Go out to the beach around dawn and you’ll see people staking claims to their spots for the day.
Anyone can claim a bit of sand by placing a chair or towel. It’s first come, first served, so the sooner you get there the better.
As the beach gets busier, people will fill in around the early arrivals. Everyone has a sense of how close is too close, and there are unofficial norms about how much space you can claim, and how much margin to leave so people can walk past.
If you arrive at midday, you can claim an available space. You know almost instinctively if a space is too small — and if you judge wrong, your new neighbors will let you know.
Nobody designed these rules or posted them on a sign at the beach entrance. They emerge from thousands of individual interactions between people and adjust as conditions change. On a crowded holiday weekend, people squeeze in. On a quiet Tuesday, they spread out.
Email newsletters used to be teasers. A few sentences, then “read more” — a link back to the website where the actual content lived.
That made some sense for publishers that ran ads: a click meant an ad impression on the website, and an ad impression meant revenue.
But this became the norm even for senders that didn’t depend on ads, like nonprofits. They built the same teaser-and-click model.
One big reason why? Measurement.
When the content lives in an email, there’s far less to count. No page views, no time on site, no funnel. Even open rates have gotten unreliable as email providers block marketers from seeing who opens. A click on a link is one of the only numbers left that can still be measured with any confidence.
So click-through became the metric — and then, like every proxy that stands in for a goal long enough, the metric became the target. Chasing clicks skewed the actual job of a newsletter, which is to give subscribers something worth reading.
Some writers went a different direction. Ben Thompson was sending full-text emails as early as 2013. Substack made that approach feel normal. A better reader experience, but less data.
That’s a trade worth making. A newsletter’s job is to create value for the people who signed up for it, not to generate a number for the people who sent it.
There’s a sign up on a lot near me. It’s a rendering of a building that’s breaking ground soon: apartments over ground-floor retail.
Until recently, the lot hosted a one-story fencing studio. Teenagers lunging at each other after school, Olympics-themed banners in the windows. I had no idea the neighborhood needed a fencing studio. Turns out it did, at least for a while.
Before that, it was a jewelry shop where I bought our wedding bands. A decade and a half later, it’s still what I think of when I walk down that block.
It’s continuous reinvention. Someone finds a new use for a space, which makes sense until it doesn’t.
A $10 notebook, the kind you use for journaling, caught my eye. I went back and forth on it for days. I treated the purchase like it needed a formal decision memo.
And at the grocery store, I grabbed a container of watermelon. Also about $10. I didn’t really think about it until I got home.
Why did I agonize over one decision and not the other? It wasn’t price: They cost about the same.
It might be the difference between a purchase and a bet.
The watermelon’s value was obvious before I picked it up: I like watermelon. I’d rather have watermelon than $10. Done.
But the notebook’s value was unknown. It depended on whether a new way of capturing notes would actually change how I think. I wasn’t really buying a notebook but trying to predict whether I’d actually use one.
The agony was about the uncertainty of the payoff, not the price.
One of my favorite shirts says, “Free speech makes free people.”
I wear it because the sentence is true and worth sharing. It has the secondary effect of advertising FIRE, the free speech organization that sells the shirt.
People regularly stop me to praise the shirt’s message. Sometimes they ask what FIRE is. The shirt never feels like a pitch.
It gives people language for something they already believe, or helps them see a problem more clearly, before it asks for anything.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson have followed a similar approach with Basecamp, the collaboration software.
I read them first for their thinking about work: why meetings drag, why busyness isn’t the same as productivity, why calm is better than chaos. I internalized a lot of that before I ever thought about their software.
A shirt slogan, a blog about work. Each appeals to who we want to be. Neither asks for anything. The pitch, if it needs to come at all, comes later.