Show up on time. It doesn’t cost anything to keep your promises when it comes to time. Show up for the meeting when the meeting starts. Have the dry cleaning ready when you promise. Ship on time. Return that phone call. Finish the renovation ahead of schedule.

Boy that’s simple. Apparently, it’s incredibly difficult.

If you want to build trust, you need to be trustworthy. The simplest test of trustworthiness for most people is whether or not you keep your promises, and the first promises you make are about time.

Cherish my time. The second part is closely related. It has to do with respect. You respect my time when you don’t waste it. When you don’t spam me. When you worry about the 100 cars backed up on the road and figure out how to get us moving more quickly. You respect me when you value my time more highly than your own.

If you want someone to think you’re selfish, just ask for a minute of their time and then waste it or use it for your own ends. Or automate the process so three minutes of your time wastes three minutes of the 1,000 or one million people on your list.

In a society where so many people have enough, few people have time to spare. When you waste it (by breaking a promise and being late) or abuse it (by viewing your time as worth more than mine), we respond by distrusting you, ignoring you and eventually moving on.

Where did Wikipedia come from?

All those hours, all that work. Where did the time and effort come from?

Clay Shirky points out that it comes from the TV we’re not watching.

Take a look at Netroidcomics, courtesy of Bert. Sure, some of these folks were at work, goofing off, but the real influx of time and energy we’re seeing online comes from TV. Three, four or even six hours a day not spent doing virtually nothing. Multiply it by 800 million people online and suddenly, there’s a huge influx of hours just waiting to be put to good use.

I don’t watch TV and I don’t go to meetings. You’d be amazed at the difference it makes.

While the last few years have been devoted to mostly trivial pursuits, I would imagine we’re going to see a rapid acceleration in the quality and meaning of things we manage to create with our new-found time. At least I hope so.

Markets love icons. We seek them out. Placeholders, shorthand for a bigger idea or a shortcut to a good enough solution.

Marilyn Monroe is an icon. You can use her image and say a lot, instantly. Same with the Mona Lisa.

Is it possible to be more of a blonde bombshell than Monroe? Of course you can be better looking or more blonde or more married to intellectual celebrities or dour sports stars. Is it possible to paint a better painting than the Mona Lisa? Definitely.

It doesn’t matter.

Once there’s an icon in place, it’s there because it’s working. It serves a purpose, it carries useful information and performs a valuable function. There will never (or not for a generation, anyway) be the next Marilyn Monroe because this Marilyn Monroe isn’t broken. Countless artists have seen themselves as the next Jackson Pollock, but as far as the lay public is concerned, we don’t really need one, thanks very much.

Google, of course, is the Marilyn Monroe of search. I have no doubt that someone will develop a useful tool one day that takes time and attention away from Google, but it won’t be a search engine. Google, after all, isn’t broken, not in terms of solving the iconic “how do I find something online using my web browser” question.

The challenge for organizations is this: the easiest projects to start and fund are those that go after existing icons. The search for the “next” is easy to explain and exciting to join because we can visualize the benefits. But success keeps going to people who build new icons, not to those that seek to replace the most successful existing ones.