on rented land? If the platform suddenly changes its rules or shuts down, you have no way to reach your audience. While the potential shuttering of a platform is not a unique phenomenon (does anyone remember Google Plus?), social media platforms have their own incentives for allowing and encouraging users and businesses to build audiences on their rented land. These incentives evolve over time as the platform grows. Broadly speaking, a new platform’s sole focus is to acquire users to create a network effect. A more mature platform will monetize its network and users.

Sure, huge swaths of the people who are looking to buy your products and services are spending time and giving their attention to YouTube, Meta, and TikTok. These platforms are behemoths and offer awesome potential for audience growth and engagement. They are built to be addictive and keep us coming back day after day. Some of them have powerful and effective advertising and e-commerce funnels built into them. But those platforms have all of the control. If a platform is shut down then you don’t have access to your audience. You have no way of exporting a list of your followers or reaching out to them on another channel. You have to start over from zero.

What’s going to happen with the future of TikTok? Your guess is as good as mine. The only thing I know for sure is that you have a choice where you publish and build your audience. Choose wisely.

++ Brett ++

Further Reading:

5 Things to Do to Move From Rented Land by Ann Gynn at The Tilt

Tech’s TikTok Dilemma by Sapna Maheshwari, Aaron Krolik, and Tripp Mickle at The New York Times

This week’s inputs:

• The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001 film by Wes Anderson
• A Light For Attracting Attention, 2022 album by The Smile

I am a big believer in systems. I love a process. I adore structure in my life, my finances, my business. Recurring tasks and reminders, planning ahead, to-do lists, I use them all. I love to know that there’s a plan and that I’m using my time efficiently.

I came to a realization recently that I have over-indexed on efficiency, and, more importantly, that I’ve done so at the expense of creativity.

I’ve been working on a few big-picture projects of late. The kind of projects that require an unrestrained there-are-no-bad-ideas-in-a-brainstorm mindset to generate starting points. From there, you iterate and iterate until you arrive at a fully realized concept. I was feeling stifled and struggling to put pencil to paper to make progress. I decided to pause, take a step back, and look at my process. I found that I was stuck in a productive and efficient frame of mind that was creating unnecessary friction and subpar creative outputs.

While journaling about my frustrations, I wrote this down:

Efficiency is the enemy of creativity.

I realized that I needed to be intentional about creating the right environment to get the creative process started. And so, I ran an experiment. I blocked out time on my calendar away from my desk to work on the creative process. No phone, no SOPs, no to-do lists. I went for a walk (with a notebook and pencil, of course) to a nearby park, because studies have found that walking improves creativity. While it is January and my visit was brief, the chilly conditions and fresh air did focus my mind and I was able to get down some terrific ideas.

I’ve blocked out time on my calendar every day for the past two weeks to focus on creative work. I put my phone away and find a simple way to mix up my physical environment. This is as easy as going for a walk with the dog, grabbing a coffee, or moving from my home office to a different part of the house. Adding a little bit of friction into my workflow and intentionally leaving the comfort of my efficient desk setup.

I will continue to experiment and tinker with this process, but so far I am a happy camper. I have found that when I go out of my way to interrupt my well-structured patterns of efficiency and productivity and try something new I am able to make significant progress towards my goals.

++ Brett ++

Further Reading:

Stanford study finds walking improves creativity in the Stanford Report

This week’s inputs:

• Heat, Michael Mann’s 1995 crime film
• Priscilla Inspiration, a playlist on Spotify by Sofia Coppola
• “Two Hands” a short fiction piece by Caoilinn Hughes in the Winter 2024 issue of The Paris Review

“What’s the trick?”
“The trick is not minding that it hurts.”
T.E. Lawrence in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia.

It’s Movie Matinee Monday and for this installment, I’m watching Lawrence of Arabia. In the titular character’s second scene of the film, we see him at work in his office. Lawrence lights a cigarette for a colleague with a match and then proceeds to extinguish the match with his fingertips without flinching or showing any signs of pain – a party trick of sorts that he is clearly in the habit of doing. The colleague proceeds to give this a try and when he puts out his match he is in obvious pain and says “Oh! It damn hurts!” before asking Lawrence: “What’s the trick?”

Lawrence smiles wryly and says: “The trick is not minding that it hurts.”

This brought to mind those ads you see online that have now become the butt of jokes – This One Weird Trick To [fill in the blank]. Instant weight loss. Fast and easy homeownership. Becoming an overnight billionaire. You get the idea. These are tropes at this point. No one loses 50 pounds or stumbles across $100,000 for a downpayment on a house while rummaging in their couch cushions.

What my limited life experience has taught me again and again: There is no shortcut. There is no trick. Whether in business, in creative or artistic pursuits, or just in life – you’ve got to put in the work. Do the reps. Log the miles. That is the only way that you can be ready to both succeed and be ready to endure what life throws at you.

A massive part of the reason why I’m working on this project – why I’m writing and sharing about my creative journey in public – is because I am applying this “there are no tricks” philosophy to my own work. I’m still not sure where this journey is going to take me, but I know I’m going to learn and grow along the way.

++ Brett ++