Radical Authenticity Over Marketing Tricks

`0:55:16`

— I love the idea of doubling down on authenticity and leaving the mistakes in. I remember reading one of your essays a long time ago. I can't remember the culture, but they would do... — Navajo rugs. — Okay. — I'll tell you the story. — Yeah. — I was in Wisconsin, in this little town called Mineral Point, Wisconsin, small, little town, about 50 miles west of Madison, and I was wandering through this gallery. Strange. It was this weird building, and it looked like a junkyard inside. You peered in, it's like, "What is going on in here?" And I saw some old man in the back. Like, "There's going to be something cool here." So, I knock on his door, I walk in. There's some rugs hanging, but there's also junk everywhere. Anyway, he comes out, and you're like, "Okay, this guy's a character." I love characters. I love old people. There's something going on there, right? I'm like, "Who is this guy?" So, he's a Navajo...

`0:56:03`

He's dead now, but he collects Navajo rugs. So, anyone can't go there today, is what I'm saying, but he collects Navajo rugs And I find them very beautiful. They're very simply patterned, and the colors are very vibrant, and they're very interesting, and I don't know what it was, they spoke to me, right? And I don't want to analyze why either, because I find that that's a great way to ruin any experience, is to try to figure out "Why." Just does it or does it not? It does. I love these things for whatever reason. So, I go in, talking to the guy, and I notice that they have a lot of errors on them. There's what I thought was an error, there's geometric shapes. So, their rugs are very geometric. They're stripes, they're squares, they're triangles, they're all sorts of different shapes. And a lot of them weren't quite right.

`0:56:48`

You can look at a shape and go, "It's not..." They're trying to make a perfect triangle, but it's not quite right. And I asked him about that. Or there's a stitch that's off, very clearly off. I'm like, "They could have just taken that out and redone it." And again, I don't know if this is true, but this is what he told me, which is the Navajo, they don't see those as mistakes. They're just a moment in time, and he relayed it this way. He's like, "If you're walking on a path, if you're climbing a mountain or something and you're going on a path, and you trip or you stumble or whatever, you don't start back." You can't take that stumble back. It just happened. The Navajo leave these in their rugs because they just happened.

`0:57:33`

And this is a record of what happened. I love that. I just thought it was so lovely. And I've tried to do that with the things that I do. I don't want to leave typos and stuff. That's not quite the same thing. But if I make a mistake on a video or something or whatever, like whatever. That's what you would do in the real world so I'm comfortable with that. I've always found that to be very, again, a very beautiful thing, that these are not mistakes. Mistakes are a concept we put on ourselves when we do something that wasn't what we intended. Why does that have so much weight? Maybe what we intended was wrong, too. I don't know. Are these rugs worse because there's a stitch off? No, they're not worse. They're better.

`0:58:18`

And that's kind of what I'm striving for with this stuff, is not to take things so damn seriously, and build a company that's afraid of itself, and afraid to do anything wrong and afraid to have an opinion. All these companies, not all, that's a very broad statement, all these companies. — Yeah. — You know what? Everyone's afraid. Companies are afraid, the PR people, and they've got to talk to lawyers before they publish anything. Everyone's afraid of everything, of saying something wrong, doing something wrong, being wrong in some way. That is not endearing. I think people want to do business with people. And they have to do business with companies because companies provide a lot of product. But I think they really want to do business with people. And maybe this is why I like the dry cleaner. Maybe this is why I like the grocery store. Maybe this is why I like running my business my way. I feel like people are dealing with people.