Idea Surplus Disorder #100

It's the 100th edition of this newsletter!

This milestone issue marks six years of a (mostly) weekly ritual that began with The Monday Morning Meeting and evolved into the newsletter you’re reading now.

Across 100 issues of this newsletter — and 223 of the Monday Morning Meeting before that — I’ve shared thousands of ideas and insights, hundreds of fun finds, plus nearly 1,700 quotes that I hope have challenged your thinking, sparked a conversation, or at least made your Monday a bit more interesting.

A few more ISD facts:

• Nearly 7,000 of you subscribe, and around a third open each issue regularly.
• Each edition takes 2–3 hours to write (usually on Sunday evening or early Monday), plus another 10+ hours of weekly reading, bookmarking, and highlighting.
• The raw materials I tap into each week include the 265 blogs I follow, along with nearly 25 newsletters I subscribe to, which cover everything from AI and innovation to business, creativity, learning, and strategy.

Whether you’ve read every issue or just found your way here recently, I’m grateful you’re part of this little corner of curiosity, strategy, and delight.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for sharing. And thanks for thinking with me.

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

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.

Thinksgiving is Coming

Thinksgiving is Filament's signature community-centered event, and it happens this year on November 6, 2025. Look for more information next week!

Ideas + Insights

Never seem to have enough time for that big project? Give this "Fast List" a read, and you'll be shocked at all of the world-changing projects completed quickly, including:

• The Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was built in 2 years and 2 months; that is, in 793 days. When completed in 1889, it became the tallest building in the world, a record it held for more than 40 years. It cost about $40 million in 2019 dollars.
• BankAmericard. Dee Hock was given 90 days to launch the BankAmericard card (which became the Visa card), starting from scratch. He did. In that period, he signed up more than 100,000 customers.
• The Pentagon. The construction of the world's largest office building was led by Brehon Somervell. The decision to proceed with the project was made on a Thursday evening. Initial drawings were completed that Sunday. Construction started two months later, on September 11 1941, and was finished on January 15 1943, 491 days later. When asked when something was needed, Somervell's go-to response was "the day before yesterday".
• iPod. Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started.

Consulting? More is not a strategy:

Plenty good enough is all that matters, though. Clients don’t even recognize great work, so who are we fooling? They recognize bad work, but not good work. Good work is just good enough. If you wrap good enough work in great customer service and project management, you’ll get away with a whole lot.

But doing “more better” work is not a strategy, especially in the implementation phase. Providing deeper insight tied to real data can be powerful indeed, but there’s not enough of that happening in the creative field.

So, be excited about those new client relationships, but don’t listen to their feedback comparing you with the incumbent firm too closely. It’s biased.

Unless your strategy is More Better Clients:

Better clients are demanding. They demand more rigorous deadlines, but they also pay more. They demand extraordinary work, but they’re more respectful. And they demand work they can proudly share with others. Better clients also have good taste.

You know that better clients exist; you’ve seen them out in the world. The trick is earning them. You don’t do that by doing better work for lousy clients. That’s because lousy clients don’t want you to do better work. They are lousy clients for a reason. They don’t want better work.

I loved this excerpt from Caesar's Last Breath on the origin of "horsepower" as a measure of power:

Rather than calculate every factory’s case separately, Watt invented a universal standard of comparison, the horsepower. He defined this rather literally by watching several horses push a mill wheel around and then calculating how far they moved the weight in a certain amount of time (550 foot-pounds per second, he found).

This unit was shrewd in several ways. By invoking horses, Watt slyly reminded factory owners what they could give up—all the oats and broken legs and vet bills. Customers also understood the unit intuitively. If ten horses had run their mill wheel before, well, they needed a ten-horsepower engine.

Want to live better? Here are a few tips:

• Tell a bad joke or a pun as soon as you think of it, even if it’s just to your exasperated spouse or coworker. It takes 20 bad jokes to think of a single good one, and you only start making good jokes once you remove the unconscious filter stifling your generative brain.
• Learn to make one cocktail really well, and always keep the ingredients at home. It impresses people, and no one ever expects you to pull off a second one.
• Before lying or doing something unethical, consider the real possibility that you and everyone you know will live for hundreds of years with enhanced memory and reputation tracking.
• In any giant museum, your goal should be to spend 5+ minutes with 10 amazing works, not 5 seconds with 1,000.
• If someone could really use several hours of your help, ask them to hire you at a fair price. Do the same when you need help. There are amazing win-wins to be had.
• If your spouse, friend, or family member has a dumb but not strictly harmful habit, try thinking of it as their artistic expression instead of using facts and logic to fail to talk them out of it.

High-performing organizations have a balance of Superstars and Rockstars:

Superstars are the people on your team who are going to change everything; a force — and source — of growth on a team.

Rockstars are the people on your team who don’t want their boss’ job; very talented at their role and will keep doing and digging into it for years if a boss doesn’t screw it up; a force — and source — of excellence and stability on a team.

People in superstar mode want a world they can change. Those in rock star mode seek a world they can stabilize. You’ll need both.

Businesses need more imagination:

Imagination, in this light, becomes a foundational asset—not just for speculative design or cultural expression, but for shaping the next generation of institutions and business models. It enables a shift from reactive, short-term thinking to proactive, regenerative strategies that can thrive in complexity and uncertainty. For entrepreneurs committed to legacy, stewardship and impact, the invitation is clear: a revolution in imagination is not a detour from innovation—it is its most enduring and necessary foundation.

How many of these cliches are on your website?

Fun Finds

• Keep your digital privacy intact when you travel.
• One Task X is a task list that forces you to prioritize one thing at a time. 
• Verification Tools for combatting misinformation.
• Simpsons Song Mashup
• The Genius of Eleanor Rigby
• Busy Day at the Airport

Words of Wisdom

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. – William Fitzjames Oldham

Someday is not a day of the week. — Janet Dailey

People tend to think that ideas are things like diamonds. And then you go out and you get them and you grab them and you bring them back. But that's not what ideas are. Ideas are things that grow. – Mo Willems

For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple stupid behavior. – Dee Hock

As you set the path, remember that teams generally become less open to new ideas and solutions after the midpoint. – Daniel Pink

Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences. – Robert Louis Stevenson

Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps. – Morgan Housel