Today I spent the day with my new boss, a woman I first met near the start of my IT career when she, then a newly-hired contractor, was appointed business liaison for what turned out to be a highly successful software application I was designing. At lunchtime, we got to chatting and our conversation turned to my boss way back then, Frank, among the most brilliant, capable, and just plain decent human beings I have ever had the pleasure to know.

I will not waste your time detailing all the kind things Frank did for me or taught me over my years under his wing, except that a lot of it was not strictly work-related, the sort of thing my father might have impressed on me had my parents not divorced and my father had not been away most of the time on Air Force duty and, frankly, had been a better man.

Today, for the first time in a long time, I tried out a new product I was genuinely excited to get hold of.

Capitalism is not, as many millennials think, the root of all evil. Neither, as many boomers seem to think, is it the garden of all virtue. There is a balance to be found between public and private interests, and between innovation and foolish obfuscation. The shaving business is a case in point.

If you’re under 40 and don’t have an MBA, you may not be aware that the shaving razor business is a scam so well known it’s part of the Harvard curriculum. It works like this. Give away an attractive razor for cheap or for free, then make a profit selling the owner proprietary replacement cartridge blades that you somehow convince them are better in some way than the crazy cheap standard blades they were using before. Bonus dollars if you hook them young enough they never used the cheaper alternative, or still think of it as grampa’s old school. Why buy 50 blades for $9 when you can buy two for $10 and get half the performance? Ah, but the packaging is so manly and sleek, like what Captain Kirk would get his condoms in.

While prepping for a recent “Pay it Forward Day” presentation, I stumbled on a useful analogy: submitting creative work for sale is a bit like dating.

It’s tempting when a submission doesn’t work out, to think something like a teenager who just got ghosted by the hottest kid in the “in crowd”, to think “I wish I knew why they didn’t like me, then I could change.” You might even be tempted to respond to a purchasing editor asking exactly that. Don’t. Don’t, because you are selling yourself short. Don’t because you’ll look like a pestering kid asking “but why don’t you like me? Why? Why?”