The Vine

I recently had lunch with Vinester Randy Sater, who brought me a really cool gift accompanied by an equally cool story.

Randy is president of StoneBridge Properties, the residential development arm of Teichert, a 125-year-old, family owned and operated construction materials producer here in my hometown of Sacramento. (To most Sacramentans, Teichert is synonymous with rocks. But that may soon change.)

With Teichert’s land nearly depleted of mining resources, Randy and his team are repurposing a 3,800-acre infill site as a new masterplanned community designed around urban farming, a tribute to the area’s early agrarian heritage. “It’s time to knit this land back into the community,” he says. “But in starting this process, we wanted to look to the past before planning for the future.”

To do so, StoneBridge commissioned local historical environmental author Paula Peper to research the history and culture of the region. Her work has now been published as a beautifully crafted, limited print, commemorative book, “Sacramento’s Brighton Township: Stories of the Land.” (I got copy #162 of 300.)

Two more books are in the works, which will chronicle the influence (environmentally, aesthetically and culturally) of Sacramento’s trees and surrounding park neighborhoods. All three can be viewed here on StoneBridge’s website. A more detailed account of this project is nicely captured here by the Sacramento Bee.

At lunch Randy lamented of the development industry, “We’re good at building houses, but not building experiences people will remember.”

I beg to differ. Some of you are doing it exceptionally well. Keep up the good work.

Vine alum Walker Smith and colleagues at The Futures Company have released a new report on consumer values and behavior in the post-abundance economy.

Prevailing media reports suggest that we’ve entered a new era of frugality — that consumer behavior is now, and forevermore will be, defined by penny-pinching and learning to live without. To win customers, be prepared for discounts and early-bird specials and a death spiral to the bottom of the price ladder.

On the other end of the spectrum is the view that this is just a temporary blip. Human nature being what it is, we’ll resume our indulgent ways as soon as the economy turns around.

This divide between extremes — fear vs. greed, or asceticism vs. hedonism — is missing the point, Walker says. Human behavior is never that simplistic and black-and-white, and you can’t extrapolate future events by simply observing present (spend nothing) or past (spend everything!) activity.

Instead the authors advise a more intelligent and nuanced approach, a value proposition grounded in neither fear nor greed, but something just as timeless: Aspiration.

They write:

“[A] smaller economy does not mean that the consumer imagination will be bereft of ambition or wholly appropriated by a resignation to do without. Even with smaller household budgets, the capacity for dreaming will be as big as ever. Consumers are not going to give up on their aspirations to a better life; they will just re-channel these ambitions to fit the context of the recovery consumer marketplace.”

The report, “A Darwinian Gale,” can be downloaded here.

Chris Guillebeau is a professional nonconformist. He writes about life, travel, work, meaning and passion…sometimes all in the same blog post.

His recent commentary on busyness is spot-on. And, for me anyway, convicting.

For all of us who have ever said, “Sorry I [fill in the blank], I’ve just been so busy lately,” take this to heart.

Thanks for the tweak, Chris.

30% of New Year’s resolutions are broken within one week. By Valentine’s Day that figure jumps to 80%. All told, it’s estimated that 97% of NYRs are unsuccessful.

To be sure, a lot of those resolutions never had much resolve in the first place; they were simply stories we told ourselves to feel better about past behavior. But even when we pursue goals with the discipline of a monk, our efforts to change are almost always done in by one factor: They’re too complex.

Losing weight, for example, is not a singular process. It requires making changes in a number of inter-related and ingrained habits—not just diet and exercise, but also time management, shopping based on meal planning rather than impulse, turning off the TV and going to bed earlier, etc.—any one of which by itself is a challenge. Collectively, they can be daunting in the extreme. And when we don’t see immediate results, we get discouraged and give up.

In their forthcoming book, Switch, Chip and Dan Heath cite the success of two professors from West Virginia University who were trying to persuade people to eat a healthier diet. They realized early in the process that a campaign built around “eat healthier” was too ambitious, too vague, and unlikely to succeed—there were simply too many variables involved.

But as they continued to analyze the problem, the researchers kept circling back to milk, the single largest source of saturated fat in the typical American’s diet. Their calculations revealed something remarkable: By switching from whole milk to skim, most people would immediately drop to the USDA recommended levels of saturated fat.

Their public awareness campaign was then created with one simple, clear objective: Persuade more people to choose skim rather than whole when reaching for milk in the grocery store. Within six months, the market share of skim milk in their target study had doubled. By narrowing their focus to one key trigger variable rather than trying to solve the much larger (and probably insoluble) issue, they effected change through clarity.

The success story here is not their marketing (although it was well planned and executed). It’s the rigorous study that allowed them to say, with confidence, “We’re going after milk.” And, just as importantly, the guts to place their entire bet on it.

When taking on a goal that’s big and nebulous and hard to know where to even begin—like, say, creating community—narrow your focus.

Find your skim milk.

That’s where you’ll win.