The systems that worked reliably five years ago become expensive habits. I have watched it happen four times, and I still got caught.
Chapter 9
1988
In 1988 a group of us at high school produced a newspaper entirely on a computer. As far as anybody around us knew, it was the first one.
I need to explain why that was not a small thing, because from here it sounds like nothing.
Producing a newspaper was a trade. Typesetting was a skilled job that people trained for and did for a living, and paste up was a craft with its own tools, its own vocabulary and its own quiet professionals who were very good at it. If you wanted a page laid out, you went to somebody who knew how, and you paid them, and you waited.
We were doing it in a room at school because we thought it was interesting.
By 1989 I had turned it into a business, on a Macintosh SE and a laser printer.
It did not start with an ambition. I had a job at a church. I was helping people with their materials and their branding for nothing, because I liked doing it and they needed it and nobody else was going to. It became a side business by accident, which has happened to me more than once. Almost everything I have built started by being given away.
Here is what I want you to sit with, because it is the whole argument of this book arriving early and in miniature.
The skill I had in 1988 was gone by the middle of the nineties. Not devalued. Gone as a distinct skill. It became a menu command. Anybody with the software could do the thing I had been paid for, and the specialists I had watched with something close to awe as a teenager mostly had to become something else.
I was seventeen and I did not understand what I was looking at. I thought I had found a clever way in. What I had actually found was the first of five times I would watch the same thing happen, and the only reason I came out ahead that time is that I was young enough to have nothing invested in the old way.
The people who lost were not worse at their jobs than I was. They were considerably better. They had simply spent twenty years becoming excellent at the exact thing that was about to stop being scarce.
Chapter 10
Four Times
The skill I had in 1988 was gone by the middle of the nineties. Not devalued. Gone as a distinct skill. It became a menu command, and the specialists I had watched with something close to awe mostly had to become something else.
Then websites did it again. Building a website in 1998 was a specialist act, and by 2010 it was a template and a weekend.
Then search did it. There was a period when knowing how search actually worked was a genuine edge, and then the knowledge spread, the tools got cheap, and the edge went where edges go.
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Chapter 11
The One I Got Badly Wrong
I was working at a high-tech firm in Santa Barbara. We sold website builds, hosting, and T1 lines, which tells you roughly when this was. I was inside the industry. Not adjacent to it, not reading about it, inside it, with a decent view of who was actually buying what and how the money moved.
Four months before the crash, I took money that had been set aside for something important and personal and I put all of it into technology stocks.
[VARIANT A] The money was set aside for infertility treatment. My ex-wife and I had it earmarked for exactly one thing, and I moved it. [/VARIANT A]
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Chapter 12
I Screamed Shark
Santa Monica Beach, 1987. I was in eleventh grade, Donnie Flaig was in ninth, and Don Kick was out there with us. Neither of them had surfed before that day, as far as I know, which is a hedge I have been using for nearly forty years and neither of them has ever bothered to correct.
I brought the boards. I brought everything. I was the one who knew what he was doing.
The three of us were sitting out past the break when I saw a fin.
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Chapter 13
What a Platform Says
One habit has served me better than any framework, and it is not sophisticated. When a platform announces something, I treat the announcement as a claim rather than as information, and I go and measure what actually happened to the accounts I can see.
I did not arrive at that from principle. I arrived at it from being wrong. Early on I took product announcements at face value, adjusted budgets around them, and told clients things I had not verified, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that the company that built the thing presumably knows what it does.
They know what they built. That is a different question from what it does to your money in your category this quarter, and they are not measuring that on your behalf.
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Chapter 14
Sixty Thousand Dollars Back
Google announced a new release of broad match at our franchise conference, which was held at Google's own offices.
Broad match is the setting that lets Google decide which searches your ads should appear for, rather than you deciding. The pitch for the new release was the usual one: give the system more freedom and it will find you customers you would not have thought to bid on.
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Chapter 15
The Truck
I was built slightly wrong and nobody knew what it would cost.
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Chapter 16
Why Waiting Is So Reasonable
Most businesses do not miss a shift because they are lazy or stupid. They miss it because the old system still works. It just works slightly less well than it used to.
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That is a preview of Part Three.
The digital edition is free. Read substantial excerpts here or download the complete book. No email, no gate, nothing to sign up for.
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