Make the Other Mistake

I came across this post during an interview with Mike Krieger (of Instagram and Anthropic fame). It made me realize how much I've internalized the concept of making the other mistake since I became an indie. There have been so many times I thought I knew the problem I was solving, only to discover I didn't once I tried the version that was out of my comfort zone. This has been true in other aspects of my life as well, and I'm sure it is for you too.

Maybe you talk way too much in meetings, or maybe you know a lot but rarely say something. Maybe every day you practice “brutal candor” with people and for some weird reason it turns out badly — or, you know you need to tell your teammate about their habit that ruins your life, but you don’t because you fear their reaction. Or it’s simpler: that thing you always say you really need to spend more time on, while everyone around you nods vigorously, and yet you somehow never get to it (strategy? posting your thoughts? recruiting? diversity?).

You probably try to make small changes, but still you’re in the crazy loop of doing the same thing again and again and hoping for a different result.

Stop the insanity. Stop it now. Make the other mistake.

How the Attention Economy is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us

This link is accessible as either an article or a podcast, but in either format, it's worth a read or listen. Kyla Scanlon joins Ezra Klein for a wide-ranging discussion about what it's like to live in a world where attention is constantly monetized. Kyla isn't advocating for a Thoreau-like experience where we all wander through the woods and avoid capitalism, but she is posing important questions about how we can better understand our relationship with our capitalist society.

I am a pretty loyal reader of Kyla's Newsletter. It often feels to me like it is being sent back in time from some future economy. And in a way, it is. Kyla is very much a member of Gen Z, and the economy she’s reporting on and theorizing about is the one that Gen Z has been churned out into — an economy that works much more digitally, where attention drives capital as opposed to capital’s driving attention.

She has emerged as a leading theorist of the economics of attention — not how they work everywhere but how they work in the part of the economy, and the part of society, that is most exposed to attentional dynamics.

Artifacts

Here's a first for me: I've decided to include one of my own pieces in Plinky's newsletter. As I've been thinking about the attention economy (ironic, I know), I've also been considering the loss of our connection to history. When everything is about grabbing your attention with the newest and shiniest, what happens to everything that's always been important because it stood the test of time?

As people willfully turn themselves into content creators, information disseminates faster than ever. The half-life of any artifact grows shorter, and the societal impact of any captured moment becomes increasingly fleeting. The purpose of writing, art, and creation has always been human connection — but as the goal shifts to pleasing an opaque algorithm, the creations themselves have become less meaningful. I expect this trend will only accelerate as more of our economy becomes tied to clicks and views, and as the act of creation grows more frictionless with the proliferation of AI.

Artifacts are our distillations of history — they encapsulate and preserve the human experience. Our world is built on the artifacts of those who came before us — people who cared enough to share, document, and build something that outlasted themselves. It is a spiritual experience to create something new in this world — to turn a figment of our imagination into a shareable element of the universe.