I had a great idea for a post, my best blogging of the year, in fact. I worked it all out when I was driving, but when I arrived, it was gone.
Vanished.
So I went searching for it, trying out dozens of possible ideas.
I never found it. But I did find five other posts, posts that never would have been worked out if I hadn’t been looking for the other one.
That’s how snipe hunting works. It’s not actually about the snipe.
Once you use your plates every day, they cease to be the good china.
Of course, the plates didn’t change. Your story did. The way you treat them did.
The same goes for the red carpet. If you roll it out for every visitor or every customer, it ceases to be red.
They’re essential. The house begins to stink if we don’t take out the garbage.
But at work, while they might be essential, they may not be important. At least, not important enough for us to spend a lot of focus on.
Chores are:
The bills have to get paid. But they might not have to be paid by you.
Entrepreneurs, artists and freelancers often spend a lot of time on chores. We justify this because outsourcing chores to others costs money, and in this moment, money is tight.
But that’s not the real story.
The truth is that if we stop doing chores, we have to do real work instead. The things that aren’t repeatable or proven. The things that are emotionally difficult, creatively challenging or simply requiring exploration and guts to pursue. If we succeed at this work, there will be plenty of money to pay to get the chores done.
Doing chores cheerfully and with skill is a fine hobby. But it might not be what you need to do right now.
A friend’s email said, “I know many of my readers aren’t techies and you’re thinking of putting this newsletter aside…”
We should get clear about what we’re talking about when we say “techie.”
I’m going to argue that involves a combination of two things:
But someone who says, “I’m not a techie” might actually be saying, “I’m willfully uninformed.” They might be saying, “I don’t give tech the benefit of the doubt and it’s uncomfortable for me to keep up with it… but by giving into those feelings, I’m intentionally falling behind.”
Some people go for a run even when they don’t feel like it, because they realize that keeping fit is part of the deal. Some go to the opera or a blues club or expose themselves to culture that isn’t an easy fit, because they know it makes them more useful, more interesting or simply more alive.
I think we’ve long passed the point where an active professional can simply choose to not understand how tech works.
You’re a user or you’re being used. Best to know which.
Not simply in the classroom, but anywhere we hope to inform, inspire or educate:
Assume enrollment. Either someone is committed to learning or they’re not. While many situations place people into a spot where they are compelled to show up (exhibit A: learning arithmetic in grade school), it’s almost impossible to teach well if people don’t care. If folks aren’t enrolled, then the first job is to change that. If you’re worried that they’ll click away or drift off, it’s difficult to do good work.
Assume good intent. This is a cousin of enrollment. If you’re worried that someone is going to use an AI to write an essay, it’s easy to spend all your time building walls instead of bridges.
Assume fear. Learning creates change, and change is scary. In addition, we’re briefly incompetent just before we understand… we know that something can be done, but we don’t know how to do it (yet). When in doubt, look for the fear.
Assume a lack of context. The reason you ‘know’ something is because you know it. You understand what came before, what’s next to it, how it works, what the language of your field is (both words and concepts). If you’re teaching something new, you can’t be sure that’s true for them. More time on context and less time on tips and bullet points creates the conditions for understanding.
Assume connection. Some would like to believe that learning can be done alone, in a tower, with a laptop. But in fact, until we interact with other people or systems, all we’ve done is absorb, we haven’t yet understood.
Part of the luxury of living near the ocean or the mountains is that you can be picky. If the surf or the powder isn’t great, leave it for the tourists. Good is insufficient, wait for the great moments…
When we’re young, or the project is going really well, it’s easy to waste the good days. After all, there will be another one tomorrow.
What becomes clear, though, is that good days are precious. When you’re feeling even a little creative, don’t wait. Write it down, roll tape, speak up. When you’re feeling reasonably healthy, go for a walk.
They’re all good days, if we choose.
Roger Bannister ran a four-minute mile by having a relay race of pace runners next to him. If he could keep up with his pacer, he’d finish the run in record time.
If you work in an office where people are regularly shipping breakthrough work, it’s likely your work will ship as well. If you’re in an industry or a zip code where entrepreneurs regularly build and fund businesses of scale, it’s more likely you will too.
The pacing team isn’t an accident. It’s a choice.
Just because it’s slow (or too fast, or too brutal, or too senseless) around here doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Or that you have to stay around here.
Walk into a bank with a stocking on your head and you’re probably going to get arrested.
Civil society as we know it is dependent on identity and responsibility. A person does something and owns the consequences. This requirement of identity leads to the dynamic of the free market that we call trust.
Even companies, which aren’t people but lately have been given many of their privileges, occasionally have to pay the price for abusing our trust.
But what happens when the email, the essay, the voice, the interactions–aren’t from a person, but from a swarm of bots? Is that really Donny Osmond singing us Happy Birthday or a clever AI construction?
[On the other hand, people are really making good use of the free AI on this blog–and so far, it’s pretty trustworthy.]
When the internet began to chip away at our interpersonal relationships, we relied on brand names or clues to figure out what was real. We invented captchas and filters to figure out who or what was truthworthy.
A certain kind of trust is no longer useful. Selfish hustlers are going to be one of the first big winners in the AI race, abusing systems that were built on traditional ideas of identity and responsibility.
Then what?
This is a fine moment to start taking the question seriously.
One reason we have so much trouble fixing chronic degenerative conditions is that we need to remove elements before we can start building new functions.
If we simply put effort on top of a shaky foundation, it’ll all be wasted.
The best way forward might be to take a few steps back.
A cat’s eye is smooth but doesn’t seem to be… there’s a mystery of depth. That illusion is called chatoyancy.
The same is true for some sorts of woods (cedar is an exception).
The digital age makes it more and more likely we’re experiencing things through a flat screen, and as a result, it’s very easy to file flat experiences away without a thought.
But creating something that’s chatoyant–that shifts in the light, that changes as we experience it… that’s a fascinating and useful project.
