The King of Clockwork

I envy the grimacing joggers I pass on my way to work every weekday morning for their samurai discipline and inveterate svelteness (a quality I lack).

Leadership and personal productivity experts goad us to rise above mediocrity by forming useful habits.

Surpassing champs like Kant, Edison and Einstein, the king of the clockwork habit could well be Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope.

He wrote with such regularity, that he produced 47 novels—plus 32 plays, short stories and nonfiction books—in his spare time.

Stephen King (with 60 novels and 200 short stories, no slouch either) describes Trollope's habit in his memoir, On Writing: 

"His day job was as a clerk in the British Postal Department (the red public mailboxes all over Britain were Anthony Trollope's invention); he wrote for two an a half hours each morning before leaving for work. This schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happened to finish one of his six-hundred-pound heavyweights with fifteen minutes of the session remaining, he wrote The End, set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book."

Your Event is Either an Experience or a Waste of Time

While they puzzle over details, many event organizers never grasp the key to a satisfactory event.

It has to deliver an experience.

In the same way a restaurant is not about food, an event's not about tables, chairs, booths, badges, busses, signs or even speakers.

An event is about an experience.

Restaurateur Danny Meyer says the restaurant's job isn't to serve food.

It's to create an experience of wellbeing: to instill in each patron the sense that "when we were delivering that product, we were on your side."

Delivering an experience justifies the patron's expenditure—not of money, but of time—Meyer says. "When they leave, are they going to say, 'That was a good use of my time?'"

"The most precious resource we all have is time," Steve Jobs once told a reporter.

Are you delivering an experience, or wasting your attendees' time?

Elementary

You can hire a hack with an app, so why not a PI?

Washington, DC-based Trustify disrupts the burgeoning market for private eyes by offering an app that, according to the startup's website, "makes it easy for anyone to hire their own private investigator on demand and at an affordable price."

The app eliminates retainers, making gumshoes no longer a luxury of only the rich.

"The customer simply taps a button on their phone or computer, provides a few key details and is then linked up with a private investigator, who gets to work instantly," the company claims.

Coming next: Uber adds a button reading, "Follow that car!"

All We are Saying

In a full-page ad this week in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, Burger King called for a one-day halt to the "burger wars" with its rival McDonald's.

The Whopper shop wants to "get the world talking" about the UN's annual International Day of Peace next month.

Wasting no time, McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook posted an 87-word "No thanks" on Facebook, spurring critics to call him a wet blanket.

Easterbrook might have replied with one word, "Nuts," like American General Anthony McAuliffe did at the Battle of the Bulge, and proved at least that his company values efficiency.

Branding gurus are unanimous about linking your brand with a cause: just do it. Want to shake down those activist do-gooder Millennials?  Wear "capitalism with a conscience" on your sleeve.

But Burger King's cheesy stunt, by sugarcoating a serious issue, shows why you should take gurus' advice with a grain of salt. 

Easterbrook's reaction, though sound, isn't savory, either.

The whole episode, in fact, leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

All we are saying, is give peace a rest.

3 Words You Should Never Ever Use

We reward disruptors like Uber and Airbnb for obliterating needless stuff.

You can reward audiences by eliminating these three needless words from your writing.

That

Writers too often use “that” without purpose. Whenever you use the word, ask yourself whether you can ditch it; chances are, you can. I think that you will find that our prices are competitive becomes I think you will find our prices are competitive.

Very

Writers hope to intensify words by slapping "very" in front of them; but the word adds no value. Our CSRs are always professional reads better than Our CSRs are always very professional.

Awesome

Overuse has sullied “awesome.” The word once meant "inspiring" or "daunting," and was reserved for descriptions of mountains and miracles, not candies and cupcakes. So avoid it. Our cloud suite is awesome is less credible—and more cheesy—than Our cloud suite is first rate. (Least cheesy might be Our cloud suite is comprehensive, reliable and easy to use.)

But never say never: needless words can enhance your writing.

E. B. White, a crusader for concision, once advised a fellow writer:

"It comes down to the meaning of ‘needless.’ Often a word can be removed without destroying the structure of a sentence, but that does not necessarily mean that the word is needless or that the sentence has gained by its removal. If you were to put a narrow construction on the word ‘needless,’ you would have to remove tens of thousands of words from Shakespeare, who seldom said anything in six words that could be said in twenty. Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound. How about ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?’ One tomorrow would suffice, but it’s the other two that have made the thing immortal."

Now that is very awesome!