Hi friends,
Greetings from Abuja.
I have two essays to share with you this week.
The Age of Implementation: One poignant quote of MLK's many is that "An idea without action is like a bow without an arrow." This statement is as, perhaps even more, true today as it was when he first said it. Ideas always seek a bias for action, they seek - as Elizabeth Gilbert put it in Big Magic, a companion who won't let it lie idle. So they move and move until it finds the companion with that bias. This movement is accelerated by the current pace of Information flow.
Fix boat or Change boat?: Building is a lot like setting a boat to sail. A major part of this process, this voyage, is being in a leaky boat. The question is when you do find yourself in a leaky boat, what do you do? Fix boat or Change boat?
Coolest things I learned this week
Scaling Intimacy
I started thinking about this idea after my chat with Liam Hounsell, who will be writing a couple of essays on the topic and how it relates to community building.
The question is "How do you create a tight-knit community while also leaving room for scale?" especially given that, according to Dunbar's number, we only have the cognitive ability to maintain 150 true relationships or connections.
In thinking about how the idea of Scaling intimacy relates to business development, I came across a connected circles essay titled: The Future of Marketing is Scaling Intimacy. In this sense, it means establishing meaningful relationships in an environment where trust is a luxury.
One of three ways described is Building an Omnichannel presence. This means making the most of every channel available and possible to drive engagement. This omnichannel approach is "not a matter of making an account on every social media platform" instead, it means understanding which platform serves which purpose and then having them reinforce each other to promote intimacy.
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Man's confidence in Man
In a Speech in March 1834, Daniel Webster said:
Commercial credit is the creation of modern times and belong in its highest perfection only to the most enlightened and best governed nations. Credit is the vital air of the system of modern commerce. It has done more — a thousand times more — to enrich nations than all the mines in the world.
What has now evolved to an entire market in which debt can be issued and traded and the use of credit cards to carry a balance forward, started out as the ability for one person, one trader, one merchant, to express the confidence that another would maintain the ability to repay and be accountable.
While systems have been developed to track that confidence like the credit score and credit ratings, It is still down to the risky will to express that confidence for the sake of growth and development.
That’s it for this week.
If you have any thoughts or questions, hit reply and we can have a chat. And if you enjoyed it, share it with friends.
Till next week,
Kelvin
Hey Kelvin - the idea of scaling intimacy was the one that grabbed me the most from this week.
Depends on what we classify as intimacy, as there are certainly levels of intimacy. The deeper kinds, I'd imagine, would probably lie in interactions off social media. I think social media is the tool that helps us find groups, communities, etc. whether online or offline, but the community model that fosters direct relationships between people is the key