Secret Menu #1
First day of unlikely presents for yourself or others
Over the next couple of weeks, at various moments when we feel like it (how’s that for a predictable sense of timing?) we are going to release for various durations (a day or two) some things from our secret menu. I am inclined to do this one thing at a time. Think of it as twelve days of Christmas, or eight days of Hannukah, except that it might be neither twelve nor eight days and they probably won’t be sequential days and neither you nor I are fully clear about what or when we’ll be releasing these things, ok?
Do you know what a secret menu at a restaurant is? These are things that are not on the written menu, but that the restaurant is capable of making at any given time. If you know that they are available, you can typically order them from the counter. You might get side-eye from someone standing in line next to you, who realizes that what you are ordering is not on the menu, and doesn’t know how you know to order it. But there is a secret thrill in getting something not publicly available, right?
It is possible, it turns out, to give people too many different choices. I realize this, personally, every time I go to the pharmacy to buy toothpaste. I don’t really need thirty different toothpaste options, but there they are.
We are organizationally in a period of transition and re-organization. I recently shut down our book distribution center in Texas, we recently parted ways with the company printing our posters. We are on the threshold of working with a new printer inside the EU, so that we can print duty-free there. Recent orders shipping to Canada have been a disaster. And so on. Right now, believe it or not, we sell 82 products. This is pared down from about 140. This means that there are 58 things on our secret menu, give or take a few. Most of the things we took down were removed not because they were not of sufficient quality, but because we wanted to focus the attention of our customers. (We did take down a series of puzzles and some apparel that seemed superfluous. Just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should.)(I also have a number of these things for sale at our HQ in California, but let’s be frank–most of you are not visiting us there in person because y’all are all over the world.)
At any one time we are probably working on five to eight book projects, in various stages of completion. Some of these are awaiting a final polish, some of them are awaiting an appropriate timing for release, some of them are earlier stage. Periodically I like to tip my hand– particularly for those of you paying attention– and make available one or more of them for a limited duration, or give you a sneak peak of something else we are working on.
About a month ago we did this with a book called Awakening Human Connection, the feedback from which has been very affirmative. This project came to pass because someone studying our work formed an impromptu circle around it, and because I had interns this past summer for the first time. I kept thinking about the simplest ways to teach connection to a group of people with no technical background.
This is a reading of the second chapter of the book.
If you’d like to buy a copy, click on the button below. If the link works, you have succeeded in purchasing something from our secret menu, and hopefully that is titillating. If the link doesn’t work, you missed the window, and maybe next time you’ll read a post with ‘secret menu’ in the title sooner.
These print in about 10 days, and should therefore arrive to you in slightly over two weeks from the date of order.
