Find opportunity in what other people undervalue
🦊 22 years ago today, Mozilla — a community of developers making free software — launched v1 of Firefox, the world’s most popular open-source web browser.
Issue #169: verschlimmbesserung and clay pots
By Harris Sockel
One of my favorite Medium genres is what I’d call “I’ve Been Through Some Stuff, And Here’s What I Wish I Knew Years Ago.”
Search Medium for “my startup failed” and you’ll find lessons on the psychological toll fundraising can take and the perils of using vanity metrics to measure progress. (You know they’re vanity metrics because they only ever go up.)
Ashley Mayer, former VP of comms at Glossier, wrote one of my favorite examples of this type of story in the Medium archive. It’s not exactly a lesson on failure; it’s more a retro on an entire phase of Mayer’s career. Pre-Glossier, she worked as head of comms at Box and in VC marketing.
There’s opportunity in what others undervalue, Mayer writes. It’s a lesson she learned from being a “non-technical” person (basically, a words person) within what Mayer experienced as the “rigid hierarchy of functions in Silicon Valley,” one that (broad generalization) places engineers, founders, and VCs up top. (I’m actually curious: If you work in tech and are reading this, do you think this hierarchy exists, or is it more nuanced than that?)
Either way, Meyer’s lesson applies to all aspects of life and work.
It’s always going to be easier to distinguish yourself — and have more fun — in a field that’s underestimated in some way. And I really respect Mayer for sharing everything she learned in Silicon Valley PR, even when the people around her questioned its value. I mean, she orchestrated a company’s IPO and shared her battle scars afterward! One lesson I want to write on a Post-It and stick next to my laptop: “the survival of any high profile IPO [ed. note: or company, or career] ultimately comes down to your story: how well you tell the parts of it you can control, and perhaps more importantly, how well you anticipate and prepare for the parts you can’t.”
🔥 Great, recent Medium stories in 1 sentence or less.
- The German word “verschlimmbesserung” means something ubiquitous but hard to express in English: “an attempted improvement that just makes things worse.”
- Songwriter Allee Willis, who wrote the Friends theme (among many bangers): Please, for the love of dance, “never let the lyric get in the way of the groove.”
- Perhaps your sandwiches are missing a key ingredient: omelet.
🏺 Your daily dose of practical wisdom: quantity vs. quality
Here’s a parable about creativity from the book Art & Fear:
A ceramics teacher splits a class into two groups. She judges one group on the quality of their work. The other is judged on quantity, i.e. how many vessels they produce. A few weeks later, something weird happens: The highest-quality products were created by the group judged on quantity, not quality.
Why? The “quantity” group was busy making things and learning from their failures, while the “quality” group (make a few beautiful pots!) spent its time drafting and theorizing, and produced nothing. The lesson here is that quantity and quality are not antithetical to one another. Instead, making lots of things (as long as you’re trying to get better and monitoring your progress) leads to a higher-quality product over time.
And the winner is…
Angela Zave for correctly identifying a zoomed-in photo from Mia Lazarewicz’s “A Comprehensive Review of Shattering Both Legs” in Friday’s newsletter. Congrats, Angela!
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
