Terry Gross conducted an interesting interview with Quentin Tarantino in which he explained how he originally wanted to be an actor. He only started writing because he was taking acting classes and needed audition scenes to perform…

I didn’t, like, study writing, I studied acting. And when I first started writing, it was literally in acting classes. And what would happen is – now it’s really easy to get scripts and stuff, but back then, you know oftentimes you’d buy the novelization to a movie if you wanted to get an idea of what the scene, you know, what happened in the scene.

Because like, you’re an actor, you want to do a scene in class. But one of the things I’ve always had is I’ve always had a really good memory. So I would go and watch a movie and then I would see a scene in the movie and I’d go, hey, I’d like to do that in class this Wednesday. And so what I would do is I would just remember the scene and I’d go home and I’d write out the scene from memory. And anything I didn’t remember I would just fill in the blanks myself and then go and give it to a classmate and then we’d do it.

When you’re discussing what you’re making, it’s tempting to try to seem perfect all the time. But revealing your flaws can be just as compelling. Imperfections are real — and people respond to real.

In “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” Michael Pollan discusses what made Julia Child so popular and brings up the famous show where she drops a potato pancake.

When I asked my mother recently what exactly endeared Julia Child to her, she explained that “for so many of us she took the fear out of cooking” and, to illustrate the point, brought up the famous potato show…This was a classic live-television moment, inconceivable on any modern cooking show: Martha Stewart would sooner commit seppuku than let such an outtake ever see the light of day.

The episode has Julia making a plate-size potato pancake, sautéing a big disc of mashed potato into which she has folded impressive quantities of cream and butter. Then the fateful moment arrives:

“When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions,” she declares, clearly a tad nervous at the prospect, and then gives the big pancake a flip. On the way down, half of it catches the lip of the pan and splats onto the stovetop. Undaunted, Julia scoops the thing up and roughly patches the pancake back together, explaining: “When I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have. You can always pick it up.” And then, looking right through the camera as if taking us into her confidence, she utters the line that did so much to lift the fear of failure from my mother and her contemporaries: “If you’re alone in the kitchen, WHOOOO” — the pronoun is sung — “is going to see?” For a generation of women eager to transcend their mothers’ recipe box (and perhaps, too, their mothers’ social standing), Julia’s little kitchen catastrophe was a liberation and a lesson: “The only way you learn to flip things is just to flip them!”

Great story. Most people today would edit this out. Yet it’s exactly the thing that endeared Child to so many. A Washington Post reporter commented:

It wasn’t that she could do no wrong; rather, she made doing wrong so right. The more she faltered — dropping the entire side of lamb on the floor, failing to make a dent carving the suckling pig, unmolding the mousse with a splat — the more viewers loved and trusted her.

The lesson for anyone trying to pick up fans/customers: Don’t be afraid to reveal those little mistakes everyone faces.

This is especially true if you’re a little guy. Being open and honest about stuff like this is something you can get away with. It’s an area that bigger competitors (with their PR teams and slew of filters) can’t match you on.

What you lose in the professionalism column, you’ll make up in the interestingness and intimacy columns.

Above: Can’t find the potato incident online but here’s a clip of Child preparing omelets.

The US Army’s Special Forces teams are 12 people. Despite their small size, these teams can equal the fighting power of a light infantry company. The capabilities of one of these teams:

Plan and conduct Special Forces operations separately or as part of a larger force; infiltrate and exfiltrate specified operational areas by air, land, or sea; conduct operations in remote areas and hostile environments for extended periods of time with a minimum of external direction and support; develop, organize, equip, train and advise or direct indigenous forces up to battalion size in special operations; train, advise and assist other U.S. and allied forces and agencies; plan and conduct unilateral SF operations; perform other special operations as directed by higher authority.

The small team size comes with a bunch of advantages: They’re self-contained, can work swiftly and quietly, don’t have the presence of conventional military troops, and are able to operate without a big infrastructure.

Big can be powerful. But even the Army realizes small can be a great way to get things done too.

The problem with selling your product to big companies: Middle men. The people who buy your products aren’t the same ones who use your products.

That disconnect is terrible for your business. You wind up making and selling products to appeal to people who aren’t using them. And that means you aim to impress the wrong people.

Let’s say you’re a gym owner trying to sell memberships. When you sell a big corporate client, you’re dealing with one individual at that company – and that may be a person who never even works out! So you impress this guy with nice dinners, tickets to the big game, fancy talk, brochures, lists of your equipment, and promises of low prices. You sell him on the sell, not on the product.

On the other hand, when you sell individual memberships to one person at a time, you sell your product. If your treadmills are always broken or your instructors are lame, individuals will go somewhere else. If everything’s great, people will stick with you and tell their friends. Your success is linked to the quality of what you make, not how well you wine and dine some guy in purchasing.

You want your success to be aligned with the quality of your products, not the quality of your promises. And the best way to do that is to build for small companies (1-10 people) or individuals who aren’t aligned with any company — freelancers, independent contractors, people building their own business during nights/weekends, etc.