The Weekly: Edition #73 - November 27th, 2020
The Work Ethic Behind Creativity
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. Every great idea I’ve ever had grew out of work itself.” - Chuck Close
In previous editions of The Weekly we have focused on everything from strategy to finance to operations. However, one topic we have yet to explore is creativity. Often, the most creative and forward-thinking companies in any particular industry end up as market leaders. But we would caution you that creativity in business doesn't necessarily equate to complexity. In fact, according to Mark Manson, the process behind creativity is quite boring.
As most folks know, we love boring. Turns out, being boring allows more space and time for the creative process to unfold.
Most people either identify as 'a creative person' or not creative at all. But Mark Manson's piece struck us as noteworthy because it illustrates how 'creative people' weren't so different from the rest of us after all.
In fact, the only differences between the Van Gogh's and the rest of the world were how hard they worked and how closely they observed the trends in their space.
For example, Charles Darwin was haled as a genius when he published his Origin of Species. But Darwin was, like most 'geniuses', an overnight success twenty years in the making after simply absorbing countless amounts of data for years:
"In all, Darwin spent over twenty years of his life coming up with natural selection. As often happens, afterward, many people attempted to attribute natural selection to a stroke of Darwin’s genius. But this chafed the old scientist. He had just spent his entire adult life collecting data from obscure places and trying to make sense of it, yet here people were, wanting to believe he’d made up his theory out of thin air. He repeatedly emphasized the amount of work that went into his new theory."
In fact, after detailing several other creative geniuses' careers including Vincent Van Gogh, The Beatles, and Mark Twain, Manson had this to say about their incredible success:
"There’s almost a direct correlation between how much someone created and how original their work ended up being."
With creativity, as in business, it simply pays to show up, and outwork the competition.
Here at Permanent Equity, we are working on building a collection of boring businesses who love simple, but creative approaches to their work that meet and exceed the needs of their customers. If there's anything that Manson can teach us, it's that anyone can be creative. It just takes the right combination of showing up, doing the work, outworking competitors, and remaining vigilant.
How Copart is making $1B from junkyard cars (Forbes)
+ "On a sprawling 97-acre lot beside railway tracks and auto repair shops in a section of eastern Long Island that’s definitely not the Hamptons, forklifts maneuver through a neatly organized salvage yard, moving everything from weathered pickup trucks to an almost-new Lotus coupe. This is no ordinary junkyard. Everything is coordinated electronically: The forklift drivers follow a meticulous schedule laid out on a tablet. Each car, be it a lightly battered BMW or a totaled Toyota, has a numerical code on the windshield so it can be digitally identified, inventoried and then moved to its corresponding spot in the sales area. In the squat, one-story building out front, customers who bought a vehicle online wait to pick up their newly purchased wreck after scanning a QR code on their phones. The well-oiled routine is mirrored at 243 Copart-owned junkyards across the U.S. and around the world. The publicly traded, Dallas-based firm dominates the market for processing and reselling salvage cars — vehicles damaged enough to be written off as a total loss by auto insurers as well as discarded cars still in decent condition."
Retailers now owe $52B in back-debt (The Real Deal)
+ "Even when a Covid-19 vaccine becomes widely available, the amount of debt may be insurmountable, industry pros say. An increasing number of brick-and-mortar stores, faced with expanded online shopping choices and lingering skittishness about the virus, may pack it in for good."
How the pandemic shook up this year’s turkey market (The Hustle)
+ "More than half of all turkeys sold over the course of the year in the US will be eaten this week, according to The Economist. With social distancing measures in place, the biggest change in 2020 is the size of the bird. Smaller gatherings mean greater demand for smaller turkeys (known as hens; ~10lbs.) as compared with larger turkeys (Toms; 15-25lbs.). But there’s a tiny problem: While demand for smaller turkeys is up, farmers have been culling their supply of hens since 2018."
The state of the digital publishing market, November 2020 (Pugpig)
+ "The Covid bump is clear to see in the raw data - we saw significant increases in users from Feb across all media, with the daily news brands getting a significantly bigger jump than the weeklies and monthlies. Many monthlies ran free issue campaigns over the summer which created a nice uptick in usage, and while we’ve seen a drop off since the summer, the majority of publishers are maintaining most of the gains they achieved earlier in the year well into the Autumn - so it’s looking great for readership across the board."
Sports has a Gen Z problem. The pandemic may accelerate it. (The Washington Post)
+ "While many have embraced digital platforms, leagues and teams were slow to tailor their offerings to the youngest generation, even as research made clear that Gen Z members — loosely defined as those born after 1996 — interact with the world much differently than millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers. And these habits have taken a toll on the way they engage in sports, research shows. According to ESPN’s internal data, some 96 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds still identify as sports fans, a consistent figure over the past decade. But the share of fans who call themselves “avid” has been dropping, from 42 percent a decade ago to 34 percent last year."
5 boring ways to become more creative (Mark Manson)
+ "Creativity is a delicate dance between novelty and value. For something to feel creative it must feel both new but also useful in some way. Although we think of creativity as creating something that is unique, most of it isn’t. In fact, most of what we experience as being “new” is simply taking old stuff and remixing it in fresh or unexpected ways."
Why some tech workers leaving Silicon Valley are changing jobs (Wall Street Journal)
+ "Deepinder Singh, founder of a Bloomington, Minn.-based startup, had never bothered trying to recruit Silicon Valley tech workers. They were too expensive and didn’t want to move. In seven years, he had never gotten an applicant from a large tech company. But since May, more than a dozen people on both coasts have applied for jobs with his company, 75F Inc., which makes internet-connected, energy-saving HVAC control systems. One résumé came from Facebook Inc. ; another came from Twitter Inc. The 130-employee firm just hired an engineer from Sonos Inc."
The secretive town at the center of the world’s oil market (Institutional Investor)
+ "Once at the center of America’s black-gold rush, Cushing is now the world’s largest onshore oil storage and energy market hub. Signs of its long, tumultuous history can be seen throughout the town, which is situated on a barren plain surrounded by muddy grasslands. Pump jacks swinging their slow, mesmerizing limbs search for the last of the region’s oil in backyards, schoolyards, churchyards, and empty lots. The city’s population, which peaked in 1930 at just below 10,000, has been in decline ever since, lingering at slightly above 7,000. The town’s graveyards have more people in them than the homes. Beneath the ground, oil pipelines converge from every corner of North America, harking back to when oil flowed in Texas and Oklahoma seemingly without end."
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