Nothing is worse than handing over a pitch deck you worked hard on, or concept drawings, and being ghosted by the other party.

This is a hard lesson I’ve had to learn over the years. Prospects are quick to ask for a pitch deck, because it's easy and takes all the burden off of them.

Whether prospects read these decks or not, service providers are asked to waste a ton of time on something that may never be glanced at—or worse, something that’s used as an A/B comparison to justify going with a lower-priced competitor.

Tip: Don’t send decks or PDFs or concept pitches via email any more. If a prospect wants your pitch, they should schedule a call. Go over the deck together. That way you'll know they at least heard your ideas the way they were meant to be heard.

Buyer’s remorse sets in almost immediately after we buy something new.

When the initial joy wears off, we realize our bank account has shrunk and our responsibilities have grown (along with our carbon footprint).

To truly get the sense of the burden of stuff, watch the documentary The Queen of Versailles. It’s one of the clearest examples of the trappings of wealth.

But deleting an item from our lives has the opposite effect. We feel good donating to someone in need. Our space grows—and so does our peace of mind.

Getting rid of something old can give us more lasting happiness than buying something new.

The news makes it so easy to hate our fellow humans. To see them as “other”, “not like us”, “idiots”, or less than.

But the vast majority of people are good in their own way.

Often it’s not that we even disagree, but that we just choose to focus on different parts of the same river.

The person in the rapids wants the river to slow down.

And the person at the delta sees all the accumulated trash.

Fundamentally people aren’t that different. They’re just responding to a different angle of reality.

Most of our time on social media is spent asking others for favors, or to buy our crap.

It’s a rare gift to be able to meaningfully help anyone, but often we see it as an imposition.

The greatest people I know feel much happier doing a favor for someone else than having one done for them.

Alt title: You don’t need to blow up 500 cars to tell a good story.

For (hundreds of?) thousands of years, humans were able to find, create, and convey meaning through telling stories. For the vast majority of human history, these oral stories required the listener to use their imagination to fill in the details. And for generations, this worked well.

Only very recently did we attach money-making to the idea. Only recently did we decide that we needed to blow up 1,000 real cars to make a movie, or to napalm an actual jungle to show us what the Vietnam War was like. Only recently did we decide that packing as much spectacle, destruction, and even sometimes death into a story would lead to greater financial returns.

So now we find ourselves in a position where AI will let us show anything. We don’t even need CGI, or extras, or to destroy billions of dollars of property to make great art.

While this is tragic for the many talented and wonderful people working in the industry, it’s a return to what storytelling was always about.

Stories were never about the money, or the destruction, or the wanton wasting of finite resources. They were about illuminating the human experience. And the spoken word still does that just as well as ever.

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