Happy Monday, after recovering from colored potatoes and marshmallows masquerading around like candy, we return to the day's news.  AI is quickly becoming unavoidable in any news form, and we are starting to find a lane into what is relevant and productive and what is pure speculation and fiction.  Today we begin with design prompts that will get you to think a bit.  Next, a life in weeks is an exploration as deep or shallow as a person wants to make it.  If you escape the first half of today's newsletter without a complete existential crisis, the second half is all business.  What happens when older people try to belong on a social network, and what makes it hard to cancel, say about a company's product or service.  An excellent start to a great week, a thing to see, think, and listen to, a shot of mind caffeine!

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There is a fantastic website or Twitter account called Images That Could Be Album Covers, we have taken the base idea, and with prompts, we will use AI to create pictures for us.  Here's today's image – see if you can guess any of the prompts:  The prompt will be at the end of the newsletter.  Hint – a rebel in a band.

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Tim Urban spins his extensive content library again and gives us a story about weeks in a typical life.  We've seen the Tim Urban posters from other outlets highlighting it before.  [With A] Shout Out to Sahil Bloom; we remember he highlighted the sign and the life review.  One of Urban's points follows this quote:

Life is fully countable, whether we like it or not; in some ways, it's like wanting to know if you have a terminal disease; some would like to know, and others might not.  Those who want to know might feel that with the knowledge, they will have some control over what to do.  The same goes for tracking your weeks, and if you can let go of the weeks gone by and focus on the weeks ahead, you can move in the direction you choose. 

Dan Toomey from Morning Brew hit us with a good story about LinkedIn, and the insight is fascinating; it is also not lost on us that Toomey and a few of the people he interviewed are millennials.  Part of why LinkedIn is weird is what it's used for, part networking, part social network, and primarily a resume/bio portfolio website.  Toomey and friends describe LinkedIn as cringey, which sounds like every conversation between a young person and an older person.  The more we dug into it, the more we found that the cringe comes from the difference between young people being transparent and fluid and old people being guarded and static while trying to appear hip and transparent.  Cringey is trying to come off as honest and transparent when you have never been (publicly) before.  Hey ChatGPT, make me sound like a millennial on LinkedIn!

Does anyone remember the Friends episode in the 90s when Chandler wanted to quit the gym?  It went something like this - Every time he asked to quit the gym, they signed him up for more stuff; eventually, Ross went with him to support his leaving the gym, and they both walked away with gym memberships.  How about quitting AOL back in the day?  That was an arduous task, and yesterday Morning Brew reported on several responses to the same question – “What was the hardest membership you’ve tried to cancel?”  The first response is a gym membership!

What’s harder to reconcile is why would a company make it difficult to quit?  Why would a company want to make it difficult for someone who wasn't using or happy with a service to be more frustrated by making it more complicated to cancel?  The goal should be to build products people don't want to cancel – teams and communities of people who want to stick around.  Instead, locking a customer into an unreasonable situation is a road to contraction instead of growth.  Do you want to build customer retention with great people, products, and processes, or complicated handcuffs?

An SXSW 2023 Music Bash & More Perform At Stereogum Range Life 2023.

Bloke.

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

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Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Here’s one for the road!

James Dean from Rebel Without A Cause with a trench coat as the lead singer of a goth band.

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

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