Book Summary: The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger

CEO autobiographies are often stuffy. They tilt toward self-grandeur, empty platitudes, and stiff writing. 

Many of these books are popular only because people want to signal they’ve read them. 

So I was surprised how much I liked The Ride of a Lifetime, Iger’s recounting of his life and career, from his beginnings as a studio supervisor at ABC up to his reign as CEO at Disney, which continues today.

The tone and writing are accessible—not pretentious—which in line with Iger’s personal brand and leadership style. 

In the book, Iger:

• Shares valuable lessons on leading from humility 

• Offers insight on the difficulty, strategy, and importance of taking big risks

• Provides interesting details on the personalities and strategies involved in acquiring and integrating Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars 

One lesson that runs through the entire book: all business is personal. 

Realizing this truth and addressing it makes taking big risks easier—and reduces the chances of those risks going badly.

What follows are my Kindle highlights from the book: the passages I found to be the most interesting, useful, and surprising.

And I mix in some commentary. (No extra charge.) 

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Part One: Learning

Chapter 1: Starting at the Bottom 

In this chapter, Iger talks about the early days of his career, and what he learned from his mentors, including ABC Sports and News legend Roone Arlidge.

His [Arlidge’s] mantra was simple: “Do what you need to do to make it better.” Of all the things I learned from Roone, this is what shaped me the most.

On the pursuit of perfection—and not being paralyzed by it:

Jiro Ono, whose restaurant has three Michelin stars and is one of the most sought-after reservations in the world.

He is described by some as being the living embodiment of the Japanese word shokunin, which is “the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.”

It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them.

In your work, in your life, you’ll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you honestly own up to your mistakes.

For all of his immense talent and success, Roone was insecure at heart, and the way he defended against his own insecurity was to foster it in the people around him.

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Chapter 2: Betting on Talent

Chapter two covers ABC’s acquisition by Cap Cities and lessons learned from the executives who lead the company. 

… it was also a function of the culture that Tom and Dan created. They were two of the most authentic people I’ve ever met, genuinely themselves at all times. No airs, no big egos that needed to be managed, no false sincerity. They comported themselves with the same honesty and forthrightness no matter who they were talking to. They were shrewd businesspeople (Warren Buffett later called them “probably the greatest two-person combination in management that the world has ever seen or maybe ever will see”), but it was more than that. I learned from them that genuine decency and professional competitiveness weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, true integrity—a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear sense of right and wrong—is a kind of secret weapon. They trusted in their own instincts, they treated people with respect, and over time the company came to represent the values they lived by.”

Iger on Roone Arlidge’s storytelling instincts:

We were scheduled to air a three-hour Olympics preview the night before the opening ceremonies, and for weeks I’d been trying to get Roone to focus on it. He finally watched it after arriving in Calgary, the night before it was scheduled to air. “It’s all wrong,” he said. “There’s no excitement. No tension.” A team of people worked through the night to execute all of his changes in time to get it on the air. He was right, of course.

When warm weather wreaked havoc on the Calgary Olympics, causing numerous event cancellations, Iger recalls his mindset: 

Things were dire, for sure, but I needed to look at the situation not as a catastrophe but as a puzzle we needed to solve, and to communicate to our team that we were talented and nimble enough to solve these problems and make something wonderful on the fly.

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Chapter 3: Know What You Don’t Know (and Trust in What You Do) 

Chapter three focuses on working with creative people—guiding them to get the best from them without destroying their initiative and creative drive. 

True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.

When I am asked to provide insights and offer critiques, I’m exceedingly mindful of how much the creators have poured themselves into the project and how much is at stake for them.

I never start out negatively, and unless we’re in the late stages of a production, I never start small. I’ve found that often people will focus on little details as a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts.

The first time I sat down with Ryan Coogler to give him notes on Black Panther, I could see how visibly anxious he was. He’d never made a film as big as Black Panther, with a massive budget and so much pressure on it to do well. I took pains to say very clearly, “You’ve created a very special film. I have some specific notes, but before I give them to you, I want you to know we have tremendous faith in you.”

Empathy is a prerequisite to the sound management of creativity, and respect is critical.

Of all the lessons I learned in that first year running prime time, the need to be comfortable with failure was the most profound. Not with lack of effort but with the unavoidable truth that if you want innovation—and you should, always—you need to give permission to fail.

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Chapter 4: Enter Disney

Chapter four covers Disney’s acquisition of Cap Cities / ABC, and Iger’s move into a larger role, with the challenges of assimilating ABC into a new corporate culture. 

Iger discusses the challenge of facing difficult situations head-on, and the fact that Michael Ovitz and Michael Eisner should have known their working relationship would not succeed:

They should both have known that it couldn’t work, but they willfully avoided asking the hard questions because each was somewhat blinded by his own needs.It’s a hard thing to do, especially in the moment, but those instances in which you find yourself hoping that something will work without being able to convincingly explain to yourself how it will work—that’s when a little bell should go off, and you should walk yourself through some clarifying questions. What’s the problem I need to solve? Does this solution make sense? If I’m feeling some doubt, why? Am I doing this for sound reasons or am I motivated by something personal?

On Michael Ovitz’s time management: 

Managing your own time and respecting others’ time is one of the most vital things to do as a manager, and he was horrendous at it.”

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Chapter 5: Second in Line

Chapter Five covers Iger’s years running ABC under Eisner, as he hoped to ascend to the COO role at Disney.

… good leadership isn’t about being indispensable; it’s about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes—giving them access to your own decision making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them improve, and, as I’ve had to do, sometimes being honest with them about why they’re not ready for the next step up.

On motivating Roone Arlidge to create a strong 24-hour ABC News special as the calendar rolled to the year 2000:

It could be impossible to execute, but when has that ever stopped you?

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Chapter 6: Good Things Can Happen

This chapter focuses on Disney’s growth while Iger served as chief operating officer under Michael Eisner, as an increasingly hostile board and economic environment robbed Eisner of his power and optimism. 

Michael’s biggest stroke of genius, though, might have been his recognition that Disney was sitting on tremendously valuable assets that they hadn’t yet leveraged.

These assets include:

One was the popularity of the parks. If they raised ticket prices even slightly, they would raise revenue significantly … building new hotels at Walt Disney World [and] expansion of theme parks.

Even more promising was the trove of intellectual property—all of those great classic Disney movies—just sitting there waiting to be monetized. They began selling videocassettes of the classic Disney library to parents who’d seen them in the theater when they were young and now could play them at home for their kids. It became a billion-dollar business.

… the Cap Cities/ ABC acquisition in 1995, which gave Disney a big television network, but, most important, brought in ESPN

On Eisner’s leadership style:

What struck me, and what was invaluable in my own education, was his ability to see the big picture as well as the granular details at the same time, and consider how one affected the other.

For his part, he’d say, “Micromanaging is underrated.”

On courage and optimism in leadership: 

Of great interest to me was the fact that almost every traditional media company, while trying to figure out its place in this changing world, was operating out of fear rather than courage, stubbornly trying to build a bulwark to protect old models that couldn’t possibly survive the sea change that was under way.

...optimism in a leader, especially in challenging times, is so vital. Pessimism leads to paranoia, which leads to defensiveness, which leads to risk aversion.

Optimism sets a different machine in motion. Especially in difficult moments, the people you lead need to feel confident in your ability to focus on what matters, and not to operate from a place of defensiveness and self-preservation.

This isn’t about saying things are good when they’re not, and it’s not about conveying some innate faith that “things will work out.” It’s about believing you and the people around you can steer toward the best outcome, and not communicating the feeling that all is lost if things don’t break your way. The tone you set as a leader has an enormous effect on the people around you.

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Chapter 7: It’s About The Future

This chapter covers Iger’s battle to become CEO following Eisner’s removal. 

THE CHALLENGE FOR me was: How do I convince the Disney board that I was the change they were looking for without criticizing Michael in the process?

Iger spoke to the Disney board, imploring them not to focus on the past issues of the company, but to look to his plan for the future:

“You cannot win on the defensive. It’s only about the future. It’s not about the past.” That may seem obvious, but it came as a revelation to me. I didn’t have to rehash the past. I didn’t have to defend Michael’s decisions. I didn’t have to criticize him for my own benefit. It’s only about the future. Every time a question came up about what had gone wrong at Disney over the past years, what mistakes Michael made, and why they should think I’m any different, my response could simply and honestly be: “I can’t do anything about the past. We can talk about lessons learned, and we can make sure we apply those lessons going forward. But we don’t get any do-overs. You want to know where I’m going to take this company, not where it’s been. Here’s my plan.”

After being named CEO, Iger reflected on shaping culture and setting priorities: 

A company’s culture is shaped by a lot of things, but this is one of the most important—you have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly.

You can do a lot for the morale of the people around you (and therefore the people around them) just by taking the guesswork out of their day-to-day life.

… this kind of messaging is fairly simple: This is where we want to be. This is how we’re going to get there. Once those things are laid out simply, so many decisions become easier to make, and the overall anxiety of an entire organization is lowered.

After the meeting with Scott, I quickly landed on three clear strategic priorities. They have guided the company since the moment I was named CEO: 

1) We needed to devote most of our time and capital to the creation of high-quality branded content.

2) We needed to embrace technology to the fullest extent, first by using it to enable the creation of higher quality products, and then to reach more consumers in more modern, more relevant ways.

3) We needed to become a truly global company.

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Part Two: Leading

Chapter 8: The Power of Respect

Chapter eight discusses Iger’s transition to Disney CEO and the initial challenges he faced: repairing relationships with the board (particularly Roy Disney, who had been campaigning in the press against the company’s direction), repairing the relationship with Pixar and Steve Jobs, and laying the groundwork to transform Disney’s structure and culture. 

The truth was, it wasn’t just Michael who was at odds with Roy [Disney]; besides Stanley, not enough people within Disney had given him the respect he felt he deserved, including his long-gone uncle, Walt. I had never had any real connection to Roy, but I detected vulnerability in him now. There was nothing to be gained by making him feel smaller or insulted. He was just someone looking for respect, and getting it had never been especially easy for him. It was so personal, and involved so much pride and ego, and this battle of his had been going on for decades.

All business is personal:

The drama with Roy reinforced something that tends not to get enough attention when people talk about succeeding in business, which is: Don’t let your ego get in the way of making the best possible decision.

If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real.

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Chapter 9: Disney-Pixar and a New Path to the Future

In Chapter nine, Iger discusses his growing relationship with Steve Jobs, and the difficult path to acquiring Pixar to transform Disney’s animation group. 

THOSE MONTHS SPENT talking with Steve about putting our TV shows on his new iPod began—slowly, tentatively—to open up into discussions of a possible new Disney/ Pixar deal.

“The average tenure for a Fortune 500 CEO is less than four years.” At the time, it was a joke between us [Iger and his wife Willow Bay], to make sure the expectations I set for myself were realistic. Now, though, she said it with a tone that implied I had little to lose by acting fast. “Be bold,” was the essence of her advice.

This was about a week and a half before our announcement about the video iPod, so we spent a couple of minutes talking about that before I said, “Hey, I have another crazy idea. Can I come see you in a day or two to discuss it?” I didn’t yet fully appreciate just how much Steve liked radical ideas. “Tell me now,” he said.

Sometimes opportunity strikes before you are prepared. And you just have to go for it:

While still on the phone, I pulled into my driveway. It was a warm October evening, and I turned the engine off, and the combination of heat and nerves caused me to break out in a sweat. I reminded myself of Willow’s advice—be bold. Steve would likely say no immediately.

“What do you think about the idea of Disney buying Pixar?” I waited for him to hang up or to erupt in laughter.

Instead, he said, “You know, that’s not the craziest idea in the world.”

PEOPLE SOMETIMES SHY AWAY from taking big swings because they assess the odds and build a case against trying something before they even take the first step. One of the things I’ve always instinctively felt—and something that was greatly reinforced working for people like Roone and Michael—is that long shots aren’t usually as long as they seem.

A couple of weeks after that call in my driveway, he [Steve Jobs] and I met in Apple’s boardroom in Cupertino, California.

He stood with marker in hand and scrawled PROS on one side and CONS on the other. “You start,” he said. “Got any pros?” I was too nervous to launch in, so I ceded the first serve to him. “Okay,” he said. “Well, I’ve got some cons.” He wrote the first with gusto: “Disney’s culture will destroy Pixar!”

“Fixing Disney Animation will take too long and will burn John and Ed out in the process.” “There’s too much ill will and the healing will take years.” “Wall Street will hate it.” “Your board will never let you do it.”

“Pixar will reject Disney as an owner, as a body rejects a donated organ.” There were many more, but one in all cap letters, “DISTRACTION WILL KILL PIXAR’S CREATIVITY.”

… we moved to the pros. I went first and said, “Disney will be saved by Pixar and we’ll all live happily ever after.” Steve smiled but didn’t write it down. “What do you mean?” I said, “Turning Animation around will totally change the perception of Disney and shift our fortunes. Plus, John and Ed will have a much larger canvas to paint on.”

“A few solid pros are more powerful than dozens of cons,” Steve said.

Steve was great at weighing all sides of an issue and not allowing negatives to drown out positives, particularly for things he wanted to accomplish. It was a powerful quality of his.

I was told over and over that it was too risky and ill-advised. Many people thought Steve would be impossible to deal with and would try to run the company. I was also told that a brand-new CEO shouldn’t be trying to make huge acquisitions. I was “crazy,” as one of our investment bankers put it, because the numbers would never work out and this was an impossible “sale” to the street.

On taking risks:

Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.

On what’s really important in an acquisition: 

A lot of companies acquire others without much sensitivity regarding what they’re really buying. They think they’re getting physical assets or manufacturing assets or intellectual property (in some industries, that’s more true than in others). In most cases, what they’re really acquiring is people. In a creative business, that’s where the value truly lies.

Iger recalls his mindset when addressing the Pixar acquisition with his board:

I entered the boardroom on a mission. I even took a moment before I walked into the room to look again at Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech, which has long been an inspiration: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”

Jobs reveals his health issues just before the Pixar public announcement, jeopardizing the acquisition. Last-minute surprises can jeopardize a business deal, even after you think it’s sealed: 

Just after noon, Steve found me and pulled me aside. “Let’s take a walk,”

He asked me for complete confidentiality, and then he told me that his cancer had returned.

“Steve, why are you telling me this?” I asked. “And why are you telling me now?” “I am about to become your biggest shareholder and a member of your board,” he said. “And I think I owe you the right, given this knowledge, to back out of the deal.” I checked my watch again. It was 12: 30, only thirty minutes before we were to announce the deal.

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Chapter 10: Marvel and Massive Risks that Make Perfect Sense

In Chapter ten, Iger discusses the challenges of acquiring Marvel: the CEO’s personality, the character licensing complexities, the skeptics of the deal, and overcoming stale cultural assumptions to create massive movie hits. 

On the complexities of acquiring Marvel given its IP licensing deals:

Marvel was already contractually bound to other studios. They had a distribution agreement with Paramount for multiple upcoming films. They’d sold the Spider-Man rights to Columbia Pictures (which eventually became Sony). The Incredible Hulk was controlled by Universal. X-Men and The Fantastic Four belonged to Fox. So even if we could acquire everything that wasn’t tied up by other studios, it wasn’t as pure an IP acquisition as we would ideally have liked.

Your negotiating style has to be adaptable to the person you are negotiating with.

[Marvel CEO] Ike [Perlmutter] would never fit easily into a corporate structure or respond well to what he perceived as Hollywood slickness, so if he was going to be comfortable with selling to Disney, he had to feel like he was dealing with someone who was being authentic and straight with him, and who spoke a language he understood.

Our connection was much more than a business relationship. We enjoyed each other’s company immensely, and we felt we could say anything to each other, that our friendship was strong enough that it was never threatened by candor. You don’t expect to develop such close friendships late in life, but when I think back on my time as CEO—at the things I’m most grateful for and surprised by—my relationship with Steve is one of them. He could criticize me, and I could disagree, and neither of us took it too personally.

Steve Jobs wasn’t a Marvel fan:

When Iron Man 2 came out, Steve took his son to see it and called me the next day. “I took Reed to see Iron Man 2 last night,” he said. “It sucked.”

The Marvel deal draws skeptics:

ON AUGUST 31, 2009, a few months after my first meeting with Ike, we announced we were buying Marvel for $ 4 billion. There were no leaks in advance, no speculation in the press about a possible acquisition. We just made the announcement, then prepared for the backlash: Marvel is going to lose its edge! Disney is going to lose its innocence! They spent $ 4 billion and they don’t have Spider-Man! Our stock fell 3 percent the day we announced the deal.

Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, which owned NBCUniversal at the time. (Before long, Comcast would buy NBC from them.) Jeff had apparently told Brian that our Marvel deal confounded him. “Why would anyone want to buy a library of comic book characters for $ 4 billion?” he’d said. “It makes me want to leave the business.” I smiled and shrugged. “I guess we’ll see,”

Iger shares his philosophy on firing people:

There’s no good playbook for how to fire someone, though I have my own internal set of rules. You have to do it in person, not over the phone and certainly not by email or text. You have to look the person in the eye. You can’t use anyone else as an excuse. This is you making a decision about them—not them as a person but the way they have performed in their job—and they need and deserve to know that it’s coming from you. You can’t make small talk once you bring someone in for that conversation. I normally say something along the lines of: “I’ve asked you to come in here for a difficult reason.” And then I try to be as direct about the issue as possible, explaining clearly and concisely what wasn’t working and why I didn’t think it was going to change. I emphasize that it was a tough decision to make, and that I understand that it’s much harder on them.

Iger finds a management star who was cast aside by Warner Bros. due to his age:

Bob Daly, who was then co-chair of Warner Bros., called me and said I should talk to Alan Horn about serving as an adviser to Rich. Alan had been pushed out as president and COO of Warner Bros. He was sixty-eight at that point, and though he was responsible for several of the biggest films of the past decade, including the Harry Potter franchise, Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s CEO, wanted someone younger running his studio.

Alan eventually agreed, and in the summer of 2012 he came on as the head of Disney Studios. What I saw in him wasn’t just someone who at this late stage in his career had the experience to reestablish good relations with the film community. He also had something to prove. He was galvanized, and that energy and focus transformed Disney Studios when he took over. As I write this, he’s now past seventy-five and is as vital and astute as anyone in the business. He’s been successful in the job beyond all of my hopes. (Of the nearly two dozen Disney films that have earned more than $ 1 billion at the box office, almost three-quarters of them were released under Alan.)

… another lesson to be taken from his hiring: Surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do.

The Marvel acquisition was a huge success:

THE ACQUISITION OF Marvel has proved to be much more successful than even our most optimistic models accounted for. As I write this, Avengers: Endgame, our twentieth Marvel film, is finishing up the most successful opening weeks in movie history. Taken together, the films have averaged more than $ 1 billion in gross box-office receipts, and their popularity has been felt throughout our theme-park and television and consumer-products businesses in ways we never fully anticipated.

Iger overrules the skeptics who said Black Panther and Captain Marvel wouldn’t work:

I’ve been in the business long enough to have heard every old argument in the book, and I’ve learned that old arguments are just that: old, and out of step with where the world is and where it should be.

I called Ike and told him to tell his team to stop putting up roadblocks and ordered that we put both Black Panther and Captain Marvel into production.

Black Panther is the fourth-highest-grossing superhero film of all time, and Captain Marvel the tenth. Both have earned well over $ 1 billion.

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Chapter 11: Star Wars

Chapter 11 discusses Iger’s long and patient play to acquire Star Wars. The biggest hurdle: George Lucas and the tether of his very identity to the mythology he created. 

With every success the company has had since Steve’s death, there’s always a moment in the midst of my excitement when I think, I wish Steve could be here for this.

In the summer of 2011 … We sat in our dining room and raised glasses of wine before dinner. “Look what we did,” he said. “We saved two companies.”

He [Jobs] was convinced that Pixar had flourished in ways that it never would have had it not become part of Disney, and that Disney had been reenergized by bringing on Pixar.

After the funeral, Laurene came up to me and said, “I’ve never told my side of that story.” She described Steve coming home that night. “We had dinner, and then the kids left the dinner table, and I said to Steve, ‘So, did you tell him?’ ‘I told him.’ And I said, ‘Can we trust him?’ ” We were standing there with Steve’s grave behind us, and Laurene, who’d just buried her husband, gave me a gift that I’ve thought about nearly every day since. I’ve certainly thought of Steve every day. “I asked him if we could trust you,” Laurene said. “And Steve said, ‘I love that guy.’ ” The feeling was mutual.

On the day of the rededication of Star Tours in Orlando, I set up a breakfast with him [George Lucas] at the Brown Derby, which was near the attraction in our Hollywood Studios Park.

I asked George if he’d ever thought about selling. I tried to be clear and direct without offending him. He was sixty-eight years old at the time, and I said, “I don’t want to be fatalistic, George, and please stop me if you would rather not have this conversation, but I think it’s worth putting this on the table. What happens down the road? You don’t have any heirs who are going to run the company for you. They may control it, but they’re not going to run it. Shouldn’t you determine who protects or carries on your legacy?” He nodded as I talked. “I’m not really ready to sell,” he said. “But you’re right. And if I decide to, there isn’t anyone I want to sell to but you.”

He said something else that I kept in mind in every subsequent conversation we had: “When I die, the first line of my obituary is going to read ‘Star Wars creator George Lucas…’ ” It was so much a part of who he was, which of course I knew, but having him look into my eyes and say it like that underscored the most important factor in these conversations. This wasn’t negotiating to buy a business; it was negotiating to be the keeper of George’s legacy, and I needed to be ultra-sensitive to that at all times.

About seven months after that breakfast, George called me and said, “I’d like to have lunch to talk more about that thing we talked about in Orlando.”

Lucas had many talented employees, particularly on the tech side, but no directors other than George, and no film development or production pipeline, as far as we knew.

Disney had already begun to assess the value of the Star Wars franchise: 

We’d done some work trying to figure out their value ...

Our analysis was built on a set of guesses, and from those we tried to build a financial model—valuing their library of films and television shows; their publishing and licensing assets; their brand, which was dominated by Star Wars; and their special effects business, Industrial Light and Magic, which George had founded years earlier to provide the dazzling special effects for his films. We then projected what we might do if we owned them, which was pure conjecture. We guessed we could produce and release a Star Wars film every other year in the first six years after acquiring them,

Next, we tackled their licensing business. Star Wars remained very popular with kids, particularly young boys, who were still assembling Lego Millennium Falcons and playing with lightsabers.

Lastly, we considered what we might do at our theme parks, given the fact that we were already paying Lucasfilm for the rights to the Star Tours attractions in three of our locations. I had big dreams about what we might build, but we decided to ascribe little or no value to them because there were too many unknowns.

Iger has to reset the acquisition price in Lucas’s mind:

In George’s mind, Lucasfilm was as valuable as Pixar, but even from our relatively uninformed analysis they weren’t.

So I said right away, “There’s no way this is a Pixar deal, George.” And I explained why, recalling my visit to Pixar early on, and the richness of creativity that I discovered.

He was momentarily taken aback, and I thought the discussions might end right there. Instead, he said, “Well, then, what do we do?”

I told him we needed to look closely at Lucasfilm and we needed his cooperation.

I said, “I’m not going to come in low and negotiate toward the middle. I’m going to do it the way I did it with Steve.”

… at the end of that process we still found ourselves struggling to settle on a firm valuation. A lot of our concern had to do with how to assess our own ability to begin making good movies—and quickly.

Ultimately, Kevin and I decided we could afford $ 4.05 billion, or slightly above what we paid for Marvel, and George immediately agreed.

But the most difficult part of the negotiation was personal and emotional—Lucas has to cede control of his creation: 

Then the more difficult negotiations began over what George’s creative involvement would be.

With Lucas, there was only one person with creative control—George. He wanted to retain that control without becoming an employee.

… his entire self was wrapped up in the fact that he was responsible for what was perhaps the greatest mythology of our time. That’s a hard thing to let go, and I was deeply sensitive to that.

I also knew we couldn’t spend this money and do what George wanted, and that saying that to him would put the whole deal at risk. That is exactly what happened.

… twice [the parties] walked away from the table and called the deal off. (We walked the first time and George walked the second.)

George told me that he had completed outlines for three new movies.

we needed to buy them, though we made clear in the purchase agreement that we would not be contractually obligated to adhere to the plot lines he’d laid out.

Negotiations were stuck. But tax law saved the day:

an upcoming change in capital gains laws that eventually salvaged the negotiations. If we didn’t close the deal by the end of 2012, George, who owned Lucasfilm outright, would take a roughly $ 500 million hit on the sale.

he reluctantly agreed to be available to consult with us at our request. I promised that we would be open to his ideas (this was not a hard promise to make; of course we would be open to George Lucas’s ideas), but like the outlines, we would be under no obligation.

On October 30, 2012, George came to my office, and we sat at my desk and signed an agreement for Disney to buy Lucasfilm. He was doing everything he could not to show it, but I could tell in the sound of his voice and the look in his eyes how emotional it was for him. He was signing away Star Wars, after all.

After the acquisition, the creative development process is rocky: 

A FEW MONTHS before we closed the deal, George hired the producer Kathy Kennedy to run Lucasfilm.

this was one final way for George to put someone in whom he trusted to be the steward of his legacy.

J.J. and I had dinner soon after he decided to take on the project.

I joked at some point during dinner that this was a “$ 4 billion movie”—meaning that the whole acquisition depended on its success—which J.J. later told me wasn’t funny at all.

There’s no rule book for how to manage this kind of challenge, but in general, you have to try to recognize that when the stakes of a project are very high, there’s not much to be gained from putting additional pressure on the people working on it.

Early on, Kathy brought J.J. and Michael Arndt up to Northern California to meet with George at his ranch and talk about their ideas for the film. George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations.

we all agreed that it wasn’t what George had outlined. George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them,

I could have handled it better.

I should have prepared him for the meeting with J.J. and Michael and told him about our conversations, that we felt it was better to go in another direction.

George felt betrayed ...

Just prior to the global release, Kathy screened The Force Awakens for George. He didn’t hide his disappointment. “There’s nothing new,” he said. In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he said, “There weren’t enough visual or technical leaps forward.”

Looking back with the perspective of several years and a few more Star Wars films, I believe J.J. achieved the near-impossible, creating a perfect bridge between what had been and what was to come.

Shortly after the release, though, an interview George had done a few weeks earlier with Charlie Rose aired. George talked about his frustration that we hadn’t followed his outlines and said that selling to Disney was like selling his children to “white slavers.” It was an unfortunate and awkward way for him to describe the feeling of having sold something that he considered his children. I decided to stay quiet and let it pass. There was nothing to be gained from engaging in any public discourse

George called me. “I was out of line,” he said.

Though each major acquisition, a common trait saved negotiations: 

Looking back on the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, the thread that runs through all of them (other than that, taken together, they transformed Disney) is that each deal depended on building trust with a single controlling entity.

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Chapter 12: If You Don’t Innovate, You Die

Chapter twelve discusses Iger’s strategy to create and deploy a direct-to-consumer service: a Netflix competitor which would eventually become Disney+.

AFTER THE DUST settled on the last of our “big three” acquisitions, we began to focus even more on the dramatic changes we were experiencing in our media businesses and the profound disruption we were feeling. The future of those businesses had begun to seriously worry us, and we concluded it was time for us to start delivering our content in new and modern ways, and to do so without intermediaries, on our own technology platform.

Disney goes through a build-vs-buy decision process:

We landed on Twitter. We were less interested in them as a social media company than as a new distribution platform with global reach, which we could use to deliver movies, television, sports, and news.

Twitter’s board supported the sale, and on a Friday afternoon in October, our board gave their approval

Iger’s gut feeling to kill the deal is prescient—Twitter’s issues would have been devastating to the Disney brand. 

Something inside me didn’t feel right. Echoing in my head was something Tom Murphy had said to me years earlier: “If something doesn’t feel right to you, then it’s probably not right for you.” I could see clearly how the platform could work to serve our new purposes, but there were brand-related issues that gnawed at me.

I couldn’t get past the challenges that would come with it.

• how to manage hate speech,

• making fraught decisions regarding freedom of speech,

• fake accounts algorithmically spewing out political “messaging”

• and the general rage and lack of civility

I felt they would be corrosive to the Disney brand.

Disney moves on to Plan B.

AROUND THE SAME TIME that we entered into the Twitter negotiations, we also invested in a company called BAMTech, which was primarily owned by Major League Baseball and had perfected a streaming technology that allowed fans to subscribe to an online service and watch all of their favorite teams’ games live.

 … we agreed to pay about $ 1 billion for a 33 percent stake in the company, with an option to buy a controlling interest in 2020.

Ten months later, in June 2017, we held our annual board retreat … We decided to spend the entire 2017 session talking about disruption …

I don’t like to lay out problems without offering a plan for addressing them.

We would accelerate our option to buy a controlling stake in BAMTech, and then use that platform to launch Disney and an ESPN direct-to-consumer, “over the top” video streaming services.

On our August 2017 earnings call … we shared our plans to launch two streaming services: one for ESPN in 2018, and one for Disney in 2019.

Iger moves from plan to execution—and must remake Disney’s culture and strategic priorities to make it work:

THAT ANNOUNCEMENT MARKED the beginning of the reinvention of the Walt Disney Company.

… we were now hastening the disruption of our own businesses, and the short-term losses were going to be significant.

I referred to a concept I called “management by press release”—meaning that if I say something with great conviction to the outside world, it tends to resonate powerfully inside our company.

We immediately began working on two fronts in the wake of our August announcement. On the tech side, the team at BAMTech, along with a group that was already in place at Disney, started building the interfaces for our new services,

At the same time, back in L.A., we were putting a team together to develop and produce the content that would be available on Disney +.

I proposed a radical idea—essentially, that I would determine compensation, based on how much they contributed to this new strategy, even though, without easily measured financial results, this was going to be far more subjective than our typical compensation practices.

“I know why companies fail to innovate,” I said to them at one point. “It’s tradition. Tradition generates so much friction, every step of the way.”

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Chapter 13: No Price no Integrity

Chapter 13 discusses Iger’s ethical challenges within the Disney culture, as talented executives make personal mistakes that harm others, and themselves. While dealing with those issues, Iger has to remake the company in response to technology disruptions which force Disney to change its creative and distribution processes.

RUPERT’S DECISION TO sell was a direct response to the same forces that led us to create an entirely new strategy for our company. As he pondered the future of his company in such a disrupted world, he concluded the smartest thing to do was to sell and give his shareholders and his family a chance to convert its 21st Century Fox stock into Disney stock, believing we were better positioned to withstand the change and, combined, we’d be even stronger.

In the fall of 2017, we heard complaints about John Lasseter from women and men at Pixar, about what they described as unwanted physical contact.

Alan Horn and I met with John in November of that year, and together we agreed that the best course was for him to take a six-month leave to reflect on his behavior and give us time to assess the situation.

As Disney was about to announce its acquisition of Fox, Iger is blindsided by ESPN president John Skipper’s issues: 

December 14 ranks as another of the most compartmentalized days of my career.

GMA announcement at 4:00 A.M. 

Conference call with investors at 5:00 A.M.

 CNBC Live at 6 00 A.M. 

Bloomberg at 6:20 A.M. 

Webcast with investors at 7:00 A.M. 

From 8:00 A.M. till noon were calls with Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, then Representative Nancy Pelosi and several other members of Congress, in anticipation of the regulatory process that was about to unfold.

… that afternoon, Jayne came into my office to have the conversation that we’d punted on the day before. She told me that John Skipper had admitted to a drug problem, which had led to other serious complications in his life and could potentially jeopardize the company.

Following the acquisition, Iger again sets out to reset Disney’s culture and structure:

I asked myself: What would, could, or should the new company look like? If I were to erase history and build something totally new today, with all of these assets, how would it be structured? I came back from our Christmas holiday and dragged a whiteboard into the conference room next to my office and began to play around. (It was the first time I’d stood before a whiteboard since I was with Steve Jobs in 2005!)

The first thing I did was separate “content” from “technology.” We would have three content groups: movies (Walt Disney Animation, Disney Studios, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Twentieth Century Fox, Fox 2000, Fox Searchlight), television (ABC, ABC News, our television stations, Disney channels, Freeform, FX, National Geographic), and sports (ESPN). All of that went on the left side of the whiteboard. On the other side went tech: apps, user interfaces, customer acquisition and retention, data management, sales, distribution, and so on. The idea was simply to let the content people focus on creativity and let the tech people focus on how to distribute things and, for the most part, generate revenue in the most successful ways.

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Chapter 14: Core Values

Chapter 14 is the wrap-up chapter; Iger looks back at his tenure from a high view, and realizes his time at Disney will soon be over. 

The intensity of the work didn’t fully inoculate me against a kind of wistfulness creeping in, though. The future that we were planning and working so feverishly on would happen without me. My new retirement date is December 2021, but I can see it out of the corner of my eye. It surfaces at unexpected times. It’s not enough to distract me, but it is enough to remind me that this ride is coming to an end. As a joke a few years back, dear friends of mine gave me a license plate holder, which I immediately attached to my car, that says, “Is there life after Disney?” The answer is yes, of course, but that question feels more existential than it used to.

Even when a CEO is working productively and effectively, it’s important for a company to have change at the top. I don’t know if other CEOs agree with this, but I’ve noticed that you can accumulate so much power in a job that it becomes harder to keep a check on how you wield it. Little things can start to shift. Your confidence can easily tip over into overconfidence and become a liability.

The Ride of Lifetime Appendix: Lessons to Lead By

The appendix offers condensed versions of the leaderships lessons Iger shared in the book.

AT THE END of this book on leadership, it struck me that it might be useful to collect all of these variations on the theme in one place.

• To tell great stories, you need great talent.

• innovate or die.

• “the relentless pursuit of perfection.”

• creating an environment in which people refuse to accept mediocrity.

• Take responsibility when you screw up.

• Be decent to people.

• Excellence and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

• True integrity—a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear 

• sense of right and wrong—is a kind of secret leadership weapon.

• Value ability more than experience,

• Managing creativity is an art, not a science.

• Don’t start negatively, and don’t start small.

• if you want innovation, you need to grant permission to fail.

• Don’t be in the business of playing it safe.

• Don’t let ambition get ahead of opportunity. By fixating on a future job or project, you become impatient with where you are.

• He was telling me not to invest in small projects that would sap my and the company’s resources and not give much back.

• When the people at the top of a company have a dysfunctional relationship, there’s no way that the rest of the company can be functional.

• As a leader, if you don’t do the work, the people around you are going to know, and you’ll lose their respect fast.

• be self-aware enough that you don’t cling to the notion that you are the only person who can do this job.

• demand integrity from your people and your products at all times.

• Michael Eisner used to say, “micromanaging is underrated.” I agree with him—to a point.

• Too often, we lead from a place of fear rather than courage,

• No one wants to follow a pessimist.

• Optimism emerges from faith in yourself and in the people who work for you.

• Long shots aren’t usually as long as they seem.

• convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly.

• messaging is fairly simple: This is where we want to be. This is how we’re going to get there.

• It should be about the future, not the past.

• It’s easy to be optimistic when everyone is telling you you’re great.

• Treating others with respect is an undervalued currency when it comes to negotiating.

• You have to do the homework.

• If something doesn’t feel right to you, it won’t be right for you.

• As a leader, you are the embodiment of that company.

• In any negotiation, be clear about where you stand from the beginning.

• Projecting your anxiety onto your team is counterproductive.

• Most deals are personal.

• making something, be in the business of making something great. The decision to disrupt a business model that is working for you requires no small amount of courage.

• It’s not good to have power for too long.

• approach your work and life with a sense of genuine humility.

• Hold on to your awareness of yourself.

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You can pick up The Ride of a Lifetime from Amazon today.

Star Wars novels: where should a new reader start?

How people look at me when they find out I’ve read over 30 Star Wars novels:

Hey, we all have our quirks. People have far weirder habits, which will not be discussed in detail here, because this is a family blog. 

But why read so many Star Wars books, nerd man?

The simple answer is I like reading, and I like Star Wars. Peanut butter and jelly. Secondly, I have a weird personal dichotomy: I hate clutter, but like collecting stuff. Books provide a balance to this. You can collect them and store them in a pretty orderly fashion. And finally, it’s fun. Fun is still ok, right?

So, where should a new reader start? 

Before I make suggestions, you need to understand something about the universe of Star Wars novels. 

Disney drew a line of demarcation amongst the Star Wars books when it purchased the franchise in 2012. Prior to Disney’s purchase, well over 100 novels had already been published. The storylines were wild, and sometimes contradictory: 

• Chewbacca was dead, squished in a collision of planets (seriously). 

• Luke had a Jedi wife.

• Leia was a Jedi Knight. 

And on and on it went. Total space chaos. 

And while many of those stories were fun, they were a nightmare for Disney, which was preparing to rake in obscene piles of cash with a sequel trilogy. There was no coherent way for Disney to move the Star Wars story forward on-screen in a way that upheld the stories in the books. 

So Disney declared all the books that came before its purchase “Legends,” which meant they didn’t count as canon. They became rumors and fairy tales.

All the books published after the Disney purchase count as canon, and Lucasfilm has a story group — “Storytroopers,” if you will — that enforce story continuity and character development. All the books and comics must now support Star Wars films and TV series, and vice versa. 

With that distinction made, I have three recommendations for a new reader:

Resistance Reborn, by Rebecca Roanhorse 

Resistance Reborn is the newest Star Wars novel. The book acts as the Avengers Endgame of new canon era of Star Wars novels, drawing in characters from numerous earlier books. Not only do we get to see what Leia, Rey, Poe, Finn, and Chewbacca are up to after the the events of the Last Jedi, we also get updates from new characters created in the latest novels, comics, and even video games:

Yes, we’ve got Norra Wexley and her son Snap (Temmin, as he went by before he became Greg Grunberg) to represent the Aftermathbooks, or figures like Bloodline’s Ransolm Casterfo and Lost Stars’ Twi’lek pilot-turned-ambassador Yendor, who become crucial allies to the Resistance’s cause. But Resistance Reborn reaches wider—and in doing so feels like a satisfying love letter to every corner of what’s come so far in this new version of the Star Warsgalaxy.

From Marvel’s comics, there are characters like Karé Kun and Suralinda Javos from Charles Soule, Phil Noto, and Angel Unzueta’s fabulous Poe Dameron comic(the former introduced briefly in the anthology novella Before the Awakening, but fleshed out more completely in Marvel’s work). From EA’s video games, we get Zay Versio, daughter of Iden, and Shriv the Duros from Battlefront II’s story campaign.

The book opens moments after the Resistance escapes at the end of The Last Jedi, as the decimated force regroups and calls on old allies to rally for what is to come in The Rise of Skywalker. 

A reader new to Star Wars novels not only gets an entertaining book featuring familiar characters, but also an introduction to characters created in the new “Disney cannon” era of Star Wars books. Double win. Start here.

Lost Stars, by Claudia Gray 

Lost Stars sits in the “young adult” sub-genre of Star Wars fiction. And it’s a romance-adventure -- a rarity among Star Wars books.

So this YA romance novel is among the best in the Star Wars genre?

Absolutely. 

Lost Stars follows the life stories of Ciena Ree and Thane Kyrell, from childhood up through their military careers as ace pilots--except one flies for the Empire, and the other for the Rebellion. 

And that Star Destroyer you see crashing? It’s the same one shown to us in the opening of the epic The Force Awakens trailer--the one crashed on Jakuu, where Rey later explores and finds metal to trade for rations. It’s a cool tie-in. 

Lost Stars covers a lot of ground, from the time of A New Hope up past Return of the Jedi, and while the main characters change and grow, their affection for one another remains steady, no matter how they fight it, and each other.

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Kenobi, by John Jackson Miller

Finally, a recommendation from the Legends Era of Star Wars novels. John Jackson Miller’s Kenobi was publsihed in 2013. 

And even though this book isn’t canon, we will no doubt see some of its themes in the upcoming Kenobi TV series on Disney+. 

Miller writes an old-west-style tale of Obi Wan Kenobi living in the desert of Tatooine after the fall of the Republic. Kenobi tries to live a quiet life in the shadows to watch over young Luke Skywalker from a distance. 

Of course, Obi Wan being Obi Wan, he gets involved with all kinds of shady characters and dangerous creatures and does lots of wild Jedi things. 

So there you have it. If you’re new to the Star Wars novel universe, then try starting here and see if you get hooked. Who knows—someday you may have read 30 Star Wars novels, too. And you can get weird looks, just like me.

The Pathway to Personal Reinvention

Trust me on this.

At some point, in your personal or professional life, you will have to pivot. The identity you had, the work you did, will no longer serve you.

It will be time to reinvent yourself. And the timing may not be to your liking. 

You Are a Brand

Tom Peters popularized the idea of “Personal Brands” way back in the Internet boom—the “real” one, in the late 90s, with dial-up service, Geocities, and sock-puppet Super Bowl commercials—with an article and cover story in Fast Company Magazine, which, in those days, was about the size of a phone book.

(Note to younger readers: a phone book is … never mind. Just Google it.)

From the classic article “A Brand Called You”:

It’s time for me — and you — to take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson that’s true for anyone who’s interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

This article made a big splash in 1997. It was true then—and, although some of the methods have changed (consultants probably don’t need CEOs to memorize their beeper numbers)—the principles are more relevant than ever:

You don’t “belong to” any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn’t to any particular “function.” You’re not defined by your job title and you’re not confined by your job description.

Brands evolve (if they want to survive). Your brand needs to evolve, too. 

Maybe your evolution is a just a nudge, a tiny course alteration. 

Or maybe it’s time for something bigger. You’re not quite sure what that change is, but you know you need it. 

In that case, welcome to the wilderness. Welcome to … 

The Wandering 

Dorie Clark wrote a classic piece on personal reinvention in Harvard Business Review. But I strongly disagree with this part: 

What’s Your Destination? First, you need to develop a detailed understanding of where you want to go, and the knowledge and skills necessary to get there.  

Nope. The “detailed understanding” does not come first. 

First is The Wandering. 

Wandering is movement, but without clear direction.

You have to reinvent out loud and in motion -- you can’t think your way to reinvention. 

That makes it more stressful, of course. You won’t know where you’re going when you start. You have to try things out, start and stop, and listen to your inner compass.

The fits and starts are a necessary toll extracted for finding the path. So let yourself try out some different ideas. Like the legendary Gerry Rafferty said, “If you get it wrong you’ll Get it Right Next Time.”

And it can take a long time to get it right. 

More from Tom Peters:

It’s over. No more vertical. No more ladder. That’s not the way careers work anymore. Linearity is out. A career is now a checkerboard. Or even a maze. It’s full of moves that go sideways, forward, slide on the diagonal, even go backward when that makes sense. (It often does.) A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.

“Reinvention” is often an excavation project. We have to shed the expectations of others, particularly in service of a specific corporate role. We have to shed the expectations of ourselves, often implanted in school or by society. 

What do you really want to do? How—and whom—do you really want to serve?

I can’t imagine reinvention without a spiritual foundation.

The danger in proceeding without spiritual belief is you’re more likely to head down the wrong path—one that just serves your ego, or pleases another person or group you may not even consciously realize you’re trying to please. 

You run the risk of ending up on the wrong path, unhappier and less fulfilled than ever.

Aim to serve something bigger than yourself.  

And then … eventually … you’ll start to know where you’re headed. 

You might even have an “Oh, I knew that all along” moment. 

You can see the path, and now comes …

The positioning 

Your new path might feel far from the person you were and the experiences you’ve had. But it’s probably not as far as you think. 

Clark discusses leveraging your past to serve your new positioning:

Develop a Narrative. You used to write award-winning business columns — and now you want to review restaurants? 

[...]

It’s unfair, but to protect your brand you need to develop a coherent narrative arc that explains to people — in a nice, simple way so they can’t miss it — exactly how your past fits into the present. “I used to write about the business side of many industries, including food and wine,” you could say. “I realized my big-picture knowledge about agricultural trends and business finance made me uniquely positioned to cover restaurants with a different perspective.” It’s like a job interview — you’re turning what could be perceived as a weakness (he doesn’t know anything about food, because he’s been a business reporter for 20 years) into a compelling strength that people can remember (he’s got a different take on the food industry because he has knowledge most other people don’t).

Change the way you think about your experience and your resume. 

A resume doesn’t exist on a stone tablet, an Eternal Truth chiseled in granite to be preserved and handed down for generations.

Instead, your resume is a story that evolves to suit your changing goals and direction. 

Career expert Penelope Trunk:

Life is messy and it is not black and white. There is no single, correct story about your life. Because each moment, in each person’s life, has multiple versions, all true.

The biggest problem people have when they are changing careers, or moving up the ladder, or re-entering the workforce, is that they cannot imagine telling a completely different story about themselves than they have been telling for the last ten years.

Did you know that my resume can tell the story of me as a writer or me as an operations genius? I don’t like operations, but if I had to get a job in operations, I could write my resume to indicate that operations has been my focus for the last fifteen years. And I wouldn’t have any lies on my resume. I’d just frame the truth in a different way.

Whatever your new path is, you have related experience that lends credibility to that path. Use it. 

Put another way: 

Don’t expect to fully “reinvent”: While the concept of “reinvention” is tantalizing (think: “fresh slate” “unrealized dreams” etc.), most people don’t construct a new career from scratch at midlife. The stories you read about the accountant turned cattle rancher – or the doctor turned vineyard owner – make for great press, but they are the exception, not the norm. In reality, most people choose a second-act career that is in some small way, shape or form related to what they did before. They figure out which parts of their old career they most enjoy (skills, people, industry, etc.) and then blend the “old” pieces with “new” interests, hobbies, and passions.

Just Keep Going

(Or, you know, swimming.)

This reinvention thing—it’s exhausting, frustrating, and, hopefully, exhilarating. We only see the “after” stories of triumph and happiness and unicorns, etc.

We don’t see the long slog to get there.

But the world has never been hungrier, or offered more opportunity, for authenticity. If you need to shift, you can. You can find a market to serve. You can find your authenticity and make your way. 

There are many examples of this today:

• A teacher turned full-time online fitness coach

• marketing agency employee turned SEO consultant and teacher:

• And an extreme example: Steve Ballmer, maniacal raving CEO of Microsoft …

became Steve Ballmer, maniacal raving owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, where he’s stealing all the buzz and cache from the rival Lakers.

People turn themselves inside out and find unique and authentic ways to impact the world and make a living. 

You can, too.If you’re struggling with reinvention, I’ll leave you with something Steven Furtick of Elevation Church conveyed in a sermon called “Trapped in Transition:”

“God is most active in moments of what I perceive to be instability and transition”

So just keep going (swimming).

You’re not alone, and you’re on the right path, even if you can’t see the path yet. 

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Thanks for reading! If you found this useful, I’d appreciate it if you’d sign up for my
weekly newsletter, The Mix Tape.

Improving Email Newsletter signup conversions

Email newsletters are still a great way to connect with customers, prospects, partners, and others in your network.

But growing an email newsletter subscriber base is a long slog. Nailing the basics of newsletter conversions on your site makes the slog a bit easier.

Marketing Examples shares the basics of improving on-site newsletter signup conversions:

Choosing whether or not to subscribe to an email list is a split-second decision. This means that subtle psychological tweaks can make a big difference.

Here’s the checklist:

1) Make it obvious

2) Use an exit-intent popup

3) Get a subscribe page

4) Ask as a human

5) Give a clear reason to sign up

6) Add Social Proof

7) Use value-based messaging

After reading the case study, I realized I had work to do. So let’s get to it, and you can learn and implement along with me.

The newsletter signup page

My newsletter signup page has been revamped (subject to ongoing additional revampage, of course).

The signup page changed from this:

To this:

So what’s the thinking behind the change?

• Make it personal: “A weekly mix of what I’m learning about” was moved into the sub-headline, followed by some sample topics.

• Social proof: The testimonial conveys that there is value in subscribing. Sharing the open and unsubscribe rates lends additional credibility.

• CTA: I had a little fun here with the subscribe button, changing from “subscribe” to (Light) rock my inbox,” which ties to the copy above. A more value-based approach (“Rock my marketing,” “Rock my SEO” might be stronger.

Exit-intent newsletter pop-ups

In the Marketing Examples case study, 55% of new subscribers are attributed to an “exit-intent” pop-up, which appears when the user’s cursor moves off the browser display and up to the tabs or address bar.

Unfortunately, Squarespace (which I use for this site) doesn’t support exit-intent pop-ups out-of-the-box, (wow, that was a lot of dashes...) but you can still add pop-ups to a Squarespace site:

Even though you can’t implement the true exit pop-up strategy, you can control timing to an extent. So I set mine up to trigger after either:

1. Five seconds pass, or

2. The user scrolls down more than 25% of the page

Newsletter sign up thank you page

After a user subscribes (yes!) you can further build the relationship and support the user’s decision with a thank you page.

With a thank you page, you should:

• Thank the person for subscribing (duh).

• Offer instructions to help deliverability, such as asking them to add your email address to their contact list.

• Offer a surprise. This can be a “freebie,” like a special report, or even something more simple. I just asked if the person wanted to take a breather and listen to “Deacon Blues,” the best song of the 1970s.

  (It is the best. Just saying.)

The thank you page is important, because of the next step …

Tracking newsletter signup conversions in Google Analytics

Now that we have the thank you page in place, tracking conversions becomes pretty simple in Google Analytics:

1. From the Analytics homepage, click “Conversions.”

2. Click “goals” from the sub-menu.

3. Ciick “Overview: from the sub-menu.

4. Click the button on the right that says “Set up Goals.”

5. Click the red button that says “NEW GOAL.”

6. Under acquisition, click “Create an Account.”

7. Name the goal in the box provided (try something wild like “Newsletter signups.”

8. “Destination” will be pre-selected in the menu below. This is good. Hit continue.

9. Under “goal details” enter the URL of your thank you page in the first box (just to the right of “equals to.”

10. Hit save.

That looks like a longish list, but it’s a quick process.

Now Google will give you reports on conversion: the percentage of site visitors who take the signup action by dividing thank you page views by total visitors over a given time period.

With the conversion basics in place, track and test

Now that you have the basics in place, watch conversions—both total conversions over time and conversion rate—and experiment. Sometimes tweaking a headline or a graphic can make a big difference, and you’ll never know for sure unless you test.

Bonus: promoting your newsletter with tagging

Obviously you want to promote your newsletter through your social accounts. But I liked this sign-up boosting tip shared by Sarah Noeckel, who has grown her newsletter to more than 5,000 subscribers:

In other words, when you share links to other articles, videos, etc. in your newsletter, tag the content creators when you promote the newsletter in social media.

Like this:

The Mix Tape:

-Facebook video inflation
-Newsletter sub strategies
-SEO tip sheet
-Lots morehttps://t.co/Q0WqtBMZ09

Featuring:@a16z@profgalloway@eriqgardner@david_perell@SEOkeval@benjihyam@claudiagray@GoodMarketingHQ@methode@johnmu@SarahNoeckel@Brian_DV1G pic.twitter.com/Gm5ex6JNhB

— Matt Tillotson (@matttillotson) October 16, 2019

Good luck! Let me know what’s working well for you.

Thanks for reading! If you found this useful, I’d appreciate it if you’d sign up for my
weekly newsletter, The Mix Tape.

Book review: Star Wars: Master and Apprentice, by Claudia Gray

“Darkness is a part of nature, too, Qui-Gon. Equally as fundamental as the light. Always remember this.”
—Master Dooku 

Good Star Wars novels feature an interesting story that generally checks a few important boxes. They will:

• Deepen and alter our understanding of existing Star Wars canon. By revealing new details or a fresh perspective on existing canon, the book rewards the reader. We learned something new, and are smarter for it.  

• Center around well-known and beloved characters. 

• Introduce new characters in service of the main storyline and the well-known characters without dragging the reader off on bunny trails.

Some recent Star Wars novels have swung and missed at one or more of these key tenants.

But not Claudia Gray’s Master and Apprentice. The book is fun. Which, you know, was once the point of Star Wars. 

(Interestingly enough, another of Claudia Gray’s Star Wars books—“Lost Stars”—focuses largely on new and unknown characters, and it’s a great book. Exception to every rule.)

”Master and Apprentice” provides:

• An interesting story, as Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are sent on a mission that morphs into something quite different--and more dangerous--than they expected. 

• An emphasis on action and on Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon’s relationship. The master and padawan, while dealing with external chaos and uncertainty, also have to deal with the exact same problems in their own struggles to work together cohesively. 

• Secondary characters that serve the story and main characters—an old Jedi turned planet-ruler, jewel thieves, a young princess coming into her own—these and other characters and others keep the book moving in an interesting fashion, and keep the spotlight where it belongs: on Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon. 

• New understanding of Star Wars canon in a few ways, including:

  • Insight into Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan’s relationship as Master and Padawan—and it ain’t smooth sailing. 

  • How the pursuit of prophetic knowledge (including ancient Jedi prophecy) affects Jedi for better and for worse. 

As a bonus, the new characters are interesting, with creative backgrounds that also serve Star Wars history—and the characters surprise us as the story unfolds.

Gray always delivers a good Star Wars tale, and this one is no different. A Star Wars novel should leave you, as a fan, entertained and enlightened. “Master and Apprentice” delivers. 

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, I’d appreciate it if you’d sign up for my weekly newsletter, The Mix Tape.

The Best SEO Newsletters of 2019

SEO newsletters help you stay on top of new developments, pick up new ideas, and even network with other professionals. Here are some of the best SEO newsletters of 2019, in no particular order.

Marketing Examples

Harry covers SEO and much more in his excellent, real-world-example-driven newsletter, and we can all better marketers for it. He shares case studies with straight-forward, actionable steps.

Sign up for Marketing Examples

Search Engine Land

Daily updates with quick news and tips. Always something in there worth a click. 

Get the daily newsletter here.

Total Annarchy 

For content strategy and just-plain-better-writing-strategy, get Ann Handley’s bi-weekly Total Annarchy. Handley, a WSJ best-selling author and MarketingProfs partner, has an easy, conversational writing style.

Get Total Annarchy

(Also, this one takes first place in the Best Newsletter Name category.)

SEO by the Sea 

Bill Slawski focuses on, as he puts it, “SEO as the search engines tell us about it, from sources such as patents and white papers from the search engines.”

Slawski has worked in SEO since 1996, and knows a thing or two because he’s seen a thing or two.

Sign up for SEO by the Sea

Content Marketing Institute newsletter

The Content Marketing Institute was founded in 2011 by Joe Pulizzi, and is a powerhouse of events and content focused on—wait for it—content.

Get the Content Marketing Institute newsletter here.

Bonus: CMI publishes a digital magazine called “CCO” that publishes in March, July, and October. 

Moz Top 10

A semi-monthly newsletter with “the ten most valuable articles about SEO and online marketing that we could find” from the Moz SEO software powerhouse.

Sign up for the Moz Top 10 

SEO Roundtable

The SEO Roundtable surfaces the most interesting topics in the hreads taking place at the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) forums.

Content is powered by Barry Schwartz, CEO of RustyBrick, and stays right on top of the latest SEO developments.

Get the SEO Roundtable newsletter here.

TL;DR Marketing 

The second best newsletter name on this list (after Total Annarchy), TL;DR Marketing brings the SEO thunder from down under. 

Sign up for the TL;DR newsletter here, or check out a past edition.

Blind Five Year Old

This one doesn’t come out on a consistnet basis, but when it does, A.J. Kohn packs it full of value and insight.

The name?

Well, A.J. says:

The strange name comes from a specific search engine optimization (SEO) philosophy – to treat search engines like they are blind five year olds.

Sign up for the Blind Five Year Old newsletter here.

Gaps.com

Glenn Allsopp is remarkable. He’s an SEO expert, an excellent writer, and a creative and diligent researcher who uncovers angles and opportunities no one else does. 

Don’t hesitate—just sign up. 

Kaiserthesage 

Tested and actionable content on SEO, content marketing, and link building from Jason Acidre – a Manila-based Digital Marketing Consultant.

Sign up for KaisertheSage here.

A bonus for the best SEO newsletters list: Morning Brew

Morning Brew is a daily email that isn’t SEO focused but gives you a quick and entertaining rundown on the big business stories of the morning. 

It’s so well-written I have to include it, and it’s great for SEO pros who want to keep up on the big business stories without wasting a lot of time reading or watching news.

Sign up for Morning Brew

(Note: This is my Morning Brew referral link. I might, someday in a bright and distant future, earn stickers or a coffee mug or if you subscribe.)

If you found this “Best SEO Newsletters” compilation helpful, I’d appreciate if you’d consider subscribing to my newsletter, The Mix Tape (if you haven’t already). Thanks!

Squarespace SEO: A Quick Audit Process

Squarespace SEO sometimes gets a bad rap, but the web site creation and hosting service offers the features needed to create a solid SEO foundation.

In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the basics to review and improve SEO within your Squarespace site, giving you a launching pad to branch out into longer-term content and link-building strategies to grow your audience. 

Squarespace SEO tools

Before we get started, here’s a list of the tools I’ll be referencing today:

• Google Analytics : The mack-daddy, commonly-used free analytics toolset from Google.  

• Google Webmaster Tools: Lets you see your site the way Google sees it, to spot errors and looks for areas to improve.

• Screaming Frog: is a “crawler” that reviews and analyzes sites, and it’s free for sites with less than 500 web pages. (If you’re new to the tool, here’s an excellent Screaming Frog tutorial for beginners.)

• Siteliner: A tool for finding duplicate content on your site.  

• Squarespace Analytics: The Analytics package provided by Squarespace (also available in a nice iOS app.) 

• TinyPNG: Allows you to compress (reduce the file size) of images so web pages load faster. Google likes fast web pages. You can upload and compress 20 image files at a time.

• Website Planet image compressor: An alternative to TinyPNG.

Your Squarespace analytics 

Squarespace has a pretty good internal analytics package that covers the basics, and an accompanying iOS app that’s easy to use. 

But if you haven’t already done so, set up your Google Analytics account, as it allows you to drill down much deeper depending on the goals for your site. 

(This Squarespace tutorial walks you through setting up your Google Analytics account and connecting it to your website.)  

Once set up, copy your Google Analytics Account number into the box provided inside Squarespace located at Settings > Advanced > External API Keys.

Tip: Make sure you log in—and stay logged in—to Squarespace on any browser you use (desktop and phone) to exclude your own site activity from your analytic stats. Otherwise, every time you visit your own site, your activity will be tracked as a visitor in Squarespace’s analytics package.  

Squarespace website architecture 

Your site should be as lean and logically structured as possible. An ideal website structure starts at the homepage, has a handful of key sections highlighted in home page navigation, and has nearly all other pages “nested” within those sections. 

A typical site structure for a personal or small business Squarespace site might look something like this:

The top level is your home page. 

At the second level are your main section areas, in this case:

• About

• Services

• Newsletter

• Blog

These sections are “nested” under the home page, and would appear in the main navigation menu on the home page. 

Don’t go too crazy with categories--seven is really the limit, and less is usually better for the user experience. 

Beneath these sections are third-level pages, which here includes blog posts and individual pages describing the services offered. 

Everything flows down from the home page, and “child” pages are nested under their parents. 

Tip: Do not nest at more than three levels if possible. After three levels, Google views pages as less important, decreasing the ranking potential of the lower-level pages. 

URL structure

Your site’s URL structure should match your site hierarchy

For example, the URL for the “Blog Post 1” page in the example above should look like this:

www.URL.com/blog/blog-post-1

The URL for the “Service Two” page should look like:

www.URL.com/services/service-2

Example: My site

At my site, the categories beneath the home page include:

• About

• Blog

• Book notes

• SEO notes

• Newsletter signup

But my URL structure didn’t reflect my site structure, and I had work to do. 

My third-level book notes pages were set up like this:

www.matttillotson.com/booknotes-book-title-author, which makes the section structure unclear. 

The fix required two steps. 

First, I changed the URL of the book notes overview page to:

www.matttillotson.com/book-notes

And then the URLs of book notes pages themselves (as children of the book notes overview page) are set up as:

www.matttillotson.com/book-notes/title-author

That structure communicates the correct site hierarchy to Google. 

Keep URLs concise, and, after reflecting site structure, as limited to the keyword or keywords for that page as possible. 

For example, using our site map example above, a page in the services section detailing purple widget repair should use the URL:

www.URL.com/services/purple-widget-repair 

There’s no perfect answer on URL length, but generally aim for 50-60 characters. 

Remember: Changing URLs will break links—both links you have internally on your own site, and external links from other sites to yours). More on how to fix that later. 

Links

Links tell Google important things about the authority of your site and individual pages and can help search ranking. 

So what is site authority? 

Google wants to point its users to the best sources in response to the user’s query. So it looks for clues—by crowdsourcing, in part—using links from other sites to yours as a measure of authority and usefulness.

Broadly speaking, the more “inbound links” you have to your site (especially high-quality, highly-trafficked sites), the more authority Google assigns to your site and higher you may rank. 

Links fall into two categories: 

• Internal: Links from one page of your site to another page of your site.

• External: Links from other websites to pages within your site. 

This audit process focuses only on internal links. We need to get our own house in order before we start inviting people to send guests our way.

Internal links

According to SEO Moz, internal links are important for three reasons: 

• They allow users to navigate a website.

• They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.

• They help spread link equity (ranking power) around websites.

Just setting up proper site navigation helps your internal linking greatly. From there, Neil Patel shares a simple internal linking strategy: 

The basic idea is that every page on your website should have some link to and some link from another page on the website.

In other words, make sure your second- and third-level pages link to other pages on your web site--but only in ways helpful to your visitors.  

Internal linking examples:

• In a blog post, link to another blog post your site about an adjacent topic, or a post that goes more in-depth on a topic touched on in the main post. 

• On a services page, link to other related service pages, or link to a “contact us” page to allow a potential customer to reach out to you. 

Internal links help spread authority across your site, and more links are better than fewer—but only when it’s good for the user. For example, a highly linked-to blog post that has an internal link to your homepage allows some of the authority from the blog post to be shared with the home page. 

Tip: Link to another internal page just once on any given page: Google will ignore repetitive links on the same page.

Tip: When linking to other pages within your site, include the keywords for the linked page in the text for your link. This content is called “anchor text.”

For example, if you are linking within your site to a blog post focused on iPhone cases, make sure to include the phrase “iPhone cases” as part of your text you use to link. 

Broken links 

Google hates broken links: links to your site that lead to pages that no longer exist, or have been moved, and create what is called a “404 error.”

Screaming Frog can quickly crawl your site and find any 404 errors on your site. 

As you can see from this screenshot of my Screaming Frog report, I had a hot mess of 404 errors. The errors were caused by a double-whammy: moving my site to the Squarespace platform and reconfiguring my URL structure to reflect the site hierarchy:

Yeah, clean up on Aisle 404, please … 

In Squarespace, the process for correcting 404 errors is more complex than point, click, and fix, but it’s pretty straightforward. 

You need to set up URL redirects, and relax, it’s not scary. Squarespace can walk you through URL redirects, but here’s an example from my site.

I changed the URL structure for all my “book notes” pages, so the old URLs showed up as 404 errors. For my book notes page on David Goggins’ “Can’t Hurt Me,” I set up what’s called a 301 redirect to point the old, broken URL:

http://www.matttillotson.com/Cant-Hurt-Me-David-Goggins-book-notes

To the new URL:

https://www.matttillotson.com/book-notes/cant-hurt-me-david-goggins

How? By using a little bit of code in URL mappings panel in Squarespace.

Breathe. The code is really simple.

The structure for the code is:

<original url> -> <new url> <redirect type>

For the Goggins redirect, this looks like:

/Cant-Hurt-Me-David-Goggins-book-notes -> https://www.matttillotson.com/book-notes/cant-hurt-me-david-goggins 301

Notice you don’t input your main URL (www.yoursite.com) --just the part after the dot-extension. 

In Squarespace, my redirects look like this:

Fixing broken links is really important. If you don’t, Google looks at your site like a scary abandoned house with broken windows, and will point users elsewhere.  

Squarespace basic SEO content strategy

Your Squarespace content should be structured and pruned to maximize our relevance and authority. Remember we want to run our site mean and lean: every page and every word should serve a user purpose. 

Here are some simple steps to help with that. 

Excess pages 

If you have excess or unimportant pages (maybe very old blog posts, or product or service pages that are now defunct), delete them or change them to “nofollow” so Google doesn’t crawl them. 

In Squarespace, you can either click the trash can to the left of the page in the “Pages” menu to delete the page, or turn off the “enable” option in the general settings for the page. 

You want to “nofollow” or delete pages Google won’t see as valuable. Yost, a WordPress plugin to address no-indexing, has a good post on choosing pages to nofollow. In general, nofollow blog category pages, author pages, date pages, and technical pages like terms of service. 

Remember: if you delete or nofollow pages, set up your 301 redirects.

Thin content 

The goal is value, and “thin” (low-word count) content can be a red flag for an invaluable page. 

Screaming Frog can give you word counts for each page, but remember that some portion of the word count doesn’t really reflect the unique word count of that page: header text and navigation text, for example, will be counted on every page. 

As a very broad rule of thumb, try to keep unique word counts north of 500.

Your milage may vary, because some pages, simply don’t need much content. A newsletter signup page, for example. 

So evaluate your pages carefully, and if a page really isn’t delivering unique value, then either delete it or expand the content. 

Duplicate content

Duplicate content can mean a couple of different things: content that has been duplicated within your own site, or content that exists elsewhere on the Internet.

A free tool called siteliner can help find duplicate content, but there are caveats:

• Some content will naturally be repeated across pages: navigation and header text, blog excerpts that may appear on a blog overview page, footer text, etc. 

• Without getting into too much detail, it’s often just fine to re-publish your blog posts elsewhere, or publish posts on your site that originally were posted elsewhere, like Medium or LinkedIn.
  (If you do this,  you may need to set up “canonical” tags so Google knows your site hosts the original content. This is a manual process in Squarespace and something we can tackle in a later post). 

So, apply salt liberally when evaluating duplicate content. Really, you’re looking for pages you may have accidentally set up twice, and overly redundant content within your own site. 

Tags and descriptions for SEO 

Clean, descriptive, and well-structured text in titles, tags, headlines and descriptions can give your SEO a turbo boost. Here’s how to do it right.

Title

Title refers to the HTML title for a given page. You can set the title in settings section of the page. 

• Squarespace lists page titles as “optional”--it’s not! Not if you want effective SEO. Use titles on every page of your site. 

• Keep your title tight (65 characters or less), include your keyword for the page, and remember you are writing for an audience--Google will use your page title in its listings. 

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions will appear in search results under your link and title and can be configured in the same screen as your titles.

Keep your descriptions under 155 characters, but over 70

Use your keyword for the page, and remember you are writing to draw an audience in. Be interesting, be accurate, be persuasive. Meta descriptions are your best shot at getting a user to click--and you’re in competition!

The good news is meta descriptions are neglected by many marketers. Writing good ones gives you a leg up.  

Headlines and subheadlines 

Squarespace allows you to create headings in your static pages and blog posts, as designated by the settings H1, H2, H3, and all the way to H6. 

Let’s just worry about H1-H3 for now: 

• Use just one H1 header, as the headline for the page (such as the title of your blog post)

• Use one H2 header per section

• Use one H3 header for each sub-section (supporting idea) within your post

Again, the goal is usability, and Google’s header preferences guide you toward clear, well-organized content. 

Don’t: Use heading designations just to create large text. Use paragraph or “normal” designations and adjust using the template menus in Squarespace. You run the risk of screwing up your on-page SEO otherwise. 

Squarespace Image optimization

Lean images with good supporting descriptive text can help your SEO rankings. Here’s how to optimize your images.

Compressing images 

Google likes sites that load fast. Squarespace performs adequately in this area, but you can help things along by ensuring your image files—photos and graphics—aren’t unnecessarily large which can slow down page load times.

A service called TinyPNG is like Weight Watchers for image files: it makes them lean. You can upload as many as 20 image files at a time and the service reduces the file size. Then simply replace your existing files with your new leaner and meaner version.

Image alt text 

Image “alt-text” is used to describe images to search engines and aids in accessibility for vision-impaired site visitors. 

Write your descriptions for an audience, and utilize your keyword strategy. 

Squarespace uses the image captions you write as alt-text, but that doesn’t mean you have to display the captions. In the image editor, you can choose “Do not display caption” as a setting in under the caption tab in the design area:

(For further guidance, check out Squarespace’s image alt-text tutorial.)

Squarespace site map 

Ok, you’ve done all the work. Now it’s time to send your clean and shiny sitemap to Google, so it can read all about your changes and index them accordingly. 

Your sitemap teaches Google about the structure and flow of your site, and in Squarespace the sitemap URL is typically:  

yourURL.com/sitemap.xml 

Example: My sitemap is located at www.matttillotson.com/sitemap.xml

Visit the Google Seach Console site and submit your sitemap URL under the sitemap heading:

Your Squarespace SEO foundation is set

Congrats! If you’ve implemented the steps in this post, you’ve laid a solid foundation for SEO with your Squarespace site. You’ve created your launchpad for world domination. Now go forth and conquer, Squarespace SEO Warrior.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, I’d appreciate it if you signed up for my weekly newsletter on SEO, marketing, and other interesting stuff.

The iPhone 11 Pro Max: one-handed use strategies

The screen. It’s giant and glorious. But using the iPhone 11 Pro Max one-handed is a challenge. (This is true of any of the larger iPhones, for that matter: the 11, 11 Pro, Plus, X, XS, and XS Max models can all require thumb-contortions.)

But if you just gotta have that Max screen real estate, there are steps you can take to make the 6.5” iPhone easier to use one-handed. 

One-handed keyboard 

iPhone one-handed keyboard

This one is simple. The change compresses the size of the keyboard at the bottom of the screen, making it easier to reach all the keys with your thumb.

To enable: To set it up, press and hold the emoji icon at the bottom of the keyboard, then select whether you want the keyboard to compress to the left or right:

QuickPath keyboard

With the QuickPath keyboard:

• You don’t have to tap out each letter (though you certainly can if you prefer). 

• Instead, you can leave your finger (usually your thumb) on the keyboard and just swipe from one letter to the next until you’ve spelled the word out. 

Sometimes QuickPath guesses the wrong word as you type, but not often. And combined with the one-handed keyboard, typing out quick messages while holding your beer is pretty easy.

To enable: Already good to go. Just start dragging your thumb across the keyboard to spell a word and QuickPath “just works.”

---

Reachabllity 

Reachability allows you tug on the bottom of the home screen and slide it down half way, making it easier to access apps, Safari address bars, etc. at the top of your screen. 

To trigger it, just pull down on the bottom of your screen, starting about half an inch up from the bottom:

To enable: Go to settings > accessibility > touch > Reachability. Then pull down at bottom of the screen to trigger the feature.

---

Spotlight

Reaching for apps in the upper-left or right-hand corner of your screen can be a pain—so don’t.

Instead, just swipe down on your home screen and Spotlight will launch. Spotlight is a powerful search tool that, among other things, can launch apps for you. Just type in the name of the app—or at least the first part of the app’s name, and when it appears in the search results, tap it.

To enable: Automatically enabled. Swipe down on your home screen to launch Spotlight.

---

App-switching with gestures 

You can quickly switch between apps, without tapping on their icons, by either:

1. Swipe left-to-right along the bottom of your screen to move to your other apps, in the order you most recently used them, or

2. Swipe up from the bottom and trigger “app cards” that let you quickly scroll through every app you have open in a sort of preview mode. Just tap on the one you want when you get to it.

---

Push your home screen apps down-screen

One of the most challenging aspects of one-handed usage is reaching apps at the top and left of your iPhone. But you can use a hack to push your home screen apps down-screen, though you will have to give up some app slots on the home page.

iEmpty (LINK) is a free service that allows you to upload your wallpaper and then create “filler” home screen shortcuts that appear invisible. This shortcuts can be used to fill the less-reachable spots on your home screen, pushing your most important apps down-screen. 

Here’s how it works:

In the end, you get an effect that looks like this:

iPhone empty home screen

All my home screen apps are now reachable by my thumb.

---

Shortcuts

Shortcuts are an extremely handy—if a bit more complex—feature that allows you to create (or download) simple programs that perform multi-step app tasks in just one tap. 

You can use Shortcuts to save time and make one-handed iPhone use easier. Examples of Shortcuts include:

• Launching a specific web page in Safari

• Opening a playlist

• Opening a third-party app and performing an action (like opening the Nike+ app and launching the run tracker feature).

And there are hundreds of other options.

Apple includes a pre-configured gallery of Shortcuts, including Shortcuts based on how you use your phone. Launch the Shortcuts app and tap “Gallery” to see what’s already available to you.

You can learn to create your own Shortcuts, and/or download Shortcuts others have made. Here are a couple of really robust Shortcut libraries:

• MacStories Shortcut library

• Matthew Cassinelli’s Shortcut library

For easy access to your shortcuts, you can:

• Add them to the widget screen (available by swiping left on your home screen)

• Set them up with icons to place on your home page

• Assign them verbal instructions for use with Siri (“Siri, open Fox Sports Radio).

---

AssistiveTouch 

AssistiveTouch allows you to create an always-on “button” that, when tapped, opens a menu of configurable actions. For example, one of the options available is to open Control Center, which normally requires a difficult-to-execute-one-handed swipe from the top of the right hand of the screen.

AssistiveTouch has lots of options:

To enable: go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch, where you also configure the feature. 

---

Help is here for your iPhone 11 Pro Max-hampered thumb

No,one-handed iPhone use isn’t as easy as it was in the iPhone 4 days (but … so …. much …. screen these days)

With a few tweaks (and possibly some hand-strengthening exercises) you can do plenty with your iPhone 11 Pro Max one-handed—and keep your thumb ligaments intact.

---

Thanks for reading! If you found this useful, I’d appreciate it if you’d sign up for my
weekly newsletter, The Mix Tape.

Star Wars: Wallet's Edge

My daughter Avery and I were fortunate enough to visit the newest Disney Parks creation: A Star Wars-themed land called Galaxy’s Edge, which opened at Disney’s Hollywood Studios last week (and at Disneyland last May).

I have thoughts, in three areas:

• Quick first impressions 

• Defining “success” for Galaxy’s Edge 

• A interesting brand partnership 

Yeah, it’s great

I’m not going to go on and on about the experience of Galaxy’s Edge itself. There are million places to read in-depth reviews and see professional-quality photos and videos if that’s your thing. 

But … 

As a Star Wars fan, I’ll just say:

Right now, the land has one feature attraction open, the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run ride, where you and five others must pilot the ship in pursuit of coaxium (non-nerds: that’s Star Wars ship fuel). 

The ride is great, but I’m not sure the best part isn’t outside the attraction:  a full-size Falcon in all it’s glory. The rider line wrapped around the ship outside, and Avery became very frustrated when she kept trying to talk to me but I was like this for about 25 minutes: 

Bottom’s Up: Og’s Cantina was also fun—it’s an offshoot of the Mos Eisley Cantina when Luke and Obi-Wan meet Han and Chewie in A New Hope. 

It’s an odd experience watching your 12-year old sidle up to bar to have a drink (even if it was just Powerade and pomegranate juice). 

We had such a good time we went back the next night, as we heard the place looks amazing all lit up. 

It did not disappoint. 

More to come: In December, the “main” attraction, The Rise of The Resistance, will open and is supposed to be Disney Parks’ most ambitious attraction ever. Looking forward to it. 

Down to business 

Some people feel the new land is under-performing. In California, the Disneyland version of Galaxy’s Edge opened in May, and park attendance there has actually fallen this year vs. last. 

In Orlando, early crowds have been manageable, but with the hurricane looming offshore it’s hard to tell what should have been expected. 

Missing the point: I don’t think massive herds of customers is the real end game for Disney Parks with Galaxy’s Edge, and, in many, ways, for the parks going forward. 

In marketing we talk about LTV—lifetime value of a customer. I’m sure Disney Parks has a somewhat similar metric—call it revenue per guest (RPG)—a measure of how much a guest spends in the park over and beyond the ticket price. 

Galaxy’s Edge is set up to increase revenue per guest in a substantial way. And I don’t mean selling ice cream and key chains—I’m talking about expensive, high-end items and experiences that truly “move the needle.”

For example, Disney takes the souvenir concept uptown by wrapping a unique guest experience around the item, enabling massive margin increases:

• A $200 Build-A-Lightsaber experience

• A $100 Build-A-Droid experience

Rather than just picking an item off a store shelf, guests pluck plastic droid parts off an assembly line to create their own remote-controlled toy, or choose their own “kyber crystal” to power up their lightsaber, which they create and “infuse with the force” themselves as part of a ceremony, complete with full orchestra music as accompaniment.

Disney can churn guests through these experiences, 15 or so per experience, ten-ish times per day, seven days per week.

Money machine.

Flipping the model: Disney offloads the assembly labor onto the guest, who pays enormous upcharges for the privilege.

That’s a unique way to bring manufacturing back to the USA.

I hope you get a mint on your pillow: And coming soon is a Star Wars-themed hotel, which is estimated to cost over $3,000 per GUEST per NIGHT.

Here a father and daughter review their hotel bill, which is so large it must be viewed from space.

Galaxy’s Edge is not designed to draw massive hordes of common guests, though it’s fine if they come. The land is a magnet for attracting super-fans with cash to burn on premium experiences.

I suspect it will do that very well.

Have a Coke and a smile… or a vaguely grenade-like beverage container

Brand partnerships have long been a way for theme parks to offset costs; a brand pays to sponsor a ride, and gains visibility and the emotional association of the cool or fun factor of the attraction.

But things are trickier in Batuu, the fictional planet on which Galaxy’s Edge is based. Disney wants the land to be extremely immersive, to the point that merchandise sold in the land doesn’t even promote or feature the Star Wars logo. The experience is set up so that you’re buying “authentic” merchandise from a far away world.

So that makes brand partnerships challenging. Piloting the Millennium Falcon isn’t quite the same if it’s brought to you by Delta Airlines, or if you have to pull the ship out of battle to grab a double cheeseburger at Wendy’s.

But Disney and Coca-Cola made it work.

They created bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite that look like thermal detonators (non-nerds: thermal detonators are Star Wars grenades). 

The bottles look pretty cool, so much so that the TSA banned them for a minute, and then rescinded.

(The TSA: Keeping you safe from recyclable plastic containers since 2001.)

The not-dangerous sodas are sold from bright red Coca-Cola branded small spaceships, complete with droid pilots. The lettering is done in Aurebesh, the Star Wars alphabet.

Photo: WDWNT

The red stations really stand out in the land, popping against the browns and grays used to theme Galaxy’s Edge.

This is when brand partnerships are fun.

• The companies found a unique way to feature Coca-Cola while maintaining Disney’s theming requirements.

• Both companies got loads of free publicity thanks to TSA incompetence.

• Guests get a unique souvenir to take home, which, of course, is overpriced thanks to the special container concept.

At $6 a piece, we own four of them. I am not immune to Disney’s marketing prowess. But at least we didn’t have to assemble them ourselves.

Review and Notes: Sticky Fingers, by Joe Hagan

Sticky Fingers: Review

“Sticky Fingers” is the biography of Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine. Wenner was complicated, ambitious, and tumultuous, and so is this 520-page book.

He wrestled with many demons—mostly self-inflicted—and yet still managed to create one of the most culturally impactful media entities of the 20th century, building friendships and infuriating the biggest names in the music industry.

As a sub-plot, I was fascinated by the story of the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, a disastrous event which served as a turning point for the social movement of the 1960s and Rolling Stone Magazine itself. 

On December 6, 1969, 300,000 people attended the free event, featuring acts like Santana and Jefferson Airplane. The Rolling Stones, spearheading the event as a response to criticism over high ticket prices, were the headline act.

A nice idea—which ended in chaos, violence, and four deaths.

Attendee Meredith Hunter was murdered near the stage by the Hell’s Angels while The Stones played.

The concert shattered the illusion of the 60’s counter-culture dream. It also marked the beginning of Rolling Stone Magazine as a true journalistic entity. The magazine, despite its relationships with the music industry and The Stones themselves, covered the event with eloquence and brutal honesty:

The 300,000 anonymous bodies huddled together on the little dirt hills were indeed an instant city — a decaying urban slum complete with its own air pollution. By the time the Stones finally came on, dozens of garbage fires had been set all over the place. Flickering silhouettes of people trying to find warmth around the blazing trash reminded one of the medieval paintings of tortured souls in the Dance of Death. The stench of the smoke from tens of thousands of potato chip packages and half-eaten sandwiches brought vomiting to many. It was in this atmosphere that Mick sang his song about how groovy it is to be Satan. Never has it been sung in a more appropriate setting.

Rolling Stone’s online archive of its Altamont coverage is fascinating, and so is Sticky Fingers.

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Kindle notes from Sticky Fingers

I knew lots of people but I had no friends. I slept with girls but I loved no one. I had invitations to deb parties. That seemed the most important thing. I was social, I knew debutantes, and I knew rich people. I had worked so hard, I liked so many people I couldn’t stand.

More than fifty thousand people showed up in Monterey to see the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas from Los Angeles; Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel from New York; the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience from London. Local favorites the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane—along with Janis Joplin, whom Ralph Gleason had helped book, and the Steve Miller Blues Band, for whom Wenner advocated—played alongside Otis Redding from Memphis and the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar.

Wenner continued to be unimpressed with Paul Simon, opining that his “primary talent is on the guitar and composing melodies for that instrument; he is not a lyricist.”

Mike Bloomfield told the crowd, according to a glowing press release Wenner helped draft with Derek Taylor, “This is our generation, we’re all here together, to dig ourselves.”

“Forms and rhythms in music are never changed without producing changes in the most important political forms and ways.”

After Bob Dylan and the Beatles, he wrote, the record business “took another look at the music of the ponytail and chewing gum set, as Mitch Miller once called the teenage market, and realized there was one helluva lot of bread to be made there.”

He titled the article “Like a Rolling Stone.” Rolling Stone! The nature of youth, gathering no moss.

That’s the Jann I first knew in San Francisco, always hunched over because the issues are too compelling, and too much fun, and there is stuff to be done.”

With the name, the vision snapped into focus: Rolling Stone, the first mainstream paper for the rock-and-roll generation.

The magazine was carefully positioned to be accessible to the American mainstream. “We didn’t want to be a part of that hippie way of life,” said Wenner. “We didn’t want to be communal. We didn’t want to have a hippie design. Our values were more traditional reporting. We wanted to be recognized by the establishment. Part of it was our own mission; part of it was what we were looking for, music. We wanted the music to be taken seriously. We wanted to be heard, we wanted the music to be heard, we wanted to change things.”

But what did a twenty-year-old Berkeley dropout know about starting a business? Not much. Jane’s sister, Linda, recalled seeing business books piled in Wenner’s room on Potrero Hill that summer. But mainly he turned to Ralph Gleason, whose Rolodex overflowed with names of lawyers and press agents, record executives and music writers. Wise in the ways of newspapers, Gleason would point his finger and Wenner would go running: Here’s a law firm who can help you incorporate. Here’s a writer from the Melody Maker in London. What about my friend in L.A.? He can write. Here’s a record agent at A&M and a publicist at Columbia. Maybe this guy at Vanguard can help you get a few ads.

The pages of Rolling Stone shaped Springsteen’s idea of what a rock-and-roll star did, how to behave.

The whole thing had been begged, borrowed, recycled, and stolen: Chet Helms’s idea and contestant list; Ralph Gleason’s title and editorial philosophy; the newsprint and layout of The Sunday Ramparts; Jon Landau from Crawdaddy!; several stories from the Melody Maker, rewritten by Susan Lydon. Ramparts magazine had even published a cover image of John Lennon from How I Won the War the month before.

Most of the record-selling business was elsewhere, a fact that actually gave Wenner a distinct advantage. Bands came through town on their tours and Wenner was their turnstile, giving them ink. “There was nothing else to do in San Francisco,” Wenner said. “There were no record companies there. There was nothing else to do but shop and hang out, or hang out with me.”

Steve Winwood of Traffic was the first rock star to visit the offices.

Local heroes Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs took assignments to write stories and reviews for Rolling Stone

Wenner seemed preternaturally certain in all things but his own writing powers. His failure to become a novelist still haunted him

“He wasn’t confident in himself as a writer.” (“Otis was the Crown Prince of Soul,” wrote Wenner, “and now the Crown Prince is dead.”)

He took the job because he figured “John Lennon knew something about LSD that he isn’t putting in his songs and I thought if I met him I could ask him.”

Townshend was trying to reposition the Who in the post-Monterey rock scene, because the mod incarnation of the band had been going out of vogue. He used Wenner as a kind of therapist and adviser—all on the record. “It was a tricky time for me, and I was surprised that Jann seemed to understand exactly where the Who would fit and would—if we were successful—prevail in a new self-created order,” said Townshend. “I described my plan to complete Tommy, at that time a project around two-thirds completed.”

Townshend waxed philosophic on the power of rock and roll to upend society—and waxed and waxed and waxed. This would become a hallmark of Wenner’s interview style, evincing naïveté to draw a subject out, and it often yielded results.

What made Rolling Stone unique, Wenner told a Time reporter, was that it was authentic. “We never thought of filling a market,” he said, “and we never created Rolling Stone toward anyone in particular.”

Davis put Rolling Stone into record stores through Columbia’s distribution system, which now accounted for 15 percent of the newspaper’s single-copy sales.

Orange highlight | Location: 2,127

When Time magazine tried to beat Rolling Stone with a groupies feature of its own, Wenner borrowed a play from the old carnival barker Warren Hinckle: He preempted Time with a full-page ad in The New York Times, asking, “When we tell what a Groupie is, will you really understand? This is the story only Rolling Stone can tell, because we are the musicians, we are the music, we are writing about ourselves.”

Scaggs had just finished recording his solo album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Allman on slide guitar and a rookie record producer in the booth: Jann Wenner. By this time, the Wenners had become close friends with Scaggs, the laconic bluesman from Plano, Texas, and his new girlfriend, a stylish and beautiful socialite named Carmella Storniola

After Scaggs’s acrimonious split with Steve Miller, and Carmella’s breakup with Dan Hicks (of the Hot Licks), the couple had moved next door to the Wenners and befriended Jane.

After the recording, Boz and Carmella moved to Macon, Georgia, to hang out with Walden and the Allmans. When the Wenners showed up for a visit, Scaggs’s drinking was out of control, and they went on a terrifying drive down a country road until Jane Wenner insisted Carmella drive.

Wenner’s arrogance nearly tanked Scaggs’s career. “That might have been why Jann and I fell out in the end,” he said. “He should never have risked Scaggs’s career by presuming to produce.”

If Rolling Stone was a professional newspaper about rock and roll, the moment of truth was nigh. What did Jann Wenner really stand for? Was he a groupie or a fucking journalist? He told him to cover the Altamont disaster “like it was World War II.” The following week, Wenner, according to Greil Marcus, sat before his editors over lunch and declared, “We’re gonna cover this story from top to bottom, and we’re going to lay the blame.”

“Altamont,” said the story, “was the product of a diabolical egotism, high ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity.” Wenner had never betrayed his heroes quite like this before. He had slammed a record or two, angered a few record executives, made Eric Clapton faint. But through an alchemical mix of petty business grievance and self-preservation, Jann Wenner nailed Mick Jagger’s hide to the wall with vindictive aplomb. For a generation of readers, the story of Altamont was the one printed in Rolling Stone, seared into history like a cattle brand held in Jann Wenner’s grip.

Jeffrey Steinberg, a stoner who got rich selling reprints of the 1922 Sears, Roebuck Catalog—but

“Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive” earned Rolling Stone a National Magazine Award for the year 1970.

If Jann Wenner had only one great idea, it was an idea with staying power: that the 1960s—“the Sixties”—was a mythic time that would be endlessly glorified and fetishized by his generation in records and books, TV shows and films, T-shirts and posters, for years to come, for ever and ever, amen.

The 1960s, with all its passion and idealism, was, at its sacred core, a business. Mick Jagger understood. So did Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.

a story line gelled in the underground press: Jann Wenner was the man who sold out the revolution for dirty record money. “Kent State and Cambodia have concerned more of us, and in a more vital way, than the latest news on Paul McCartney,” Burks said in 1970. “What’s going to happen now, I think, is the trivialization of Rolling Stone—and that just makes me very sad.”

By the end of 1970, Wenner had all the ingredients for a new era of Rolling Stone: the financial backing of the American record industry; two reel-to-reel tapes of John Lennon spilling his guts about the Beatles; two budding superstars in photographer Annie Leibovitz and writer Hunter S. Thompson; a new book publishing division called Straight Arrow Books, which would launch with The Connoisseur’s Handbook of Marijuana; and last—and far from least—a new investor on the hook, Max Palevsky, chairman of the Xerox Corporation, a multimillionaire prepared to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into Rolling Stone in 1971.

“We were a full forum for John and Yoko,” he said. “Anything they said, we printed.”

Throughout the early years of Rolling Stone, he was happy to run Lennon’s unedited missives on macrobiotics and rock festival controversies, and he worked hand in glove with Derek Taylor to make Apple Records a de facto bureau for Rolling Stone, publishing the PR man’s own essay about the Beatles, who in turn gave Rolling Stone intimate previews of Beatles albums and supplied Wenner with advertising dollars. (Later, a Rolling Stone editor learned that Beatles manager Allen Klein had “laundered and pre-digested” much of what Lennon sent to Wenner’s paper, editing him for libel.) Rolling Stone would become a convenient partner for John and Yoko to create their own narrative—and a formula for Wenner’s success.

THE “LENNON REMEMBERS” INTERVIEW buoyed Rolling Stone’s national presence like nothing before it. Archconservative William F. Buckley devoted a newspaper column to it, dubbing the interview “How I Wrecked My Own Life, and Can Help Wreck Yours,” describing Rolling Stone as “endless copy about other rock groups, classified advertising for abortion seekers, and home-growing advice for marijuana users, plus a great deal that is inscrutable except to high-honor students in the sub-culture.”

Thompson’s rap was in a lingo neither Wenner nor his accompanying editor, John Lombardi, could quite understand: “Fun Hogs.” “Greed Heads.” “Fat City.” “Pigfuckers.” “He was inventing vocabulary,” recalled Lombardi in an interview with Peter Whitmer in 1990. “You could see the seeds of the writing style.”

Wenner came across Thompson’s first book of journalism, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs

Somewhere across the desert, Hunter Thompson was rumbling toward them in a rented Cadillac.

They set up a canister of nitrous oxide by the pool and sucked the gas from a clear tube as they swam by.

That night, Thompson tried the confrontational approach to disarming police that he described in Fear and Loathing, performing a stunt he claimed never to be able to replicate: Asking the officer whether an intoxicated man could do this, he flipped his sunglasses off the back of his head and quickly caught them behind his back. “That should count for something, shouldn’t it?” he said. Leibovitz snapped a photo and the cop let them go. The future of Wenner’s newspaper was saved in a single stroke.

“It was really a survival thing; you just get placed in these places,” she said, “and the volume of what I witnessed and saw and photographed began to create me.”

Pat Caddell, a polling wunderkind from Harvard who became part of Rolling Stone’s druggie entourage and published a long and wonky election essay in the newspaper.

Wenner was, in effect, reframing rock and roll as a celebrity culture like any before it. It wasn’t a movement, or a youth culture anymore, let alone a revolution. This was the age of personalities, just as the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s had portended. Mainstream magazines like Time and Newsweek ran small sections called “Transition” and “Newsmakers” to highlight the famous and important, but boldfaced names were now the medium of rock and roll and thus the message of Rolling Stone.

The youth movement in the 1960s seemed to be essentially unitary, but as it shattered, its fragments proved to be even more journalistically interesting, and Rolling Stone was perfectly positioned to sweep them up.

As Wenner told a reporter in 1971, “There is no such thing as objectivity. It does not exist. Nobody is objective. No perceived event is objective, and any serious editor or writer will recognize that.”

In this new space, a minor press baron from San Francisco could casually float into high society with the drug dealers and the rough trade. “Jann, in a sense, was very lucky,” said Dotson Rader. “It was in the ’70s when the social categories collapsed. In the ’70s, you’d go to a party at Leonard Bernstein’s at the Dakota and you would see socialites, some of the Kennedys; you’d see the crème de la crème of New York society. And then you’d see musicians, artists, and then you’d see drug dealers and everybody, perfectly well mannered, but the social mix would’ve been unthinkable twenty years before. And suddenly, I think because the rich were frightened and were thinking, ‘We better let the barbarians in before they tear the house down,’ the walls came down. Forced tolerance is what it was. It also made it possible for Jann to move as quickly as he did.”

“The only thing that matters in life is sex,” declared Prince Egon, who when asked if he was a bisexual laughed and said, “Bisexual? That is funny! Hahaha. You talk like that is rare. Do you know any man our age, any man under thirty, do you know one who has not slept with a boy? No, you know none. There are none.”

earlier years.” The reality was that Thompson was not able to return to those productive earlier times.

As the Rolling Stone cover line put it, “There’s Gold in the Middle of the Road.” The band was Loggins and Messina.

Consequently, the Carpenters, John Denver, Carly Simon, Donny Osmond, and even actor Peter Falk, star of NBC’s Columbo, all made the cover of Rolling Stone. “That’s the period where Rolling Stone really does turn into a promotional vehicle,” said Greil Marcus. “Whether

said critic Dave Marsh, who first wrote to Wenner in 1970 asking why he hated groups from Michigan

As a rule, Rolling Stone critics hated Led Zeppelin.

Annie and Mick had become lovers, an affair that began in Montauk and allegedly inspired the song “Memory Motel”

The T.A.M.I. Show, in which the Stones were famously blown off the stage by the kinetic James Brown.

In New York, Wenner was exploring his sexuality more openly than in the past, socializing with Steve Rubell, the co-owner of Studio 54, and sexually ambiguous media executives like Geffen and Barry Diller, not to mention grade school classmate and gay icon Liza Minnelli.

The ticket stubs told the story: Rolling Stone Magazine vs. The Eagles, the Sunday afternoon of May 7, 1978. It was a supernova of 1970s spectacle, a “grudge match” of slow-pitch softball between the biggest rock-and-roll magazine and the biggest-selling rock-and-roll act, played out before five thousand spectators at Dedeaux Field at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Jimmy Buffett, slated to be the umpire until he broke his leg in a previous game, followed the action via CB radio.

Don Henley and Glenn Frey of the Eagles hated Rolling Stone. The music editor, Peter Herbst, who started in 1977, had described their live act as a bunch of “formless blobs” onstage who “flaunt no athletic grace—if anything, they loiter.”

Chuck Young wrote up a snarky item in Random Notes making fun of the band’s losses in intramural softball against a team led by Jimmy Buffett. Glenn Frey, whose competitive streak was legend, wrote in to correct the record and challenge Rolling Stone to a game: “Anytime you pencil-pushing desk jockeys want to put on your spikes, we’ll kick your ass, too.”

There was a brief moment of hope that Hunter Thompson, the “sports editor” who inspired the team’s name, might bring much-needed star power to their side, but the night before the game a group of staffers went to see him in a luxury hotel in L.A. and watched him snort a pile of cocaine while telling his life story to the producers of a new film, Where the Buffalo Roam, starring Bill Murray as Hunter Thompson.

Crowe counted his Mitchell interview among the best he ever did for Rolling Stone. It was also one of his last before he left for a successful career in Hollywood, later directing Almost Famous, the nostalgic 2000 film based on his early life at Rolling Stone, in which he cast Jann Wenner in a walk-on part.

(He wanted Carl Bernstein to write it, but Herbst assigned it to the new editor of Random Notes, Kurt Loder.)

him by supporting his battle with the Nixon administration, which tried and failed to deport Lennon for fomenting political disorder.

Lennon was in his “Lost Weekend” period, carousing with songwriter Harry Nilsson and famously getting evicted from the Troubadour for heckling the Smothers Brothers. He showed up at an Ann Peebles

concert with a sanitary napkin taped to his forehead—an incident reported in Rolling Stone in February 1974:

Carson—but Rolling Stone was now a business formula, an uneasy détente between Wenner and his editorial staff rather than the cult of hip that it used to be in San Francisco. “To me, the whole scene felt unhappy,” said Annie Leibovitz. “It wasn’t exploratory any longer. I think everyone was living off of what Rolling Stone meant and was. Again, looking back at it, it’s growing up. I don’t know if Rolling Stone survived that move, on some level.”

In 1988, a writer named Albert Goldman published a massive biography called The Lives of John Lennon, which chipped away at the hagiography surrounding the Beatle to recast him as a closeted homosexual who was filled with rage and might have once beaten a man to death in Hamburg in the early 1960s.

The death of John Lennon was the end of the Beatles, but it was the beginning of Jann Wenner as keeper of the rock-and-roll myth. The Rolling Stone version of history—in biweekly issues and Rolling Stone–branded picture books, anthologies, and televised anniversary specials—was carefully shaped by Jann Wenner. He was the fame maker but also the flame keeper. The success and power of Rolling Stone made him the de facto architect of rock’s cosmology, but it was his attention to the legends that made him the indispensable man.

Commercials as art forms—it was an ingenious stroke, and it would become a revolution not only in marketing but in music fandom.

Furstenberg told him to give it up. “She took me aside,” recalled Wenner, “and she said, ‘Why are you doing this? There are fifty-five people around here who can produce movies; there’s only one person who can do Rolling Stone. Do that. Stay with that.’ ”

On March 5, 1982, John Belushi’s naked body was discovered in a room of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, dead from an overdose of heroin and cocaine. The night before, he had been partying with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams until three in the morning. According to the female drug partner who was with him, his last words were “Just don’t leave me alone.” She left shortly thereafter.

And once a couple of Beatles and Bob Dylan appeared with the Rolling Stones, there was no rock or pop star who did not want to be installed in that historic continuum. This was a public honor but also a media spectacle that could revive careers, kick up record sales, spark reissues (on the new format enlivening the coffers of the music companies, the CD), and burnish the reputation of forgotten artists like the Rascals or the Dave Clark Five. It would also stoke old rivalries, as when Mike Love of the Beach Boys ranted, during his acceptance speech, that Mick Jagger was “too chickenshit” to get onstage with him.

“The richer Jann got, the more he thought he was smarter than everyone else, he was better than everyone.

“Jann works through his shame, but he does it publicly and through the pages of Rolling Stone and Us Weekly,” said Gary Armstrong, the onetime chief marketing officer for Wenner Media and a gay man in whom Wenner confided. “Every really good issue is a therapy session.”

He related to the Playboy publisher. Now, there was a man who stamped the world with his personal vision of life. An individualist. A maverick. A lucky guy. “He lived it,” said Wenner. “He lived it.”