If 1,000 people toss a fair coin three times, 125 of them will get three heads in a row. Perfect score. And 125 will lose every time.
We probably shouldn’t give the winners too much credit.
Actually, the real work is deciding which games to play and which results are worthy of trust and respect going forward.
No one buys a hat without looking at themselves in a mirror first.
Ever.
There were hats before there were mirrors, so I’m not sure how it used to be, but that’s how it is now. Even though we may imagine we’re wearing a hat to protect ourselves from the sun, the mirror reminds us that it’s really about something more than that.
A surprisingly large number of choices we make involve actual and metaphorical mirrors.
“What will I tell my friends?”
“How does this make me look?”
Don’t open a hat store unless you install a mirror first.
Since I was born, humans have created 6 billion jobs.
All while technology relentlessly disrupts existing industries.
The pin making machine replaced the hand-crafted pin.
The ox-pulled plow replaced millions of hours of backbreaking work.
The amplification and electronic distribution of music upended the work of the live musician, and the camera replaced countless portrait artists.
The internet destroyed the travel agent industry, and Grammarly and Photoshop turned fine editing jobs into low-paid gig work.
[Claude adds: Skilled typesetters, trained in working by hand, were angry at desktop publishing, and the digital distribution of music and books ended the future of many traditional retailers. It’s easy to go on… The assembly line replaced skilled craftsmen who built entire products by hand. The printing press eliminated armies of scribes who copied books and documents manually. The calculator made human computers – people hired to perform mathematical calculations – obsolete overnight. The washing machine destroyed the livelihoods of professional laundresses and washerwomen. The automobile industry wiped out blacksmiths, stable hands, and carriage makers. Email and word processors replaced secretaries who specialized in dictation and typing. The mechanized loom put countless hand-weavers out of work during the Industrial Revolution. GPS navigation systems eliminated the need for most mapmakers and drastically reduced demand for physical atlases. Digital photography destroyed the film development industry and put countless photo lab technicians out of work. Self-checkout machines have steadily replaced cashiers across retail stores, and ATMs transformed many bank teller positions.]
When the web arrived, many of the projects I had built as a book packager–some at great cost–became obsolete. It didn’t seem to me that I could do much about this, though. Arguing that I was entitled to have people buy the Information Please Business Almanac instead of looking stuff up online wasn’t going to work.
It’s entirely possible that a magical AI will replace every single human job and then destroy the Earth. But it’s far more likely that the pattern of the last five hundred years will continue.
If this transformation was an opportunity, what would you do with it?
Pedestrian traffic in Grand Central Station is a bit of a miracle. Thousands of people, all walking quickly, in almost non-Euclidian chaos, headed toward different trains. And no one collides.
We see the same thing at a more dangerous clip when a four lane highway merges. The cars are just a few feet apart (or perhaps a few inches) driving a mile a minute (faster than a cheetah) and yet, collisions are rare.
If one person, just one, running late for a train and carrying a hot pizza, starts shouting and running through the train terminal, the crowd will part and he’s likely to make it to the other side.
It might even work if two different people do it.
It doesn’t scale.
What we’ve learned from thousands of years of practice is that the only way to avoid collisions is to find the confidence and empathy to yield… the shortest way to get to where we’re going involves cooperation and the resiliency that comes with empathy and awareness. When we exchange appropriate spacing and yield when we can, connections occur and we can flow forward.
Selfish brutality might work in the short run, but it always breaks.
Teaching is not about assignments, textbooks or authority.
It’s about the pedagogy, connection and approach that creates the conditions for a willing student to change their mind.
Everything else is simply grunt work.
Sooner or later, we are all self taught.
Conversations and projects usually revolve around an axis. It could be a goal or an urgency or a person.
It might be the boss. Wondering what they want, what they need, what sort of mood they’re in, what just happened, what might happen. “What would Jeff do?”
It might the clock. SNL goes on at 11:30, whether or not it’s ready.
It might be the bureaucracy. Figuring out what the rules are, who sets approvals, what the slowdowns might be.
In politics, it’s usually about the tussle of the day, the micro-crisis of right now.
Often, conversations at work are about (apparent) risk and safety, not possibility and innovation.
Inevitably, the center of gravity pulls attention and action from all around, straight to its core. The centered emotion and fear and objective is the silent moderator of the interaction.
Worth noting: the context changes as the day unfolds. The interactions in the operating room are different than those in the boardroom (or the lunchroom) at the same hospital.
And the center isn’t usually clearly spoken of or described. The center is less about the nuts and bolts of the tactics, and more about the fears, desires and power of the humans that have made themselves the center of the conversation–even conversations that they’re not present for.
Culture is what happens when human beings interact, and “people like us do things like this” creates standards and expectations that are built on the foundation of our shared understanding of the center.
A clear indication that this is going on is how it feels when that center isn’t in the room. When we try to center on something else, the system pushes back, whispering that the new path a distraction or moving it down the priority list. But when the center shifts, we can feel the conversations shift as well.
The most effective way to change an organization, a company or a relationship is to identify the invisible centering forces and address them.
Our opportunity is to weed out the toxic centers and get back to focusing on the work that we signed up for in the first place, the change that matters.
It begins by naming the center.
Two hundred years ago, there were a lot of violinists. Many made a living at it.
If you were of means and wanted to hear music, your best option was to hire someone to play it for you.
Of course, the invention of the phonograph and the radio changed all of that. Now, one great violinist could be heard by millions, not dozens of people.
The result is that there are now only two sorts of violinists:
If you are hoping to make a living as a pretty good violinist, you were born in the wrong century.
As you’ve already guessed, we’re all violinists now.
A screwdriver works because the handle is bigger than the screw. You can twist the handle with leverage, causing the screw to turn. The bigger the handle, the more leverage you have.
We’ve spent a trillion dollars building a worldwide communications and AI network, and you can have access to the whole thing for $20, or free if you go to the library.
All that tech, those connections, the programs, the learnings, the communities–torque that’s available to anyone who earns our attention.
Corporations and governments used to need to hire 1,000 people to even come close to having the leverage that any individual reading this has right now.
PS Celebrating the launch of my Kickstarter with an interview with Oriana Leckert, head of publishing at Kickstarter. Bring your questions, I hope to see you there.
It’s at 4 pm NY time today. Here’s a possible translation to your time zone:
There will be a recording posted on Linkedin.
“Maybe” is the problem.
If you’re serious, say, “yes.”
And if it’s not for you, walk away.
But endlessly reconsidering opportunities without forward motion is a place to hide.
Many organizations have a widget or service, something people already need or want, and they work to sell it to people.
Some seek monopoly power so they can force others to do what they want them to do.
But there’s a third path: we can create a brand or a movement or a community that seeks to do things with people.
A chance to accompany someone on a journey, to lead instead of manage, or to amplify and narrate. When we help people get to where they hope to go, persuasion isn’t as important as enrollment and engagement.
