Publicity is the hard work of getting media outlets and social media influencers to talk about you. Hustle for attention and mentions.
Public relations is the much harder work of engaging with internal teams to make something worth talking about. It’s not spin, it’s story telling that resonates and holds up to scrutiny.
Sometimes, organic publicity is a natural byproduct of good public relations. Mostly, though, the work is about the public, not the folks in the middle.
If you want to do public relations, you need access and leverage and time.
If you want to do publicity, you’ll need a thick skin.
Not smart is a passive act, remedied with learning, experience and thought.
Stupid is active, the work of someone who should have or could have known better and decided to do something selfish, impulsive or dangerous anyway.
The more experience, assets and privilege we have, the less excusable it is to do stupid things. And at the same time, the more useful it is to announce that we’re not smart (yet).
Everything flows from the strategic decisions we make early in the process:
Choose your landlord. The rent is due every month. The place we set up (whether it’s a retail storefront, a social media platform or a warehouse) determines our cost structure, our deal flow and the space we have to work with.
Choose your investors. They decide the scale of the resources we have to invest, the timeframe and the decision-making rubrics.
Choose your customers. This either flows from the first two choices, or, if you’re smart, this is the one you make first. Your customers decide whether or not to spread the word, to be loyal, and to push you to raise or lower your standards… Your customers are the engine of your growth and also the architect of how you spend your day.
It’s easy to back into all three of these choices. To do what others are doing, to find yourself with a mortgage or SEO strategy or payment schedule that pushes you to run your project in ways you never would have chosen.
Often, we build things hoping they’ll work. But complex systems are more resilient when we build in the diagnostics for failure from the start.
A multi-unit retail chain, a medical practice, a school–they need a dashboard and process for finding and fixing things before the entire enterprise fails. A personal finance plan and a career probably need one too. It’s easier to do that well if we plan for it.
They don’t use canaries in coal mines any more, but you might need a few.
PS if you’re already doing this, you know. If you’re not, this is the moment to begin.
A friend sorts his records in an interesting way: not by name or genre, but by which musicians are friends with each other. That means some shelves are very crowded, and I’m imagining a few notorious artists have plenty of room all to themselves.
It’s possible that we sort the folks in our lives this way as well. The people who can be counted on, who are part of a larger circle, who are dynamic or interesting or selfish… lots of shelves, available to anyone willing to put in the work (or not).
Typesetters did not like the laser printer. Wedding photographers still hate the iphone. And some musicians are outraged that AI is now making mediocre pop music.
One group of esteemed authors is demanding that book publishers refuse to use AI in designing book covers, recording audiobooks or a range of other tasks.
As always, this isn’t going to work very well.
Plato was sure that the invention of handwriting would destroy memory, and I’m confident there were scribes who thought that the Gutenberg press was the end of civilization. Yet, all around us, there are writers who use spell check, guitarists who use electronic pitch tuners and photographers who use digital cameras.
Productivity wins out.
Productivity is outcome focused. When we create more value in less time, the consumer comes out ahead (that’s why it’s called “value.”)
And so people don’t mind driving on streets that were paved by machine instead of by hand, or driving instead of walking. They eat in fancy restaurants that have freezers and write on paper with a pen, not a quill.
As AI expands, the real opportunity is to find a way to use human effort to create more value.
When we bring humanity to the work in a way that others demand, labor is honored and valued.
The irony here is rich: the industrial age indoctrinated us and pushed us to be less human, to be cogs in the machine. School brainwashed us into asking if it will be on the test–the test itself is an artifact of quality control, and human resources was invented to make factories more efficient.
So it comes around. Now that we’ve got a tireless computer ready to do the jobs we trained to be pretty good at, it’s human work that matters.
In the 150 years since the dawn of photography, the jobs of most painters disappeared. If you need a way to remember someone’s face, take a photo. But at the same time, the profession of original, trendsetting painter has grown remarkably. It turns out that there’s a market for paintings that are powerful, memorable and inefficient.
Systems are powerful and persistent. Often, they evolve to serve those that seek value from those systems.
It’s easy to imagine that we have a say in whether or not AI will take over the basic elements of our work as radiologists, writers or musicians. We don’t.
What we do have is agency over how we’ll thrive in a world where human work is being redefined.
Either you work for an AI or AI works for you.
July 2, 2025
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