Extraordinary organizations have this is as their employee handbook. Resilient ones. Human ones that can thrive in the face of automation and AI. Organizations that are built on customer service, hospitality and flexibility.
Of course, this means you’ll need to treat your team with respect and offer them training and dignity. It means you won’t be able to simply write down every single step in the manual, or work as fast as you can to replace people with uncaring software.
The partner of UYBJ is “why?”
If someone asks a team member why they’re doing something, it’s not useful to train them to repeat the policy. The puppetry of “I’m just doing my job” is the opposite of UYBJ. And that means, “because I said so,” while convenient, might not be the best management style.
When a customer asks, “why is it like this?” the professional can answer honestly and with conviction. That’s what it means to use your best judgment.
If you have a job where UYBJ doesn’t apply, it’s worth recognizing that every day you spend there is one where you’ve wasted a chance to learn something new and to take responsibility for what’s next.
Some pits are infinitely deep. Problems that, once addressed, always get worse. N +1. For some folks, the acquisition of money or power are like this. A little leads to a desire for more.
Other problems have known solutions. The tank only holds 8 gallons and then you can move on to filling the next one. A third ice cream cone isn’t as good as the first one. Effort leads to satisfaction.
It pays to decide which sort of hole we’re trying to fill.
Where do you show up, what do you publish? Who do you ask, and what do you answer to? What gets better because you persist?
Are there systems you support or work to change?
What do you do when you don’t feel like it? Especially then.
The ocean is made of drops. And our practice turns those drops into something of significance.
It’s a practice if we show up even if it’s not working (yet). And it’s a practice if we understand how to make it better.
Our actions become our habits, and our habits attract others. That becomes our community, and our community builds systems. Those systems feel awkward until they become normal, and then, once normal, they become the status quo.
Bolts of lightning rarely change the world, but erosion does. Streams turn into rivers, and rivers persist.
We don’t use the same language or ideas with an in-law that we do with our bar buddies.
When the internet was young, people often chose to filter themselves online. We didn’t know who was on the other end of the pipe, and we knew it would be there forever. And typing feels more permanent and official than speaking…
Over time, the algorithms rewarded people who were guttural, hurtful, profane and, to use an overused and inefficient word, “authentic.” And so it flipped.
Now, social media is filled with amped-up rants that pretend to be unfiltered, and the standard for discourse is quickly eroding. There’s plenty of data to confirm that we’re spewing words and ideas that would never be tolerated in person, with friends.
Why should our standard for public behavior be lower than it is for the people we know?
Unfiltered doesn’t mean real. Because it’s our filters that make us who we are.
We don’t notice that the tree we planted a few years ago thrives just a bit more each day. We don’t notice that the mail shows up when it’s supposed to, that our civilization persists in the face of chaos, and that the lights (usually) go on when we flip a switch.
Granted?
What would happen if we paid as much attention to these persistent delights as we pay to the annoying surprises that unfold each day?
The narrative of our time here becomes our lived experience. We’re the directors of this very long cinéma vérité documentary, deciding what gets focused on and what we skip over.
And it turns out that choosing our focus often leads to the plot changing as well.
And shiitake mushrooms, spaghetti squash, ginger and even packaged tofu?
In the 1960s, the culture changed, and so did the supermarket. Small markets with fifty or sixty kinds of fruits and vegetables transformed into supermarkets carrying hundreds of varieties. Cooking shows and cookbooks raced to teach home cooks about the new, interesting and exotic.
And Frieda Caplan showed up to orchestrate a connection between a desire for novelty and unknown international foods.
Frieda didn’t invent the kiwi. But she named it, told a story about it and brought it to the merchants who needed it. She saw that markets in flux often need narrators.
The metaphor is something we see all the time–when markets and culture change, there’s room for an agent of change to bring leverage and innovation to the world. The extraordinary thing about Frieda’s was the scale of it. One person, in the right place, the right moment, with the right attitude, transformed the diet of millions of people.
Is there any doubt that right now we’re seeing a similar shift in the culture all around us?
Ever since Viking took this photo fifty years ago, some people have been sure–certain–that it clearly shows a face on the planet’s surface. Of course, once we had a high resolution image from a later mission, all resemblance to a face went away.
Human beings need a story, especially when we’re trying to understand something we haven’t already classified. And so we see faces in clouds, in grilled cheese sandwiches and on other planets.
We do it with song lyrics that don’t make sense and with technology we don’t really understand as well.
Some of the drivers are:
Fear of the unknown.
Novelty and the arrival of something new.
Unpredictable inputs that seem to assert some sort of intentional action and agency.
It’s no wonder, then, that LLMs and other forms of AI lead to waves of pareidolia. We ascribe a gender, a tone of voice and most of all, intent to these computer programs that are doing nothing but math. We imagine that they are lying to us, manipulating us and getting ready to take over the world.
If imagining that there’s a little person inside helps you use the tool better, that’s fine.
But made up stories that we invented to deal with our fear often make it worse. They distract us from the hard work of understanding what’s actually happening.
When the details become more clear, we’ll then have to unlearn all the personification we insisted on learning.
The simple rule: Nine shortcuts take longer and are less productive than simply doing the work the right way the first time.
When we look for one-quick-tip and the lazy hack, we’re wasting time we could have spent on the direct path instead.
When a shortcut becomes the best way to do something, it ceases to be a shortcut. It’s simply the direct path. It’s easy to find satisfaction in finding the unexplored shortcut that gives us a temporary advantage. However, it won’t last long, and the time spent looking for it is a distraction.
Sit down and type. Stand up and lead. Simply begin.
December 11, 2025
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