Cultish Creative Weekly (4/6/2024)

I’m only highlighting one thing this week because,

It came out on the first of the month.

It’s highlighting the work of Daniel Kahneman (who indirectly has had more influence on my work and career than perhaps any other single individual).

It’s highlighting, in the words of Jason Zweig, how Kahneman never got hung up on the past. Which is profound. And so valuable to see modeled.

I have to share this quote again (from Monday’s post What Living With No Sunk Costs Really Looks Like)

The next thing you know, he sends a version so utterly transformed that it is unrecognizable: It begins differently, it ends differently, it incorporates anecdotes and evidence you never would have thought of, it draws on research that you’ve never heard of. If the earlier version was close to gold, this one is hewn out of something like diamond: The raw materials have all changed, but the same ideas are somehow illuminated with a sharper shift of brilliance.

The first time this happened, I was thunderstruck.  How did he do that? How could anybody do that?  When I asked Danny how he could start again as if we had never written an earlier draft, he said the words I’ve never forgotten: “I have no sunk costs.”

And I’m really highlighting this in the context of…

What a song. Still. And what a lesson in how the group got signed.

A bunch of teenagers from Cleveland. Who decided they had to go to LA to get a record deal, so they bought one-way tickets.

Guess what didn’t work?

Oh, kids. OH kids. All passion.

But while they were in LA, they found some strategy. The person they were hoping would sign them was about to have a tour stop in…

Cleveland. Where they knew people. Where they could get themselves in front of him.

So they got one-way tickets back.

And then they got signed.

By Eazy-E and Ruthless Records.

Maybe you don’t think about Behavioral Psychology when you think about Bone Thugs, but I do.

I think of this story and I think of it as a story about learning to trust your gut, learning to have strategic logic, and learning to balance the two.

RIP Daniel Kahneman.