Make A Pyramid, Not (Just) A Period

One of my favorite parts about running a search against my Personal Archive here is being reminded of adjacent thoughts around that idea.

The other day a client was explaining to me how his company was trying to make the most of good and bad interactions with their business. I asked if he’d ever seen the Heath Brothers’ work on moments, and he hadn’t, so I did what I usually do and checked to see if I’d previously written about it. I had, and so instead of sending him a book, I got to send him the bullets out of this post: The Four Factors That Make A Moment.

While I was there (and remembering how soaked I got at that soccer game 2 years ago), I saw another post I did from a few years back, relating moments to the behavioral psychological principle of the peak-end rule from back in 2018. In a strange way, it gave me a glimpse about not just how my thinking has been focused on this stuff for 7+ years, but also that there’s a body of awareness I’ve created in myself and in my archive that seems to mean something.

The client got a shortcut to an explanation they were looking for. I got a reminder of why networking your ideas against your people can make you look like you have superpowers.

Step out of my little search-bar brain for a moment with me. There’s something bigger at play. I see it in the language we use around pop culture too.

It seems like in the past few years everybody is talking about eras. They’re using the term in the Swiftian sense, and they’re using it to describe the differences between one album or project and the next. That’s all good. Eras or even periods are good ways to segment points in time where something rhymed.

But what if we thought a little bigger?

What if we thought about how the periods stacked up into longer arcs?

And what if we thought about how those longer arcs might start to look totally unexplainable?

I’m thinking these deserve a name, and I’m thinking of calling them pyramids.

The stuff you look at and think, “Aliens must have made this.”

The stuff you look at and think, “They made this across several generations, and all sorts of pop-music periods, but they didn’t do grand architectural monument sculpting without an eye towards an infinity they could only theoretically, if not spiritually imagine.”

Taylor Swift kind of can pull this off - the pyramid idea, I mean. I sense she can at least. The string of hits across all those albums, that’s pretty epic. Or even Epochal.

The point is, pyramids don’t happen by accident. They don’t happen without (eek) sacrifice. They don’t happen unless we have the audacity to start to understand what each brick we’re putting down is going to amount to.

It feels like each Personal Archive entry has been a brick. It feels like when I search them I start to see periods of interest. But, more than anything, as I step out into showing the public conversations that often provide the source material for these notes (check out the Cultish Creative YouTube channel and take a scroll), I’m starting to see some pyramids.

I see ways of describing moments in the experience of others. I see ways of describing moments in my own experience. I see—not just Taylor Swift references, but a whole comparison to Queen and the Ramones as bricks in this musical puzzle I’ve been amassing for years.

One brick at a time doesn’t seem like a big project. But when you step back, you start to see a massive project emerging. What looks impossible from a distance is just bricks on bricks when you zoom in. All it takes is sustained attention. If you do it, at some point you will step back and marvel at it too. It’s so worth it.

h/t creative people drawing creativity out of you. Shoutout to Kris Abdelmessih who got me to say this out loud on a call when we were otherwise just troubleshooting a microphone issue for something we were working on.

ps. For reasons he will immediately understand, bonus shoutout to Josh Spector too, who inspired a bunch of structural stuff in this post (and I’m trying to get him to start a Personal Archive somewhere too)

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