Upstream #160
kid-ults & superagers, creator brands, not to do list, theatre, dieterich buxtehude.
This is late. Soz. Been busy. Anyway, itâs free so youâve really got no say on the matter. You doin ok? Hope so. Itâs Springing itâs Spring, isnât it. Right, letâs do it.
âTalent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.â
Arthur Schopenhauer, b 1788.
culture // kid-ults & superagers
Weâre not gettin any younger, but increasingly when given the choice of age or shoe size, we're acting like the latter and creating a mysterious case of the disappearing life stage, the middle age. WTF even is middle aged anyway? 40, 50, 60? J-Lo's nearly 54 ffs and the actors in the Sex and The City reboot were the same age as the Golden Girls (ave 55). We feel about 20% younger than our actual age, thatâs our subjective age. But living longer these days, also means acting younger and weâre pushing ourselves beyond what we ever thought possible. In the US, in the past decade, the number of people 60+ registering for Ironmanâs and triathlons has quintupled to 13,000. Kidults might be a slightly pejorative term, and Superagers a little patronising, but somethingâs changed, and the blue rinse brigade might be gone forever.
brands // creator brands
Went to London last week where our youngest was researching and buying Prime, the energy drink from YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI. The new fidget spinner. All scarcity and status. She poured it down the drain once she tasted it. It launched in January last year on instagram. By March, it had sold $10 million, reportedly $250 million by year end and $45 million in January this year. Itâs the fastest beverage launch in history. And another creator packaged good success. Creators are shifting the model from product > brand > audience, to audience > brand > product. Rihannaâs half time super bowl performance, where she briefly applied her cosmetics brand Fenty, is another example. It skyrocketed searches for Fenty and her digital album sales, and audio streams. In the attention economy, creators are the conductors.
technology // not to do list
Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph, shared a wonderful video of Steve Jobs describing mans talent as a toolmaker, to amplify abilities we already have. How we can travel more efficiently with a bike, than a condor can on its own. Randolph goes on to compare this to AI, saying "A coming wave of disruptive companies will be built by layering domain expertise over GPT3. The best of these will: solve complex problems, not just automate simple tasks. Be exceptionally nimble - evolving as fast as the underlying AI does. And use usage as a metric, not number of users. There will be a lot of noise. Few will surviveâ. This will take focus. And Jony Iveâs definition of focus (which he learned from Jobs) was great, he says âwhat focus means is saying no to something that, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because youâre focussing on something elseâ. Perhaps a ânot to do listâ might help.
creativity // theatre
Creative thinking and ideas are amazing. But ideas without action, are useless. Execution is everything and ideas, are the easy part. Design Thinking, the darling of ideas for decades, is getting questioned. This piece, design thinking was meant to change the world what went wrong, is cutting about the short term impractical mysticism of innovation theatre (and design thinking consultants), vs the practical reality of implementing long term systemic change. IDEO, the centre of design thinking excellence is evolving too. Founder Tim Brown openly admits that now âItâs about recognizing that the expertise is much more in the hands of the user of the system than the designer of the system. And being a little bit less arrogant about knowing everythingâ. The naive optimism of asking âwhat could beâŠor what if...â can be dangerous, if a basic understanding of the system isnât there. Makes sense. And itâs universally true.Â
five random (ish) things:
Rijk museumâs tour of Vermeer with Stephen Fry đŒ.
Gallup's state of work report only 21% are engaged đ©.
Edelman Trust barometer is in, trust in business is up đ.
Japanâs falling birth rates hit crisis point đ¶.
Froderick the greatest story ever told đž.
watching // dieterich buxtehude
Spencer Cullumâs cool. A Nashville based pedal steel guitarist, and a kind of throw back to the late 60s and 70s, in all of the good earthy ways. Rock onđ€.