The Theory of Bubbles

Burst no bubbles.

For more than seven years I worked in an ice cream shop attached to a gas station. Nights, mostly. You couldn’t really get lower than that. I spent a long time there before I ever built anything that worked.

One night a guy looked at me and said, “You live in your own bubble.” He meant it as a small thing, but it stuck with me. I started thinking about people and their bubbles, and what edge I could pull out of it.

Here’s what I landed on: everybody lives in their own bubble. And I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean it literally. Every person carries their own metrics, their own goals, their own standards. Their own heroes and their own losers. Their own version of upside and downside. Their own narrative about how life works, what’s worth sacrificing, what they expect to get back. The whole thing is sealed and self-contained.

So when you want to negotiate with someone, partner with someone, or sell to someone, you can’t do it from inside your own bubble. You have to move next to theirs. You have to approach them the way they understand life, and offer them something that makes sense in their world, measured by their parameters. If you show up measuring everything by your own metrics, you’ll lose, not because your offer is bad, but because you’re reading the wrong instruments.

I think about it like a Laplace transform. (I’m an engineer, so bear with me.) The same signal looks completely different in the time domain and the frequency domain. Nothing about the signal changed, only the coordinate system you’re viewing it from. People are the same. To actually talk to someone, you have to transform into their domain. Speak in their coordinates. And suddenly the thing that looked impossible becomes simple, because now you’re both reading the same axes.

This doesn’t mean you sacrifice yourself or fold. It just means you pay real attention to how the other person thinks and which bubble they live in, before you act. Because some of your moves, things that feel totally normal to you, can pop their bubble. And once you pop it, you’re not in a win anymore. You’re in a loss for both of you.

And the whole point of any move you make should be winning.

So before you pitch, before you negotiate, before you push, find their bubble. Step into their coordinates. You’re not changing the signal. You’re just finally speaking in the domain where they can hear it.

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