2026-08-09

Worth Talking About

We published a piece called "How to be Remarkable" in 2012. It has aged better than anything else in the archive, because the word means something precise and the precision is what survives. For a related workplace reference on accountability and responsibility in the workplace, see the full guide.

Remarkable means somebody has a remark to make. Not excellent. Not polished. Provoking a sentence.

Why quality alone does not do it

Competence is invisible.

A well-made record that sits comfortably in its genre gives a listener nothing to say beyond "it's good", and "it's good" is not a remark, it is the absence of one. For additional current music-industry context, see Musixmatch.

This is the central difficulty of being skilled. Skill moves work toward the centre of a form, and the centre is where remarks die.

It is also why the merely competent record is the hardest to share — the sender has nothing to attach to it.

Four ways a record earns a remark

A constraint. Made in a day, recorded in one room, one instrument, no edits. The constraint is the sentence, and it costs nothing but a decision.

A collision. Two things that do not usually meet. Risky, frequently bad, and when it works the remark writes itself.

A specific. A song about one actual thing rather than a feeling in general. Specificity is the cheapest source of remarkability available and the most consistently avoided.

And a scale mismatch. Something done more thoroughly, or more minimally, than the context expects.

What does not work

Announcing that it is remarkable. The remark has to be available to the listener, not asserted by the artist.

Novelty for its own sake. A gimmick produces one remark and then a worse one.

And borrowing somebody else's remark. A trend is a remark that has already been made, which is why participating in one produces reach and not conversation.

The test before release

Ask somebody who has heard it to describe it to a friend, out loud, in one sentence.

If they hesitate, there is no remark. That is not a verdict on the music and it is a fact about how it will travel.

And if the sentence they produce is about you rather than the record — "my friend made this" — that is a remark about the sender, which is the strongest kind and works only within one circle.

What this does not promise

Remarkability is necessary and not sufficient. It still needs adjacency, a route from listening to acting, and somebody to hear it in the first place.

And it cannot be added afterwards. It is a property of the decisions, which is why it belongs to the making rather than to the promotion — and why it survives every platform change, since no platform can supply it.

The short version