Learn to Make Dollars/Money online

Thursday, 11 June 2026

Values capture

When culture pushes us to measure things that don’t matter to us, our values are captured.

Once the metrics turn a profit for corporations and those in power, they are amplified, and almost overnight, begin to matter to us, even if they run contrary to what we originally set out to do or become.

We’re easily seduced by scoreboards, competition and dark patterns.

Professor C. Thi Nguyen has written a brilliant book on the philosophy of games—big and small. The Score helps us understand that dominant industrial and cultural systems push to deskill us as we become fungible, replaceable parts in an easily measurable enterprise. His book is wide, deep, and unforgettable. (It also includes riffs on yoyos and fly fishing.)

Measurements are sticky, contagious, and relentless. Once a competitor begins to move ahead on a metric, it gives them an advantage, and that pushes us to focus on the same metric or fall behind. The Red Queen races ahead, simply because racing ahead is what they’ve been trained to do.

Perhaps, though, falling behind on a metric we don’t care about might be exactly the right thing to do.

In a game like Scrabble or chess, the values capture is right there in the rules. It’s explicit, agreed upon, and the whole point. You feel good about landing a seven-letter word because that’s what scores, and you don’t mind trading your rook for a better position—that’s the game you signed up for. But when we carry that same instinct into how we spend our working hours (and months, and decades), we might end up sacrificing far more than a rook.

Once we see values capture unfolding, we have a shot at making a choice. Measure what matters.

• Email to a friend •

You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog. Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.

Safely Unsubscribe • Archives • Preferences • Contact • Subscribe • Privacy

Email subscriptions powered by FeedBlitz® • 650 E. Palisade Avenue Ste 2, PO Box 173 • Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632

Wednesday, 10 June 2026

Seth's Blog : Video games, movies and books

View Online

Video games, movies and books

What’s the structure of your project? Here are three paradigms to consider:

Video game development is expensive and risky because you’re on two frontiers at once. The tech frontier, trying to do something with hardware that hasn’t been done before, and the game mechanics frontier, perfecting and polishing new forms of interaction that last. So Myst and Tetris and Doom… classics we talk about decades later. A teenager could build a knockoff of any of these in a few weeks now, but back then, they represented risky leaps.

Movies use a technology that’s over a hundred years old, with incremental improvements added all the time. But being the first with the new tech doesn’t win many prizes. Instead, successful movies are a combination of one creator’s vision and the coordinated work of hundreds or thousands of professionals using proven tools and techniques.

And books, five hundred years into the genre, still remain the work of one voice. The partnership with a largely unseen editor and publisher matters, but sooner or later, the author puts the words on paper.

[There are analogies here that go far beyond the strict adherence to the three final products of course. Slack is a videogame, developing real estate, making a record or performing surgery is a movie, and the work of a freelancer is closest to writing a book…]

I’ve done all three, and each is thrilling in its own way. As the available tech advances, each type of project is more accessible than ever. But each still comes with its own rules, risks and upsides.

We get to choose.