Clay Shirky reminds us that the media business has changed. Forty years ago, your TV show only had to be better than two other shows–not every show, just the shows on the other channels. Today, of course, with a million choices, each show earns the attention it gets in every single moment.

As I wrote in the Dip a few years ago, the only way your business wins in Google world is to be the best available option, where “best” means best for the person searching for an answer, and “available option” means everything. (Best doesn’t mean most expensive or exclusive, it merely means the best choice for me, right now. You don’t have to be happy about how much competition you have, but it helps to admit it.)

Great surgeons don’t need to be respectful or have a talented, kind or alert front desk staff. They’re great at the surgery part, and you’re not here for the service, you’re here to get well (if you believe that the surgery part is what matters). In fact, gruffness might be a clue to their skill for some.

Great opera singers don’t have to be reasonable or kind. They sing like no one else, that’s why you hired them, and why they get to (are expected to) act like divas. Get over it.

So the thinking goes.

The traditional scarcity model implied some sort of inverse relationship between service and quality. Not for service businesses like hotels, of course, but for the other stuff. If someone was truly gifted, of course they didn’t have the time or focus to also be kind or reasonable or good at understanding your needs. A diva was great partly because, we decided, she was a jerk.

I think that’s changing, possibly forever, for a bunch of reasons:

• The state of the art is now easier to find. Word spreads about behavior and service faster than ever. As a result, customers quickly become aware of what a raw deal they’re getting from this supposedly gifted individual.
• It’s so much easier to deliver better service (Dr. Diva, please send me an email if you’re running late!) that we’re far less forgiving.
• Since just about any intelligent and caring person can use technology and a bit of humility to deliver better service (see above), we start to wonder whether that diva provider actually is intelligent and caring. And if he isn’t, it doesn’t really matter if he has some sort of skill, because uncaring hands are worth avoiding.
• With fewer great gigs available (even in opera), it’s not so easy act like a jerk (or be insulated and uncaring) and still get work.

Wrestling with a puzzle, a project or a problem, the likeliest reason to give up is the belief that it can’t be done. What’s the point of persevering if it’s actually impossible to succeed?

“It can’t be done,” we say, throwing up our hands. Not “I can’t do it,” or “It’s not worth my time,” but “It can’t be done.”

In the year after Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile, the record was broken again and again. Once people realized it could be done, it wasn’t an impossible task any longer. And that’s why there’s a flood of tablets on the market, many from companies that had what they needed to build the first one, but didn’t until Apple showed them the way.

Two things you might take away from this: First, there’s solace in finding someone who has done it before, whatever “it” is you’re trying to do. Knowing that it’s possible and studying how it was done can’t help but increase the chances you’ll stick it out.

Second: huge value accrues to the few able to actually do a thing for the very first time.

This rule is true for any company that is growing.

If you’re in a race, race now, because early leads and early gains compound, and because coordination issues in bigger organizations always slow you down.

Now that everyone has a media platform, look for even more of the mutual back scratching that comes from tracking favors.

The most corrosive sort of this network amplification goes like this: I do something for you unasked. Then I do something again. Perhaps I even tout you or your work a third time. Then I come to you, point out how generous I’ve been and ask for you to do something for me. Or I network my way to one person and then use that platform to reach three more, and repeat until I’ve worked the entire digital room.

Humans have a natural openness to reciprocity. It’s a time-honored survival technique, one that allowed us to live together in villages for millenia. Someone who doesn’t reciprocate is less likely to be protected by his peers, right? Not only have we been taught reciprocation since birth, but it feels right. It’s baked in.

The problem occurs when the trading of favors become mercenary, when alert individuals start manipulating the system for personal gain. Suddenly, every favor is suspect, measured and not at all generous. Suddenly all the likes and links and blurbs become nothing but currency, not the honest appraisals of people we can trust. It means that bystanders have trouble telling the difference between honest approval and the mere mutual shilling of traded favors.

Yes, you can trade your way up, but at some point, the very people who were influenced by all your trades start to realize that you can’t be trusted.

Mutual funds deserve to be rigorously measured and relentlessly traded. Favors and taste and allegiances, though, not so much. Like is too important to be something you do because you have to.

Long-lasting systems can’t survive if they remain insatiable.

An insatiable thirst for food, power, energy, reassurance, clicks, funding or other raw material will eventually lead to failure. That’s because there’s never enough to satisfy someone or something that’s insatiable. The organization amps up because its need is unmet. It gets out of balance, changing what had previously worked to get more of what it craves. Sooner or later, a crash.

More fame! More money! More investment! Push too hard and you lose what you came with and don’t get what you came for.

An insatiable appetite is a symptom: There’s a hole in the bucket. Something’s leaking out. When a system (or a person) continues to demand more and more but doesn’t produce in response, that’s because the resources aren’t being used properly, something is leaking.

If your organization demands ever more attention or effort or cash to produce the same output, it makes more sense to focus on the leak than it does to work ever harder to feed the beast.

The taxi’s waiting, it’s honking its horn, time to go to the airport.

Yes, the passport is in my pocket. I checked five minutes ago.

Of course, the cost of checking again, just one more time, is tiny. Hardly worth discussing with myself. And compared to the cost of being wrong, of missing the flight… go ahead, check again.

And like giving in to a toddler every time he whines for ice cream, this is the problem.

The lizard brain seeks constant reassurance. It will wheedle and argue and debate with the rest of your head, pushing for one tiny bit of evidence, some sort of proof that everything will be okay.

Don’t do it.

When you indulge the lizard, it gains power. It doesn’t walk away ashamed, humiliated at its anxiety. Instead, it merely sidesteps and looks for the next thing to worry about, because, ready for this? It’s nice to be reassured.

Developing the reassurance habit is easy to do and hard to kick. The problem is this: there are some ventures where no reassurance is possible. There is important work for you to do where no proof is available.

If you’ve trained the lizard brain that reassurance is forthcoming, it will scream even louder when those projects that don’t come with proof are at hand.