Idea Surplus Disorder #83

In this week's Idea Surplus Disorder: Grand Canyon focus, micro-meetings, vacation emails, accountability sinks, vintage strategy, participation trophies, SNL product logos, seventeenth-century death roulette, and more.

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

SuperCollider Focus: 2025 Strategy Planning

Need to get a jump-start on your 2025 strategic planning, but not sure how to begin?

Join us on Friday, November 1, at Filament for another edition of SuperCollider, where you can give your team a practical, results-oriented mix of learning, teamwork, and co-working.

We'll give an introduction to Filament’s service-centered planning toolkit designed to help you and your team identify the strategies your top customers wish you’d adopt. Then, we'll show you some ways to leverage AI tools to test your plan before it goes live.

Ideas + Insights

What if you brought some Grand Canyon Focus to your next task?

Imagine you’re standing at the edge of a cliff, where you really need to concentrate in order not to fall into the abyss. Imagine the intensity of that, the forced focus, the complete and utter devotion to being present.

Now try that kind of complete and utter concentration for reading the rest of this post. No distractions, no pulling away to other things, just stay with the words, keep connecting with me and the meaning of this article. Be here, without fail, or you’ll fall off the cliff.

You can practice this with any task, from washing a dish to writing a paragraph. Fully pour yourself into it, so that the doing of the task is you. The doing is a full expression of who you are.

But maybe you should still ignore some of the small details early on:

How often have you found yourself stuck on a little thing for a whole day? How often have you realized that the progress you made today wasn’t real progress? This happens when you focus on details too early in the process. There’s plenty of time to be a perfectionist. Just do it later. Just get the stuff on the screen for now. Then use it. Make sure it works. Later on you can adjust and perfect it.

Emails are micro-meetings eating our days:

[O]ur inboxes are really just to-do lists.... There’s no way anyone could manage such a system without spending the vast majority of their day doing email. Such is the world in which we live.

Relatedly, stop emailing while you're on vacation:

All emails are not created equal, and when you’re on vacation, you’re sending more messages than can be contained in the contents of your note. Every email sent by a vacationing employee is a tiny cultural erosion: a signal to other employees that time off isn’t really time off. In aggregate, these tiny erosions matter. They send signals like “I don’t trust you to do the job without me,” or “I’m not organized enough to wrap up my loose ends before I go on vacation.” Either way, they erode perceptions of your likability and competence.

Where does your organization fit on this great chart?

"Accountability Sinks" are structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.

Stuck trying to figure something out? Ask a person with a disability:

We are the original lifehackers. Our lives are spent cultivating an intuitive creativity, because we navigate a world that isn’t built for our bodies. We believe in the innovative value of this skillset, which is why we are building pathways into design for disabled people.

When you complain about the "younger generation" of workers, are you really just critiquing yourself?

[T]he critique of younger generations is a sublimated critique of a generation’s own parenting and child-rearing practices: no one wants to admit that the decisions they made (or tacitly endorsed) are responsible for the type of worker they find objectionable.

But that sort of introspection requires, well, work. The easy workaround is to expand the critique to an entire generation and put it in the passive voice. Hence: The kids want participation trophies instead of we gave the kids participation trophies.

If you're thinking of a resolution for your team, maybe you should write more:

[W]riting is more than a tool for thinking – it actually creates the conditions for higher-order thinking. It is through reading and writing that we master the ability to link and qualify concepts, and apply the "rules" of logical argument.

What's your "I don't believe others don't do this!" hack? Personally, I'm still mystified when people don't use keyboard shortcuts.

Be a Pencil:

1. You will be able to do many great things, but only if you put yourself in someone else’s hands. 
2. You have to endure painful sharpening to become a better version of you.
3. You will be able to correct any mistakes you make along the way. Very few decisions in life are permanent.
4. The most important part of you is what’s on the inside. 
5. Leave your mark on every surface you touch. 

I love this 1957 Walt Disney Corporate Strategy Chart!

Fun Finds

• Fake Product Logos from SNL
• Seventeenth Century Death Roulette
• Game of Thrones, Redneck Style (made with AI)
• Thomas the Tank Engine stunt video (made before AI)
• A Chart that Explains Absolutely Everything
• Are sleep trackers stressing us out?

Words of Wisdom

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

"What's the safest way we can be reckless?" – Chrissy Hynde

"If you dig a hole and it's in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn't going to help." – Seymour Chwast

"You’ll never be good at being somebody else." – Naval Ravikant

“The world wants you to be typical. Don’t let it happen.” – Jeff Bezos

"Figure out what you’re good at without trying, then try." – John Addison

“Stop trying to be cool. Be nerdy and obsessive about the things you love. Enthusiasm will get you farther than indifference.” – James McCrae