Idea Surplus Disorder #104

This week in Idea Surplus Disorder: We dive into the power of deliberately bad first drafts, the clarity that comes from picking a pricing model, and why launching something new calls for a Rude Q&A.

We'll also explore fading workplace rituals like happy hour, the internet’s three types of curiosity, and how attention comes in spotlight, starlight, and daylight forms. You’ll also find a strategic disappointment matrix, a warning for analog businesses competing online, and a simple set of questions that might make your next PowerPoint disappear.

And as always, you’ll find a mix of fun finds, practical insights, and thought-provoking quotes to help you lead, live, and think more intentionally.

I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here.

It's Thinksgiving Time

Thinksgiving is our initiative that pairs business teams with nonprofits for a day of collaboration and innovation.

It'll take place on November 6, 2025, this year, and we'll only have 50 spots available. Watch the video, and let me know if you're interested.

Ideas + Insights

Feeling stuck on a project with your team. Focus on building the deliberately bad first draft:

Empty out everything you’ve been thinking about the job on to the page and don’t worry about whether it’s any good or not. You need it all out in front of you so you can see it all properly in all its horror.

Pricing is one of the hardest things to do in business. And if you don't know which one of these three pricing strategies you're embracing, it gets even harder:

More for More (get the best, with a price to match), More for Less (everything you actually need, at a reasonable price), or Less for Less (it’s not much, but it’s incredibly affordable).

You must pick one approach, and accept its batch of consequences. If you don’t incorporate those consequences into the rest of your strategy, you’ll have a confusing market message, a Frankenstein product, and the wrong pricing model.

The only wrong choice is to not choose at all, and thus be confusing to customers and misaligned with the rest of your strategy. Then you will make internally-inconsistent choices, working against yourself, and your customers won’t know how to think about your product, which means they won’t be comfortable buying it.

Launching something new to the world that others might not understand? Create a Rude Q&A:

1. Ask friends who excel at giving tough feedback for their opinions. Some people are naturals at this task and enjoy coming up with the rudest, most confrontational questions the world has ever seen. You might be offended or hurt by what they come up with, but that’s okay – better to be offended/surprised now, in an RQA than in a demo, pitch meeting, or public setting.
2. Make sure to include questions that are unfair or based on erroneous, but popular, assumptions. Reporters, clients, and the public all have their share of unfair questions and erroneous information, and you want to be ready for them.
3. Spend more time on the answers than the questions. The answers take more time because the responses need to be more polite and mature than the questions themselves. They also need to carefully refute assumptions in the questions without being dismissive.
4. Write polite answers. Only the questions should be rude – your answers should be diplomatic. Technically it’s a Rude Q & Polite A (RQPA).
5. Review them with your staff. You want everyone who speaks publicly about the project to have similar answers.

I've got to admit, this makes me a little sad, but nobody goes to happy hour any more:

Indeed, there was a time when an after-work happy hour—loosely organized among a gaggle of officemates, all searching for a hit of debauchery to burn off the resentments of an annoying shift—was one of the sacred rites of employment.

During these gatherings, acquaintanceship could be hammered into familiarity, the awkwardness of hierarchical leverage could melt away, and dirty laundry could be aired free and easy without the panoptic paper trail of Slack.

And yet, for so many reasons, our sacred after-work happy hour has become an endangered species. This is something I began to notice slowly, then all at once. I used to know the people I worked with, right? Weren’t my personal and professional lives a bit more entwined? I swear, my colleagues used to have fun around the office. Why does that all feel so long ago?

My friend Kate O'Neill has a piece in Fast Company introducing her Strategic Disappointment Matrix:

• High Certainty / Low Disappointment = Easy wins (pursue enthusiastically)
• High Certainty / High Disappointment = Necessary moves (require courage but clear communication)
• Low Certainty / Low Disappointment = Safe experiments (gather data for future decisions)
• the Low Certainty / High Disappointment = Breakthrough territory

If you're a mostly analog business, it is dangerous to compete on the internet:

Leaving the analog world and all the advantages it afforded incumbents — brick and mortar retail, movie theater distribution, cable bundles — means these businesses suddenly find themselves in a perpetual competition for customers in a landscape full of new rivals and devoid of any of the friction that once buttressed their dominance.

What's your style of curiosity?

An analysis of 483,000 Wikipedia users found that people pursue their curiosity in three ways.

Some browse articles as ‘hunters’, targeting ‘specific answers in a projectile path’, and their interests are more likely to be in science and technology.

Others are nomadic ‘busybodies’, who explore more, building broad, loose networks of knowledge; they gravitate toward arts, culture and the humanities.

A third group are the ‘dancers’ – a little harder to define, they tend to leap ‘in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge’, taking an unstructured and inventive approach to information-seeking, across radically different subjects.

Your Attention Requires Three Forms of Light:

1. Spotlight attention: Focuses on immediate tasks and short-term actions (making coffee, finding glasses, reading a chapter). When disrupted, you can't complete these immediate tasks.
2. Starlight attention: Directs your longer-term projects and goals (writing a book, building a business, being a good parent). Like stars guiding travelers, it keeps you oriented toward your bigger objectives. When disrupted, you lose sight of where you're heading.
3. Daylight attention: Enables self-reflection and clarity about what you truly want. It helps you understand why you chose your long-term goals and who you want to be. When this attention is disrupted, you may lose touch with your core identity and purpose.

If you must use PowerPoint, at least ask yourself these three questions:

• What are we trying to achieve or communicate?
• Is a deck the best way of doing so? Or can we have a conversation, have a meeting without a deck, or send an email?
• If it is, how can we distill it down to key points and minimize the time spent on putting it together?

I love this advice from James Clear:

To improve, compare little things (marketing strategies, exercise techniques, writing tactics, etc.).

To be miserable, compare big things (career path, marriage, net worth, etc.).

Comparison is the thief of joy when applied broadly, but the teacher of skills when applied narrowly."

Fun Finds

• 100 digital artists animating the same scene
• A teeter-totter bench that demands collaboration.
• The original clown car.
• Top Ten Worst Beatles Songs
• Speaking of ... Live Cam at Abbey Road
• Old Pub Signs
• The Sounds of Love

Words of Wisdom

Patience is a kind of hospitality. — Francis Weller

Humor is built on the relief of recognizing how difficult things are. — Sasha Ravitch

Happiness never comes through answers. It only comes when we’re so tired of answers that we just decide to live the questions fully. — Richard Rudd

Forgiveness unlocks time. — Anonymous

If you need 10 of something, make 30. Then pick the best. – Rick Rubin

The shortest path is the one you don't abandon. – Shane Parrish

People respond well to those that are sure of what they want. What people hate most is indecision. – Anna Wintour

Always aspire to act in a way that cancels out someone else's cruel or stupid behavior. – Carl Hiaasen

Time will multiply whatever you feed it. – James Clear

The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. – Carlo Rovelli

Up Next From Filament

Every month, Filament delivers an incredible mix of free programming and professional development. You can find links to sign up for all of our upcoming events, including PlayDays, EmpowerHer, NSFW, and SuperCollider here.