If you’re trying to do or make something for someone else, you’ll either be judged or you’ll be ignored.

We say we don’t like being judged. I certainly say that.

Being ignored is the alternative. It’s certainly more comfortable to be ignored. No risk. Very safe. Won’t make you distracted as you sit comfortably on your couch in the evening.

But is that better?

The best time to start, buy the real estate, max out your retirement savings, build your network, eat healthy, train for a marathon, or find a mentor was before.

The 2nd best time is now.

Don’t let the 2nd best time go to waste. It’s severely underrated.

The paradox of social media is the echo chamber.

Social media algorithms are really good at showing us the entire world while at the same time narrowing our view of it. If you engage, even passively, you start to get more of what you want, think, and feel.

The more you get what you want, the easier it is to nod along. Nodding along is about rightness and righteousness. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah, I’m right. And with social media, you can nod along without incurring any risk.

Is this a feature or bug of social media?

When you’re nodding along in person, you incur risk, even if you’re in a group and enjoying the benefits of safety in numbers.

You’re standing with others. This side of the line, not that side. My sign says I’m with these people. People can see you. People can point at you. You have to walk back down the street or get into your car once you’re done nodding along.

So, is it a feature or a bug?

Neither. It’s a mirror. Social media reflects not just our desires but our fears. It doesn’t just amplify our voices; it echoes our silence. The real question is our willingness to engage with risk.

When we look in the mirror, are we happy nodding along?

I had something happen today that was hard to believe. I’m still not quite sure I do.

The mid-50s engineer in me is a bit cynical: That can’t be right. What’s the catch? That’s how they get ya.

But the other guy, the little flicker of the guy I want to be, wants to believe it. He’s a little wary but in a trust-but-verify way.

Belief is hard. Hard to believe is easy.

Sometimes you gotta take the hard way.

When someone asks me what I do for a living, I usually say, “I’m a typer.”

Software development, like many jobs today, is just typing. But is it?

How many times have you looked at someone else in your company and thought, “that job is easy,” or “I could do that job better than them.”

That might be true, but remember, your job is also just typing.

Hollywood loves making movies about serendipity.

RomComs, of course. Serendipity is almost always the inciting incident in a RomCom. However, most other genres also use serendipity to either throw the characters into the action or provide a critical piece to the puzzle along the journey. 

Because serendipity makes a great story.

Is it chance? Is it fate? Is it Providence? Is it some other over-arching force from the Universe that wants it to happen?

It taps into something deep inside us. We want to believe in destiny, that someone or something is watching over us, and that our lives have a greater purpose. We want to believe we can win the lottery. We can picture ourselves with the great big check in our hands as we stand at the front of the room full of flash bulbs. We dream about serendipity. 

Serendipity makes it all change in a heartbeat. One minute, you’re A. The next, you’re B. And B is amazing. 

But progress rarely happens due to serendipity in real life. 

I’m sure each of us can recall serendipitous events in our lives. Maybe even one or some of those led to something remarkable. You still tell that story. 

However, progress usually happens due to plain old incremental steps in the right (or wrong) direction. Get up today and do the work. A little better or more complete today than yesterday. 

Then, next week or next month, you look back and realize how far you’ve come.

Even if you’ve never been fishing, you’ve told fish stories. 

You know the kind of stories I’m talking about.

You catch a 6″ bass and release it back into the lake. A month later, you’re telling your buddies over beers about the 12-incher you caught. By the time you’re retelling the tale at the family reunion, that fish has become a 20″ monster that put up a fight worthy of Hemingway.

Why?

It might be rather simple. Maybe you’re just exaggerating. You’re trying to be relevant or one-up someone else with the guys. Yeah, you’re human. 

Or maybe…

You’d had a difficult week. In fact, you just got laid off, and now you don’t know what’s next. Let’s face it: you’re a failure. Your wife knows it. Your kids know it. Your friends know it. You’ve been exposed.

You and your son are at the lake, and it’s been a slow day. Nothing biting at all. Jeez, you’re even a failure at fishing. Of course you are. 

And then, you get one! Out of the blue, a bass hits the line and puts up a good fight. You get it to the boat and bring it in. Now, you’re not a total failure. That’s a win! 

When you look back on that day, you remember the win. You feel the pain that preceded it. You feel the boost to your morale.

That win felt like a 20″ monster that put up a fight worthy of Hemmingway. 

You never want to hear that.

But, on the other hand, you really do need to hear that. Because unless it sounds stupid to someone, it’s not creative, innovative, or daring enough. 

Your creativity, innovation, and courage are exactly what this world needs. That’s the only way you can move yourself, the state of the art, or your people forward. 

Yup, it better sound stupid because it just might work.

For every person who stands at the front of the stage, there was someone who worked behind the scenes.

For every person whose name is on the front of a building, there was someone, or more likely many someones, who worked behind the scenes.

For every person whose name appears on the front of the script, there was someone who worked behind the scenes.

For every person whose name is on the placard at the bottom of the trophy, there was someone who worked behind the scenes.

Read the credits. Read the memoirs or journals. Read the biography. Read the footnotes and references. That’s where you’ll find them. 

If you’re someone looking to have their name on something or stand at the front of something, you’re gonna need those someones behind the scenes. The better you are at finding, engaging, and appreciating them, the sooner your name will be there. 

As it turns out, we now have two universal solutions.

The first is AI. “We’ll just plug AI into that!” AI will solve most of our problems. It certainly is creating mountains of business opportunities.

And if you translate the headlines coming out of the pharma world, it looks like the second universal solution are GPT-1 drugs (Ozempic, WeGovy, etc).

I mean, what can’t it do?

It makes you skinny. It cures your diabetes. It helps lower your cholesterol. It also cures your heart disease and kidney disease. 

It’s the miracle drug. Let’s just plug Ozempic into that!

I think maybe, just like with AI, what Ozempic does is shine the light on humans’ current struggles and our inherent desire to move forward. To find solutions to the human problems of emotional, intellectual, and physical pain. Progression rather than conservation. There’s a lesson about humanity in there somewhere. That’s for another day.

But also, just like with AI, Ozempic doesn’t think. It doesn’t feel. It has no inherent desires or purpose. It isn’t a solution for anything without you and your pain. You’re the human, and you’re the star of the show. You can make the decisions.

Don’t ever forget that. 

“Everything is amazing and nobody is happy”

– Louis CK

Your mobile phone is a stone-cold miracle. Yes, of course, physics and blah, blah, blah…

It’s a miracle. Make no mistake.

Driving down the highway at 70 mph, you just call your friend sitting in his house 400 miles away. And it works. Oh, look at that: Bryce Harper just jacked one (seconds ago) to win it in the 10th. Did you close the garage door? I’ll check. Looks like I can get the grass cut with about 10 minutes to spare before the thunderstorm hits. Hey Siri.

Nothing demonstrates the law of conservation of complexity more than the phone in your pocket. Using your phone to do stuff is intuitive, (mostly) simple, and (mostly) just works.

But under covers, the complexity that exists is mind-boggling. ChatGPT estimates that the current iPhone required 3-4 million man-hours of engineering effort. That’s just the phone and iOS. Then add in the millions of additional engineering hours for the over 2 million applications. 

And that’s not even considering the hundreds of years of scientific research and understanding that preceded it and makes it all possible. It’s a miracle.

And now we expect it. What’s wrong with this thing? Why didn’t the dentist remind me of my appointment? Damn phone won’t connect! I don’t have service.

Our phones have simplified living in our world. And therefore, in some very tangible ways, have disconnected us from the realities of living in the physical world. Once you expect miracles, it’s hard to live without them.

So, as Louis CK says, “Will ya give it a second?”

Remember trying to install a modem or network card into your PC in 1995?

First, you had to grab your screwdriver to deconstruct and open up that machine like you were performing open-heart surgery. Once laid bare, you’d insert the new card, being careful not to zap it with ESD and render it useless, into an open ISA or PCI slot on the motherboard. Once the new board was installed, you’d reconstruct it and hope you got everything back in the proper spots. Oh shit, I forgot to put this screw back somewhere…

But that was just the beginning because the real fight was still before you. You had to come to blows with the system software to get it to recognize what you just put in there. Boot into the BIOS. Now, which PC manufacturer is this? What was the key sequence? Oh shit, I didn’t hit it fast enough. Once into the esoteric BIOS screen, you had to hunt around for the ISA/PCI settings to configure the address range and interrupt. Address range? What’s that even mean? Which interrupt? What’s an interrupt? How many times will I have to reboot? Oh shit, I must have the interrupt wrong because now it won’t even start up. 

You were poking and praying. It was trial and error. Sometimes, it took an hour. Sometimes, you never got it to work. 

Even my colleagues and I, who knew and understood what this all meant, struggled mightily to make it all work. 

Then along came USB.

I worked on the development of USB technology in its infancy. I wasn’t the inventor or a contributor to the specs or working group, but I was part of a team inside Lucent Technologies working to implement it. We were developing a USB chip and low-level software to sell to PC manufacturers. 

USB was the first PC technology during that era that said, “OK, enough! This is stupid. There’s gotta be a better way.” 

The whole point of it was to make it dumb-simple for a user to use. Therefore, the part that the user sees and interacts with has to be easy to understand, robust, and “just work.” No opening up the computer. No connector mismatch. No “is this a Dell or a Compaq?” And, most importantly, no f’n software configuration. When I plug it in, the system sees it, and it just works. Let’s go. 

But, like it is with so much in this world, a pile of complexity under the covers is required to make it simple on the outside.

We call this the conservation of complexity — every application has an inherent amount of complexity that cannot be removed. You can move it around to different areas of the system — hide it here, deal with it there — but the complexity inherently exists. 

So, who gets exposed to that complexity? Who has to deal with it?

As an engineer or anybody who makes something for someone else to use, your goal is to deal with the complexity and keep it away from your users. 

Ask yourself, “Who is my user and how can I make the right thing to do the easy thing for them to do?”

Preoccupied — A state of being so focused on a particular task, problem, or concern that it dominates one’s mental and emotional energy.

When you’re preoccupied, you’re focused, coming up with creative solutions, productive, and committed. 

But you’re also probably stressed, neglecting those around you, neglecting other responsibilities and tasks, neglecting what’s going on in the world, and not sleeping well.

Preoccupation, like so much else of our lives, is a double-edged sword. You can get there and solve the problem, but not without some cost. 

What are you willing to pay?

Software developers work with a tool called a “Source Code Control” (SCC) tool.  

Think of an SCC tool as a library card catalog system that keeps track of everything about the books. The card catalog shows you what books exist, where they are, who the author is, and who has them checked out. And in this card catalog system, you’re allowed to change the contents of the books! If anybody checks out a book and changes it, that person becomes the new author. 

When you author a change, you attach a little note that describes it. This message is called the commit message.

It looks like this:

commit 14eacff768fcf58530a65f4bee4fc8f36b251c7a (HEAD -> DEVOPSDEV-1635-modify-status-utils, origin/DEVOPSDEV-1635-modify-status-utils)

Author: John Macdonald 

Date:   Fri May 10 15:54:52 2024 -0400

    DEVOPSDEV-1635 for the love of god...

The gobbledygook at the beginning is all of the “what” info that the tool includes automatically. The engineering stuff. With it, you can learn all you need to know about what changed, by who, when, and what it looked like before the change. You can even undo any change. 

The line at the end is what I typed in as the commit message. 

The best commit messages are brief, but tell you something beyond the what. The why. The purpose. Ancillary effects. Or the author’s state of mind at the time.

You only have a few characters. What will your commit message be?

Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do…Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun

– Ecclesiastes 9:7, 9

Racing to get to the end.
Why? What’s at the end?
What even is the end? Death, of course.

So why race?
Why look past what is now to get to what is later?

Presence. 
Presence is the gift. 

All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean…This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. 

Ecclesiastes 9:2-3

We’re all on the unavoidable path. We share the common destiny. 

We may live virtuously. We may live in depravity. It doesn’t matter. Death awaits us all.

But perhaps, in this shared fate, we’re called to live fully. To embrace our moments, to feel the low times, to find joy in the present, because in the end, it’s the life we’ve lived that defines us, not the inevitable end.

What does a full and authentic life look like to you? Only you can define that, but for sure, it doesn’t come from your social media feed. It doesn’t come from your neighbor. It doesn’t come from the outside. 

It comes from within. Within you and your inner circle. Within your relationship to God or the Universe or the Spirit. 

We call share common destiny. Look within to find your road. 

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.

Ecclesiastes 9:11

Solomon got it (assuming Solomon wrote it).

You can plan. You can get ready. You can be wise, swift, and strong. And sometimes, it will go exactly as you predicted or prepared for. You should be prepared.

But time and chance happen to all of us.

Life has a way of surprising us. What will you do when time and chance happen? With the proper mindset, they open doors to unexpected opportunities and paths previously unknown.

I just keep telling myself this. Maybe you should too. 

In engineering, choosing a network topology affects the short-term and long-term operations, performance, reliability, and abilities of the network and its constituents.

Star Network

The hub and spoke model. Every connection runs through the critical hub. It’s simple to create and easy to maintain and can be efficient. The overall network remains unaffected if an outside node goes down. However, if the hub goes down, everything crashes and burns. 

If you’re the hub of your network, you are the one maintaining the direct relationships to your people. You control who and how deep the relationship. However, it puts a lot of pressure on you to manage all interactions, and can be vulnerable if you’re unavailable.

Ring Network

The loop model. Data moves in either direction serially through each node. It’s very efficient and predictable. It’s also easy to configure, create, and diagnose issues, as each node needs only know about two others. However, a single breakage brings the entire network down. 

You’re connected to a small number, and relying on the connections of your connections. Each person linked to the next can pay dividends without you. But if a single person drops the ball, or doesn’t care as much as you, the whole thing falls apart. 

Mesh Network

The distributed web model. Every device has a connection to every other device, either directly or indirectly. Mesh networks are complicated and costly to create and diagnose issues but offer superior resilience. Nothing can bring the entire network down. 

You’re part of a larger web of interconnected contacts. Each person is not only linked to you but also to each other. This creates a robust network where referrals and recommendations can flow freely, increasing your reach and resilience. But it requires more effort to build and maintain.

Which One?

Any of these topologies can bring you success. However, only the mesh network can help you knock it out of the park.

How will you build your mesh network?

My 19-year-old son and I were in the grocery store recently, and he said to me, “Hey, Dad, don’t you think the number of ice cream flavors has exploded since I was a little kid? It’s crazy how many there are.”

He’s right. It’s crazy. 

My Dad always talked about setting up an ice cream stand on the boardwalk at the beach with only two choices: vanilla or chocolate. And every scoop is served in a cone. No dishes here. 

He’d smile, actually relish, as he could picture the conversation with the customer who asked for something off-script, “But don’t you have anything else? What about mint chocolate chip?”

“We got vanilla, and we got chocolate. Which would you like?”

He loved talking about that. 

Vanilla and chocolate are by far the most popular ice cream flavors in America, and have been since the beginning. Most people choose one, even when presented with a potpourri of other choices. 

So why all the flavors?

Do more flavors help the ice cream industry as a whole sell more ice cream? Do you, as an ice cream retailer, need to stock a million flavors? Can you build a better business with more choices?

I don’t know. Maybe. 

I do know, however, that the number of choices, not just in ice cream but in all things, has increased exponentially over the last 50 years. That has split markets into ever-decreasing niches.

In a world of endless choices, find the one that you can most delight your people with, and focus there.

When you’re stuck, frustrated, or feeling like you might not be able to, start asking more questions. Specifically the why questions.

Why are you working on this project?
Why are you trying to start a company?
Why are you spending time on this task?
Why are you designing it for that platform?
Why would someone care?
Why do you care?

At the end of the day, it’s the why that matters. 

“Hey, Bob! Great to see you. How’ve you been? Working hard or hardly working?”

Sometimes, we use time to determine the answer.

“Boss said we could have as much overtime as we want. I’ve been pulling double-shifts.”
“We gotta ship next week. I’ve been sleeping at the office twice a week.”

Sometimes, we use physical effort.

“It’s mulch season. By the end of the day, my crew is a dishrag.”
“That fire last night was the most intense I’ve been on. The EMTs had to give me oxygen at one point.”

Sometimes, we use the complexity.

“I’ve been working on this algorithm for days and I still don’t have it yet.”
“I have a patient with something I’ve never seen before. I’ve been talking with experts across the globe to figure out the best treatment.”

Sometimes, we use the level of responsibility.

“We’re shipping next week, and it’s my butt on the line if something doesn’t work.”
“I’ve got three people on my team who are not pulling their weight. I’m gonna lose the rest of the team unless I fix the problem.”

Sometimes, we use the emotional danger.

“I’ve gotta stand in front and defend our position.”
“I’ve written the piece, but it’s so personal that I’m afraid to publish it.”

No matter what kind of work you do, you want to do the hard part. The hard part is what makes a difference. The hard part is how you separate yourself. How you stand out.

AI could never do the hard part. 

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

– Maybe Mark Twain, but maybe nobody

I stare at my ToDo list for the day, and I can feel myself gravitating towards certain tasks.

I can roughly categorize my tasks on the list as follows:

• Sales and networking
• Management
• Technical

Myself really wants myself to do the technical ones. Those are the ones I like. Write some Python to help so-and-so? Sure! Love to. Look at last night’s automated test suite and figure out what hapened? Absolutely! Dig into our architecture to see how we should make it better? I’m already doing it. 

I can often psyche myself up for the management tasks also because I’m usually good at them, even the tricky ones. I don’t mind doing the stuff I’m good at.

But then there’s the sales and marketing tasks. Ugh.

We’re starting a new company. Going out on our own. We need to find customers. I, as the leader of the band, need to find the customers. I suck at it. At least right now.

Guess which tasks are the most important? In fact, nothing else is actually important right now.

The days you start by eating the frog are the days you’re making progress.

Nothing else matters.

If you ask most people, they’d be happy to drive an EV. 

Probably even some of the people who think and say out loud how EVs are part of the grand master plan of authoritarian control. You know, mass surveillance and whatnot. I live amongst many of those people. 

Even these people would drive an EV?

Yes, many of them. Because at the end of the day, most people choose their cars for practical reasons. A person’s personal car choice is not the religious issue that the politicians and wealthy people say it is. It’s a practical choice. 

“This is one that I like and can afford.”
“I like to buy used cars. They provide better value.”
“I understand this one here.”

Even choosing a car-lifestyle or a non-car-lifestyle isn’t the religious issue those same people say it is. It’s, yet again, a practical decision for most. 

Sure, you’ll find scads in the trendy areas of NYC that don’t have cars due to the religion of evil-cars. And you’ll find scads in the semi-rural regions of Pennsylvania that would never consent to public transportation due to the religion of do-what-I-want-when-I-want. 

But for most, if you live in NYC, having a car is really difficult unless you also have a bank account with lots of commas. If you live in semi-rural Pennsylvania, not having a car is really difficult. We don’t have public transportation, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, or the old-fashioned local pizza delivery guy on my road. You want it? You gotta go get it yourself.

Here’s my view: EVs will overtake fossil fuel vehicles when it becomes more practical for the masses to have an EV.

Like with any other product development, watch what people do and ignore what they say. So, if you’re an engineer or in the EV business in any way, focus on that. Let’s make EVs more practical than fossil fuel cars. Cost, charging, reliability, safety, and yes, even the messaging. 

Most people don’t care whether their car is electric or not. 

When the Bobs come asking, you better have an answer.

Is it your title? “I’m the CEO. I do the CEO things.”

Is it your project responsibilities? “I’m the lead software engineer for the automated test framework. I define, develop, and fix it.”

Or is it more informal and harder to define?

Every good engineering team has at least one person whose role is hard to define. At least in the traditional sense of “here’s my title, and here’s my job description.” They step up to whatever is needed at the time, even if what is needed is below them, not familiar, or someone else’s job. They’re standing next to you in the lab, the conference room, and the mud.

Every great engineering team has this quality running through all the members.

When you start something new you’re going to need defined roles. A contract amongst yourselves so that everyone knows who’s responsible for what. You’ll need to satisfy the Bobs.

But also, everyone’s gonna need the mentality of “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

You can plan. You can measure twice and cut once. You can think ahead.

But at the end of the day, sometimes the universe pulls its goalie in the middle of the period. 

Now what? Now, you dig in and find solutions. You improvise. You could never have foreseen the current situation, so don’t get hung up. Use a different part, move that functionality into a different module, change the API, find a different supplier, bend it and hit it with a hammer. 

My favorite scene from the movie Apollo 13 takes place a short time after the famous, “Houston, we have a problem.” A group of engineers stands around a table staring at a mish-mash of pieces and parts available to the spacecraft crew. Their mission is to turn that pile of stuff into an air filter because C02 buildup is slowly asphyxiating the crew (here’s a great article on what they did).

Here’s what you got. Do it, or people die. 

There is no higher compliment that can be paid to a boots-on-the-ground engineer than “Wow, that’s clever.” Clever solutions happen at the intersection of creativity and knowledge. Now, put that engineer on stage with a crowd of people asking him to create a clever solution on the spot. That’s improvisation.

Don’t be afraid to go off-script. 

Engineers are like all non-engineers — nobody wants to fail.

Nobody wants their design to fail. Nobody wants their decision to be the cause. Nobody wants to be seen as bad at their job. But really, nobody wants to be blamed. 

Measure twice. Cut once.

But failure doesn’t necessarily mean somebody was reckless. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone is bad at their job. 

When I was teaching my kids to drive, I took each to a snowy, icy parking lot. 

“Hit the gas. Feel the wheels spin. Now hit the brakes. Feel the car slide. Try to turn. Feel the car keep going straight.”

The first thing I do whenever I pull out of my driveway onto the snowy, icy road is get some speed and hit the brakes. How slippery is this road? I recommend you do the same thing.

Failure is a data point. Failure helps you find the limits. Failure helps you experience what happens when you cross the line.

Here we are on the arc of our product development, and this happened. That was unexpected. Or, maybe, OK, great! We found the limit. Interesting. What can we learn? Why? What do we need to change? What do we need to make better? What if…?

SpaceX has blown up a lot of rockets — nine of them. Rapid unscheduled disassemblies. Theory is one thing. The real world is another.

The faster you break it, the faster you can fix it.

Engineers are famous for proclamations such as “You can’t make a baby in one month with nine women.”

Reality, and such. There are laws of physics and biology, after all.

But also, physics doesn’t control how much effort you put in or the project management decisions you make to go as fast as possible. Each individual must do it today, not tomorrow. Look at priorities all the time. Reprioritize when necessary. Keep the thing, the thing. Yes, you can find time today to meet about it. If that piece will be delayed, reimagine it, find a new solution. Always find new solutions. There is no work-life balance. There is only work-life integration. You can sleep when you’re dead. Magic doesn’t happen on 40-hour workweeks. 

The bear is right behind you. The other startup wants it more. Faster wins every time. 

As engineers, we have a love-hate relationship with cost.

On the one hand, we like to start with a clean sheet of paper and dream. What if cost didn’t matter at all? What could we build? But also, cost is one of those existential variables that helps bound the problem. 

Sometimes, boundaries are just limitations that must be engineered around — The river flow has this range of characteristics.

But many times, the boundaries on the problem are what push creativity and technology in a direction that leads to a better overall solution. Even better than without boundaries — Screen real estate limitations lead to better user interfaces. 

Cost can be either. Sometimes, we know the budget, and then that budget is just a limitation to engineer around. Engineering effort stops when we meet the budget. Sometimes, however, the cost becomes the main thing. Minimization without expense to function, performance, and perception is worth the effort.

When designing, we often trade cost for time, responsibility, and perception, if even subconsciously. We look around at what already exists and start there.

However, what if we throw those assumptions out the window and return to the first principles of what we’re trying to make and for whom? 

We can use this service to get us started quicker. OK, but could we do it better ourselves?

If we use this provider for this part, they will take responsibility if it breaks. OK, but do we care? 

We want to put “ISO certified” on our website. Do we? Does it actually matter?

Questioning every cost can be exhausting, but it can also be liberating. 

When Elon started SpaceX, he looked around at the history, players, and current state of rocket-making and believed it could be done better, faster, cheaper. 

He came up with a set of rules that engineers would live by in SpaceX:

1. Question every cost.
2. Have a maniacal sense of urgency.
3. Learn by failing.
4. Improvise.

Who the heck was he?

At the time, it seemed arrogant. Maybe even reckless. Sure, NASA, the US military, Lockheed, Boeing, and the throngs of subcontractors were living off an unending faucet of government financing with little incentive to improve, but also, they’d been there and done that. They’d lived through the public successes and failures. They knew what they were talking about. 

It takes as long as it takes and costs what it costs. Measure twice, cut once. Safety (including reputation safety) is paramount. Failure is not an option. Slow and steady. 

I’ve been in this position — the underling, the newbie, the one without any experience in the field. Who am I to question the wisdom and the knowledge of those who came before?

But just because this is the way its done, and we have very good reasons for doing it this way, doesn’t mean we should keep doing it this way.

That’s true in engineering, and its true in your life. 

Name it. 

Your project.
Your book.
Your song.
Your app. 
Your company.

You can change it later, but name it today.

Once it has a name, it exists. 

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

It doesn’t have to be special.

It doesn’t have to be good enough for someone else.

It doesn’t have to be your best, but it better be your best effort at the moment.

But it has to be done. 

It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.

No matter how much you’ve pre-planned, followed procedures, controlled what you can control, kept up with maintenance, and ensured you’ve thought of everything, at some point, it will melt down. The tank will let loose, or the pipe will burst and fill your basement with excrement. Oh, and it will be 2 am on a Saturday morning.

How will you handle it as the leader?

Step one is to put on your boots, assemble the team, and prioritize. The team will want to spin because we’re humans. Spinning is what we do. You’re job is to focus the spin. Invite all of the relevant fixers into the room and discuss it. Argue it out. 

What’s our first step? Who’s gonna do what right now? 

Not what’s our long-term approach. Not who or what’s to blame, unless that blame directly leads to the solution (ie, “the pipe burst, let’s patch the pipe”). 

What are we going to do in the next hour? 

Determine who should work together and who needs to be left alone to focus. Nobody leaves the room until each of us knows exactly what we’re supposed to be doing when we walk out of it. 

Pure tactics. There will be a time and place for strategy, lessons learned, and blame. But it’s not right now.

Then dive down into the muck. Keep the real-time communication flowing. Adjust the path and directions based on that communication and what you learn. Head off the spin.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. 

No, we don’t think it is. We can probably say we know that it isn’t. 

But it’s OK — actually scientifically appropriate — to occasionally look out the window and say, “Are we sure the earth isn’t flat? Because it really looks flat.” And then go through the exercise of convincing ourselves that it is indeed still round. 

Occasionally, if infrequently, you should go back and convince yourself that you know what you think you know. The key is understanding when it makes sense to do it. If you do it too often, you spend too much of your time re-establishing all you know to be true at the expense of moving forward. Can you imagine having to wake up each morning and going through all of the data associated with the roundness or flatness of the earth?

Two inflection points that could cause the re-evaluation:

1. Time — we look at it all again every so often just to make sure we really know what we know. Do new tools capabilities exist? Has more or more relevant data been gathered? Once a year. Once a quarter. What’s the time frame that makes sense for your industry?
2. Event — did something just happen that should cause us to re-evaluate what we think we know?

Don’t be afraid of the “Is the earth flat?” questions. Everything we know today says for sure it’s round, but scientific rigor requires that sometimes you should reconvince yourself. 

Willingness is a measure of risk tolerance.

Are you willing to risk money?
Are you willing to risk love?
Are you willing to risk your reputation?
Are you willing to risk comfort?
Are you willing to risk friends?
Are you willing to risk your future?

Most of the time we don’t think much about willingness because the stakes are low. A little money, adjacent friends, an unknown future. 

But every once in a while, we are confronted with an inflection point. Here it is right out on the table. Big risk and maybe big reward or big downside.

Are you willing?

This place has a high cost of living. That place has a low cost of living. Will you get a cost of living raise?

We talk about the cost of living in terms of financials: rent and real estate, milk and eggs, taxes and healthcare, energy and transportation. 

But is the true cost of living some financial measure?

Cost is trade of payment. What are you willing to pay to live the life you want? 

My guess is that it has little to do with money.

Most of us in the western world spend most of our time dancing around the top of Maslow’s Pyramid. 

Let’s face it: a blog like this never exists unless I have the privilege of spending a good chunk of my time bouncing between the top tiers in that pyramid. And that’s definitely privilege. In fact, in the whirling dervish of today’s culture wars, where the term “privilege” has become a slur and call to punitive action, this is one variable on which you can check yourself. 

But sometimes you’ve fallen, or been pushed, down to the bottom of the pyramid. You’re in danger. Actual danger. 

When that happens, all of the highfalutin, I-wonder-what-my-life-means, deep thinking goes right out the window. It gets replaced by, “I gotta get shit done. Now.”

There are no philosophical musings. There is no deep thinking outside of the problem at hand. There is only, “How do I fix this?”

When you find yourself scrapping for the morsels on the floor, take a quick look around and see who’s under the table with you. Who else is bleary-eyed? Who else shared their just-recovered random chocolate chip with you? 

These are your people. These are the one’s you go to war with. These are the ones with whom you share the reward when you get back to the top of the pyramid.

Don’t let them go.

Ask an engineer from the tech industry (software or hardware) what the best moment in their career was, and likely the story will sound like this:

We got the prototypes back from the manufacturer the day after Christmas around lunchtime. We had to ship it on the 2nd. Three of us immediately grabbed the unit and headed into the lab. 

Nothing worked. We were screwed. When we first powered it up, one of the power caps blew right off the board. So we looked at the schematics, found the problem (reversed power and ground on that cap), and fired up the soldering iron to fix a few of the boards. Crisis averted.

Then, we couldn’t get the software loaded. Totally dead. But we dug in.  

At dinner time, we hit a local pizza joint. Over slices we argued, called each other unprintable names, created new ideas, abandoned others, and the juices flowed. By midnight of that first day, we had made some progress. We were confident that we had found and fixed all of the hardware issues and had made enough progress on the software that we were encouraged. It still wasn’t working, not by any stretch, but progress was made. 

And that continued day after day. Eight in the morning till after midnight. The week between Christmas and New Years. We shipped those prototypes on time and they worked. 

It was awesome. Three of us committed. Three of us feeding off each other’s energy. Three people acting as a single mind-melded entity. Three better than one.

Collaborative energy is real. When you capture it, don’t let it go. 

“Yo, wait! How did you do that? What was that command?”

It was sometime in the early-90’s at Lockheed. I was looking over my colleague Jim’s shoulder as he whirled his way around the command line on his Sun Workstation. He was showing me how to run nuclear survivability simulations on the spacecraft.

Then he did something — used some esoteric UNIX command — that dumped a sorted version of the file to the screen. It was exactly what we needed to see in the format we needed to see it.

 I stopped him, and asked him what the hell that command was because I needed to know that one.

“Oh, it was this…”

And he brought it back up on the command line. Then he said,

“You need to add this to your Book of Magic Commands.”

I just blinked at him.

“Uh, what?”

He reached down, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out a composition notebook. On the front was a piece of tape with the words “Magic Commands” written in Sharpie.

“Yeah, every time I come across an important command that does something I need, or something I don’t understand, but works, I write it down in this notebook. My Book of Magic Commands. If I ever lose this, I’m done for.”

And I started my Book of Magic Commands that very day. It wasn’t actually a notebook but a file folder full of papers on which I wrote down the esoteric incantations of the world in which I have spent the rest of my career. In that early era of the computer age, this knowledge was power. Those that knew the magic commands held a special pedestal in the hierarchy of organizational usefulness. The knowledge was centralized. 

With the internet and ChatGPT, we software developers and computer power users no longer need to keep a notebook or file folder full of hand-written “magic commands.” The knowledge has been distributed. Anybody can ask for it and receive it. That’s generally a good thing, but there’s some nostalgia wrapped up in the pages of the “Magic Commands” notebooks tucked away in thousands of aging software developers desk drawers. I wonder what we’d learn about the authors if we collated all of that particular knowledge. Certainly something more than “here is the list of commands I used but didn’t really understand.”

I was looking through my filing cabinet for some old tax stuff and I ran across mine today. Here is that very first paper that started my Book of Magic Commands.

I’m not a master marketer.

I make the things. But what I know about marketing is that the magic comes down to: 

Is your idea worth sharing?

You can develop the perfect strategy. You can build out an amazing library of content. You can hire influencers and celebrities. You can show up to the right events and gain the spotlight.

Marketing can make all the difference. Some great ideas have never seen the light of the day because they were hindered by poor or no marketing. Marketing tells the story around your thing, and stories create the arcs of how we move through this life.

But, at the end of the day, if what you’ve created isn’t worth sharing, then it won’t last very long. The best marketing taps into the network effect. 

For many people — people like me — sharing an idea with your network encounters great friction. For reasons I don’t even understand myself, I sometimes hesitate to share. What if they don’t like what I like? What if they have a different experience? What if the things that matter to me don’t matter to them? Maybe I’m worried about my integrity. Or maybe it’s simpler than that and I’m just worried about what somebody else thinks of me.

Regardless, if you find me sharing your idea with my people, you’ve mastered the art. 

Go create something worth sharing.  

“It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.”

– Steven Pressfield, The War pf Art

Observing versus participating.

There is little risk in observing. 

You can make a difference by observing, but only if, by observing, you’ve engaged others in the process through your observations. You’ve helped somebody see a new perspective, feel something they hadn’t previously, or find a new creative arc. You’ve moved the state of the art forward through engaged observation.

All the risk is in participating. 

If you’re in the ring, you’re participating. And if you’re participating, you incur risk. We reward risk. I don’t know if that’s a feature or a bug of the world we live in. I just know it’s true.

Also, if you’re in the arena, you’ll get my respect. I may not agree with you, and I may think you’re doing it all wrong, but I’ll certainly respect that you’re out there making a go of it. We’ll argue till we come to some mutual understanding, even if that understanding is “yeah, we’re not gonna come together on this.”

If you’re on my team, you’re in the arena, and I’m there too. I’m willing to get stomped by the bull. Are you?

Nobody is self-made.

If someone says it, that’s arrogance or ignorance talking.

What about your customers, readers, or users? Your legal and accounting partners? The people who wrote the stuff you read? The kid in his basement who wrote the app you’re using? The financial system? The internet? The government? Your employees? Your partner and family? That one teacher in 6th grade?

Each of us is one part of a whole, and that whole is what made you. Not you.

The first step in contributing something meaningful to this world we live in is to acknowledge those who’ve made you who you are.

I’ve been trying to get to this post for the last hour and a half.

I’m not procrastinating, but every time I say to myself, “OK, now let’s start writing,” I’m pulled back to the other thing I’m actually working on. The thing my brain just can’t stop thinking about.

I’m teaming with ideas that I just gotta get out of my head. “Oh, and this.” “Don’t forget that.” “Yes! Move this here.”

I’m in (or was in) the flow state. The flow state is a gift, but it can be fickle. When it grabs you, hold on and don’t let go until it runs its course. It might last an hour or maybe all day. Maybe you’ll miss lunch or dinner. No matter.

Go with the flow.

When I pick up a hammer, there is no doubt about what I use it for.

I hit and extract things with it. Sometimes those things are nails, sometimes not. But I never look at it and think, “maybe this hammer would be good at designing my deck” or “I wonder if I could drill a precise 1/8″ hole with this thing?” I don’t ask it to do those things. It never crosses my mind that it might be able to. 

I have no expectations for the hammer beyond hitting and extracting. 

Just like a hammer, ChatGPT (and Claude, etc) is a tool. A tool that requires a person.

But when we look at ChatGPT, we’re not exactly sure what we can use it for. Can it write my essay? Can it create my company logo? Can it do my math homework? Can it write my code? Can it design my code? Can I just “plug AI into that” and have it solve my problem? Can it just do everything while I sit around watching Squid Game?

ChatGPT looks super smart. It looks like it knows everything. It looks like it solves many of our problems. But looks are deceiving. 

Here’s some advice: lower your expectations. 

An actual paraphrased conversation I recently had with ChatGPT:

Me: Create an icon set to be used in a presentation that represents software build, package, release, and deliver. 
ChatGPT: [gives me something, but with a misspelled word]

Me: Try again, but simpler, use only a single color and spell software correctly.
ChatGPT: [gives me something I like, but software still misspelled]

Me: OK, give me these exact images again, but spell “software” correctly in image 3.
ChatGPT: [totally changes everything and software still misspelled]

Me: No, don’t change the images. Go back to the previous, but just correct the spelling of “software”
ChatGPT: [again, totally new images that I don’t like and software still misspelled]

Me: no, dumbass. do what I’ve already told you to do.
ChatGPT: [4 new images, software still misspelled]

Me: [Back to google image searching…]

ChatGPT is that kid in school that talks a good game, but you know that under the covers, doesn’t know shit about shit. Because it doesn’t know anything. It’s statistics, pure and simple. Statistics, even predictive statistics, is an analysis of history, not knowledge.

AI is sneaky stupid. Lower your expectations.

What role do consequences serve? Do they serve any?

What if the implementation of the playground eliminates any consequence of falling?
What if the implementation of the economic system eliminates any consequence of repression?
What if the implementation of the financial system eliminates any consequence of doing stupid things?
What if the implementation of the legal system eliminates any consequence of the transgression of the law?
What if the implementation of the social system eliminates any consequence of poor choices?
What if the implementation of the social system eliminates any consequence of inequality?

The balance between what should and shouldn’t have consequences and what those consequences should be is where the rubber meets the road. 

It matters quite a lot who’s in the room.

How you speak. How you see yourself. What your role is. What the others’ roles are. What do they care about. What terminology you use. Which story you tell.

If you’re talking to the engineering team, tell them how the stuff they’re making matters to the company and the customers.
If you’re talking to the financial team, tell them how the money they’re saving matters to the company and the investors.
If you’re talking to the marketing and sales team, tell them how gaining customers matters to the company and their own bank accounts.
If you’re talking to the admin team, tell them how their day-to-day effort matters to the workers and the leadership.
If you’re talking to the investors, tell them how their investment matters to the world and the inevitable success that follows.

All the same message wrapped up in a myriad of stories.

Always know who’s in the room.

Do they becken you or do they torture you?

It might be a physical piece of paper or the just-opened “Document1” file in Word. Maybe it’s the “untitled” project in GarageBand or the squarish vehicle that’s been sitting under a tarp in your backyard for 20 years. It could be the empty space or the old, worn-out couch in the corner of your basement. It may be the “Live Video” button on the “Create post” screen. It might be the scraggy patch of grass and weeds between the patio and the garage.

Whatever your blank page and whether it’s beckoning or torturing you, it’s time to start. Add one line, or one beat. Remove the cover. Charge up the drill and uncover the saw. Grab your shovel and tiller.

We don’t leave blank pages around for nothing.

Principles.

Everyone says they have them. Some like to shout about why theirs are the right ones, while others argue with only themselves.

But watch what they do.

I’ve spent a career making things for other people to use. The biggest takeaway I have is that people generally do the easy thing. Because we can’t always do the hard thing. Sometimes we need to just do the easy thing. Even if it goes against our principles.

So, if you’re a maker, a builder, or a creator of useful things, make the right thing to do the easy thing to do.

Adding manpower to a late (software) project makes it later.

As people get promoted into increasingly higher positions within an organization, they start to lose their minds. Like they’ve never been the person in the trenches and have never experienced or understood the issues at that ground level. For example, throwing more people at the problem.

If two are good, eight are better. The Costco principle. 

But if you’re doing the work, you know two things:

1. If you’re already late, adding more responsibilities to your plate, such as bringing people up to speed, communicating with more people, and herding more cats, slows you down. 
2. You can’t make a baby in one month with nine women. Some things take the time they take based on physics, biology, God, or whatever. 

Every team project has an academically correct amount of people performing the correct roles and tasks. Each person working at capacity and contributing exactly what is needed from them. 

No team project in history has ever experienced this.

However, good leadership can approach it. Good leaders can assess the state of the crew, fix priorities, and help grease the skids. Good leaders are in tune with the work to be done and the team itself. Then, they can figure out if and where to add manpower.

Thwarting Brooke’s Law takes awareness, communication between leadership and the team, and the willingness to admit that maybe it’s gonna take what it’s gonna take. 

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

“Murphy’s Law” originated in the late 1940s at Edwards Air Force Base. Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was an engineer working on an experiment designed to determine how much sudden deceleration a person could withstand in a crash. Murphy had a problem. Specifically, he had a team competence problem. A technician had wired the experiment incorrectly, consequently leading to a failure to obtain the crucial data during the test. Exasperated, he exclaimed something close to the law we now know and use frequently.

Then it got legs because it resonates with all of us. You already know this one. You’ve seen it in your life and probably cited it, usually in a moment of frustration or a pessimistic prediction of the future.

However, what if, at its core, it’s really a call to optimism?

Murphy’s Law encourages us to plan ahead, be resilient and flexible, understand risks, and innovate on solutions. It serves as a reminder not just of the inevitability of problems, but of our capacity to anticipate, adapt to, and overcome them.

Murphy’s Law is your friend.

The cognitive limit to the number of stable social relationships that one can maintain is around 150. 

Kevin Kelly wrote a famous blog post about “1000 True Fans.” If you’re someone who makes things, or making things happen, you should read this.

He argues that if you can cultivate 1000 true fans of whatever it is you’re making or doing, you have a sustainable business. You can bypass the traditional channels that require someone or some group to select you for success, such as record labels, book publishers, media publishers, HR departments in corporations, etc. 

But what about the subgroup of 150 people inside that group of 1000 true fans? Your inner circle. 

What if every day you woke up and nurtured a true and meaningful relationship with one or a few of those 150 people. Not 150 every day. Just a few. Over the course of the year, you’ve touched them all. 

Now, what if each person on this planet did the same.

What kind of a world would we live in if each and every one of us cared about, nurtured, and built a relationship with our 150?

The attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse through unintended consequences. 

Economic theory states that you usually get what you incentivize properly. This one is closely related to Goodhart’s Law. 

Colonial India had a live cobra problem. So, the government offered a reward for every dead cobra. This worked. Eventually, there are very few live cobras. 

But now, the people making money from the incentive had a dead cobra problem. So, the people started breeding cobras just to kill them. This worked.

But then the government caught wind of the scam and eliminated the reward. So, the breeders just released all the captive snakes back into the wild.

And once again, colonial India had a live cobra problem.

Removing older, more polluting vehicles from the road can increase overall emissions due to the environmental cost of manufacturing new vehicles.

Using antibiotics to promote livestock growth can lead to the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Pay-as-you-throw schemes to encourage recycling and reduce waste can increase illegal dumping.

Traffic congestion taxes to reduce center city traffic can lead to grid-lock in neighborhoods just outside the fee zone.

Solutions to multi-variable and complex problems require rigorous analysis, experimentation, and assessment of consequences and reactions to incentive schemes. Reassessment of data. Adjustments over time. Willingness to change directions. Admission of false starts. Unbiased rethinking. Empathy and kindness. Forgiveness. 

What doesn’t work is soundbite-worthy, toggle-switch, single-variable, fist-pumping slogans. 

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

One of my friends and I have a funny little tension around the scheduling of software development work. We call it the 3X fudge factor. I look at the work he’s to do and I come up with my estimate of how long it should take him. I tell him, and then he immediately multiplies by three. If I say it should take a week, he says it’ll be three weeks.

It works in reverse also. If he gives me an estimate of three days, I immediately translate that as one day.

Who’s right? Well, we both are. Kind of.

I’m right if he’s totally focused, nobody gets in his way, and nothing goes wrong—the best-case scenario. But when does that happen? Never. So, his 3X estimate usually turns out to be closer to right and sometimes even aggressive, as the second clause of Hofstadter’s Law kicks in.

But you gotta know the best-case scenario to know how much Hofstadter’s Law will effect the final outcome. The longer the best-case, the more effect. Plus, if we need him to get it done ASAP, I can use my position to create the best possible environment by reassigning responsibilities, swatting flies, and giving him every possibility to remain focused.

One of the key leadership attributes is knowing how and when to apply Hofstadter’s Law.

Adding extra capacity sometimes leads to worse overall performance.

“More is better.”
“If I just had more money.”
“That’s easy for you, you have more money/time/land/etc.”

We often conflate abundance with advantage. It can be. But it isn’t automatically.

a) Don’t let them tell you why you can’t, what you can’t, or how amazing you can’t be with what you have.
b) Don’t tell yourself why you can’t, what you can’t, or how amazing you can’t be with what you have.

Last weekend, I drove to NYC to deposit my oldest son and his girlfriend back in Brooklyn after they had spent a nice weekend with us. Up and back through three of the five boroughs: Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. I’ve driven through NYC dozens, maybe 100’s of times, and even before they lived there, I was already a hardened veteran of NYC driving. As soon as I cross the Goethals Bridge or emerge from the Holland Tunnel into the canyons of lower Manhattan, I’m in NYC driver mode. Like flicking a switch.

I’m a freakin pro. And truth be told, I love it.

U-turn in the middle of the street? Yup. Turn left from the right lane? Of course. Just stop in the middle and double park? You betcha.

I’ve not (yet) had an accident, and I know why. Because when I’m driving around there, I expect any and all things all the time. Just as I don’t think twice about disregarding all traffic decorum, I expect all of those around me to do the same.

Of course you can cut me off. Oh, you want to stick your bumper into the 8-inch space separating me and the guy in front of me? Sure, go ahead. Going around me on the sidewalk to the right? Be my guest.

It’s all good because none of it is astonishing to me in this context. I expect it, I’m ready for it, I adjust, and it’s no big deal. And yeah, I do it also.

But what happens on the roads in the small rural community in eastern Pennsylvania in which I live? Nothing like that. It’s all slower, orderly, and calm. I don’t expect any of that.

But then someone gets cut off, and what happens? Boom. Accident. Or, at the very least, “You idiot! Where’d you learn to drive!” It might bother me for the rest of the day.

This is the Principle of Least Astonishment — minimizing confusion and unexpected behaviors while maximizing intuitive understanding.

We in the software development world use the Priniciple of Least Astonishment (also called the Law of Least Surprise) all the time.

If we’re doing our job and using this principle, you (the user) can figure out how to do things on your phone or computer that nobody has taught you explicitly. For example, nobody taught you how to find the settings on your phone. You know they’re in the “Settings” app. We use this principle under the covers as well, even in the nitty-gritty interworkings of the technology. We argue vehemently about how this API should work or what should data it requires.

Least astonishment changes with the intuition of the culture and its people. Which means it changes over time and with context. If you handed an iPhone to George Washington, he wouldn’t be able to find the settings, nor even understand how to turn it on because he doesn’t have any context or intuitive build-up for the technology.

He would be very astonished.

Next time you’re organizing your closet, developing a set of guidelines for your Church committee, or driving around your town, make sure you’re applying the Principle of Least Astonishment. It will serve you well.

Work expands to fill the time available for completion.

I hate meetings at work. And you do, too. I know you do. 

Long ago, bleary-eyed in the middle of the night, I learned a couple of valuable lessons about meetings. The first is we have way too many. Therefore, the first step in taking back ownership of your time is to decline useless meetings. But the second was just as important — meetings will last as long as the calendar says they will.

If you invite people to a one-hour meeting, someone, or sometimes several someones, will yammer on for 60 minutes until the bell dings. Then, the herd will just move on to the next meeting, where someone else will yammer on for the full 60 minutes.

It’s stupid. It’s a productivity killer (personally and organizationally). It sucks your energy and willingness to live. 

But it’s also not really someone’s fault. It’s just a trait of human beings. It’s kinda just in us. Hence, the naming of the phenomena. 

So how do you combat it? By also applying a little human psychology of your own.

1. Change your default meeting time to 15 minutes. Only selectively and intentionally schedule a discussion for longer than 15 minutes. 
2. Why have a meeting if you can work it out with a few exchanges on Slack? Do it.
3. Announce that you have hard stop at 15/30/60 minutes. Then leave/drop at that time. 

You can do this. Break the grip of Parkinson’s Law. 

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

“Is this going to be on the test?”
“What code do I use to ensure this is covered by insurance?”
“How do you rank me against my peers?”

We game the system. It’s what we do.

Great leaders look outside the system, procedures, and policies to recognize great performance and impact.

Two-way door decisions are the kind where you can always change your mind, back up, and make the other decision. Ordering a burger is a two-way door decision.

One-way door decisions are the kind where you can’t go back once you make it. Jumping out of the airplane is a one-way door decision.

Two-way door decisions allow testing, trying new things, and changing one’s mind. One-way door decisions require commitment, careful consideration, and learning as much as possible before making it.

Often, we trick ourselves into thinking that two-way door decisions are actually one-way door decisions. That’s not surprising because restricting the number of variables is a hack we use to solve problems. If we tell ourselves, “OK, I have to commit,” and believe it, we’re more likely to make that outcome successful. Let’s not consider the other side.

But most decisions we make are two-way door decisions. There’s usually a path to back out, chang your mind, and do the other thing.

Sometimes you gotta bite the bullet and start again. That’s just being a human.

Customer: Can you help me with this problem?
Clerk: Not my job.

Manager: Will you help Jane figure this out?
Employee: Not my job.

Test Engineer: Can you help me understand how this works?
Software Engineer: Not my job.

“Not my job” may seem like the opposite, or at least orthogonal to “just doing my job.” But at their core, they’re both about responsibility — specifically, a deflection of responsibility (if even in a faux manner).

Not my job is an attitude.

I’ve banned the phrase “not my job” from my teams. That doesn’t mean that we always take on everything, no matter the request. It just means we don’t have the “not my job” attitude. If the request or task isn’t something we can or should handle, then we set the requestor on the right path as best we can.

We help. We don’t deflect responsibility.

Is it your job?

Reporter: What were you thinking when you ran into the burning building to save that child?
Firefighter: Just doing my job.

Tenant: How could you evict us?
Sheriff: Just doing my job.

Parent: Why did you help our son and tutor him after school and on weekends?
Teacher: Just doing my job.

Regulator: How could you continue after knowing your company was dumping illegally?
Employee: Just doing my job.

Just doing my job is a utility answer. It provides both a cover and a deflection for real or faux humbleness. Equal parts “not my responsibility” and “oh, thank you for noticing that I took responsibility.” 

Doing your job in either case is about responsibility. 

Your company and customers need someone who takes responsibility. Your team needs someone who takes responsibility. Your community, Church, and book group need someone who takes responsibility. This world need people who take responsibility. 

Are you just doing your job?

The music artists have stood up.

Much like the authors did over the summer, songwriters and musicians have penned an open letter to the tech industry — let’s pump the brakes on music generation with AI.

And like the authors, the musicians are afraid of two things:

1. Losing revenue
2. AI will generate music that sounds like them or is as good as or better than they are (which, for many, but not all, is just a form of the first thing)

“When used irresponsibly, AI poses enormous threats to our ability to protect our privacy, our identities, our music and our livelihoods. Some of the biggest and most powerful companies are, without permission, using our work to train AI models. … For many working musicians, artists and songwriters who are just trying to make ends meet, this would be catastrophic.”

“This assault on human creativity must be stopped. We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem.”

As with the authors and anybody whose job sits in AI’s crosshairs, I agree with part of their argument. 

The copyright and “likeness” argument is very interesting. Let’s face it: Humans do this all the time, not just with the arts but also with science. We always use those who came before us as inspiration and sometimes quite directly to move the state of the art forward. Art and science are additive. 

Why is AI different than humans in this regard? Is it scale? Is it that AI has illegally ingested the content?

I’m interested to see how it turns out. I agree that protection for the creators must exist. Basically, I trust the legal process.

The fear of “AI might do our job better than us” is, in my opinion, a non-argument.

Drum machines and GarageBand didn’t put drummers out of business. Synthesizers haven’t put orchestras and horn sections out of business. Pre-recorded loops haven’t put touring musicians out of business.

AI is a brand new toolbox full of new toys. The true creators will find innovative and interesting ways to incorporate the new AI toolbox into their art. 

They always have. They always will. 

The fear-mongering says that AI will take your job.

Be afraid. It’s all bad. At best, our future is one where we all sit around with nothing to do because of AI. At worst, AI tries to kill us. 

In reality, AI, or at least its current and near-future state, has quite the opposite effect. Learning how to use it will make you more valuable to your company and customers. 

The current state of AI is what I call “personal automation.” 

It’s still you, but it’s you with a drill and circular saw. If you dig in, your productivity will go up. 

However, productivity isn’t the only value that AI increases. Because it’s also you with an editor, an Excel expert, a personal assistant, a graduate assistant, and an awkward teenager in his parent’s basement who’s learning to write Python code to scrape the contents of questionable websites. 

“Here is a list of highlights from last year. Create a message to send to our partners that summarizes it succinctly with an optimistic tone.”

“Create a formula that looks through my table of data and makes 3 categories: > 100, < 1, and everything else.”

“Look through this chain of emails, summarize it, and tell me if I’ve been asked to do anything, and if so, create a reply that indicates I’ll work on it next week.”

“Find the trends in this set of data.”

“Here is a Python script. Keeping this same style, add a new function that takes in a filename from the –ofile argument and directs all output to this file. The default is out.txt.”

It’s you, but more valuable. 

You have a plan. You have a map. But your destination is unknowable without hindsight.

You are disciplined. You are committed. But your journey is unknowable without hindsight.

You have an idea. You have a team. But what you sell is unknowable without hindsight.

Physics insists that the future is unknowable, and hindsight is 20/20.

Don’t fight physics.

Are you living a good story?

Living a good story conjures visions of adventure, travel, overcoming odds, meeting interesting people, purpose, falling down, and standing up for one’s beliefs in the face of an oppressing mob. The highlight reel plays like a movie trailer.

But does the trailer really tell the story?

Are you living a good story?

Of course, you are. It’s up to you to see it that way.

Each step, analysis, task, decision, operation, and assignment in this story already is or will be, theoretically possible with AI. If you broke down this story into each of its constituent parts — from entity formation and legal work, to business case analysis, marketing plans, and content creation, all the way through manufacturing and delivery — you can plausibly replace that part with AI. 

If you work in any of the areas mentioned, AI will affect you. But will you be replaced? Will you lose your job?

Autonomous automation is the dystopian nightmare of Vonnegut’s Player Piano. And you’re starting to see it in corporate road maps, venture capital pitch decks, TEDx talks, and fear-mongering journalism. 

But that’s all it is right now. It’s in the idea stage, and it’s being driven by the idea people, just like the internet was in the late 90s. It’s in the “we can apply AI to this task and get faster, cheaper, better” block diagram stage.

Some of it will happen. Some of it will start to happen in five to ten years. 

But just like with the internet, and electricity, and horseless carriages, humans and their creativity still matter. These technologies created entirely new business models and industries. 

Automation and AI will do the same. Yes, depending on your job — white-collar work is more at risk than blue-collar work — you may become a victim. 

But like most other victimhoods in this life, it’s a matter of perspective and what you do with it.

We’ve generated a set of technical drawings and specifications for your products, forwarded these to a manufacturer that meets specifications, and created the distribution pipeline. You were hoping for a same-day service from order through shipping, but the cost analysis, considering pricing and manufacturing, doesn’t support it. The manufacturer we’ve chosen to support the business case will manufacture-on-demand and has indicated that each product will require 14 hours to build. Therefore, we cannot guarantee same-day shipping for your customers, but we can guarantee next-day shipping. The manufacturer has locations in Brazil and Mexico, so 2nd-day arrival can be guaranteed for US customers but not European and Asian customers. We know this does not meet your original intentions, but given the business case, this is the best financial scenario for you.

This is where it gets really interesting.

This is supply chain management (SCM). You can get a college degree in it, just like many other fields that AI is coming for. SCM is critical to any physical product development business. Next to sales, the most important thing.

You may have yet to hear of SCM prior to Covid. It used to be a behind-the-scenes pillar of the operations department. Important but not really discussed outside of the walls of the office. But Covid shined the light on the supply chain — or lack thereof. In the post-Covid world, SCM has found its place in the sun. 

And someday, AI will both automate it and make the decisions. 

Connecting the pieces of the supply chain is pure automation, but making the decisions about this manufacturer versus that one and analyzing the delivery outcomes with regard to the business case is very interesting. Businesses pay consulting companies exorbitant fees to figure this stuff out for them.

When will AI take over?

Not very soon. Both automation and decision-making in the supply chain currently sit across a heterogeneous mix of world partners. Governments, language, geography — all deterrents in the supply chain. Even though AI might be smart enough in the near future to do it, the logistics will slow it down significantly.

But someday…

In addition to the website and social media content, we’ve generated a social media and web advertising strategy, and the first ads will start to run today at 6 pm. These ads draw the engagers to the top of the sales funnel that we’ve connected to your entire online presence. We’ve created a strategic communication campaign that resonates with your target audience and reuses much of the content they’ll see on your social media to ensure continuity and build the trust they require. In compliance with the marketing strategy and business objectives, we’ve set a pricing structure that requires two versions of your product with slightly different feature sets for each. This varies from your original idea of a single product but will result in a better overall product strategy and pave the way for follow-on products in the future. We’ve named your products the “BassBlaster Pro” and “BassBlaster+” and have adjusted your product definitions accordingly. 

This paragraph contains an interesting mix of AI automation in combination with decision-making. 

You’re already seeing AI advertising services and automated campaigns. Once the strategy is developed, using AI to automate the advertising and communications campaign itself is fairly straightforward.

But the humans are currently making the decisions and forming the strategies. In our scenario, the AI makes these decisions and forms the strategy. That’s coming in concert with the marketing strategy since they all work together.

The big leap here is that AI is performing the CEO and CCO’s (Chief Commercial Officer) role of devising the business strategy and then a product strategy to support the business. 

Although a leap for now, this is definitely coming as well. Maybe AI isn’t the CEO and CCO but more like a business consulting firm such as McKinsey, Bain, or BCG. In fact, our scenario highlights that AI might have a more meaningful impact on the business consulting world than the product development companies themselves. 

Business majors should be on notice. 

The domain “freakthefishout.com” has been purchased, and the website has been created along with a full set of social media accounts. We’ve generated a baseline of video and visual content with you as hero figure for each of those accounts. We highlight the excitement of the launch of your product and company but contrast it with the content that resonates with your audience, which tends towards introversion, outdoor pursuits, and a requirement of trustworthiness. We gathered enough video of you from our initial conversation to generate the first 30 days of content. We’ll ask for another conversation with you in two weeks so that we can generate the second 30 days’ worth of content. The social media campaign will continue for the next 60 days, as defined in your introductory AutoBizInABox plan, and can be extended indefinitely with follow-on plans. 

The domain, website, and social media account creation for a basic product business like this is, like the legal and financial pieces, straightforward and cookie-cutter. AI could even write the code and make the desirable customizations required for the marketing strategy it has devised. 

You’re now hearing about the wonderful world of AI-generated video content. Sora and deepfakes, etc. And maybe that scares the bejesus out of you.

You can relax. This part of the scenario is quite far off. 

Yes, to some extent, it’s here or very close, but fully automated, realistic content with you as the star, is much farther off. The deepfake stuff that you see today is a human-intense exercise. AI is just the skill that makes it possible. 

Sora is currently generating some interesting video, but its wholly fiction. It’s not accurately generating real people, places, and things. Certainly nothing like capturing someone’s likeness and using that to create. This is theoretically possible but maybe practically impossible for a long time.  

The more interesting use of AI here is to make decisions about the audience. Those decisions tie to an overall product and marketing strategy and guidance that AI formed itself. It’s not exactly an automation use case of AI, but it’s a decision-making use case that’s coming as well. 

“FreakTheFishOut, LLC has been created with you as the founder and sole operator. Your federal EIN number is 12-3456789, and business checking and credit accounts have been created and connected to a bookkeeping and tax service that falls within your business case’s projected financial picture. We’ve pushed a mobile application to your devices for all financial transactions. You’ll find a founder gift of $100 in your business checking account as a thank-you for using AutoBizInABox.” 

AI could rather simply handle this entity law, banking, and accounting, with an interface to the government. 

Low-cost, vanilla entity creation services already exist through sites like LegalZoom and SwyftFilings. A couple of questions and a few clicks later, you have an LLC or S-Corp. To get the EIN, you use the IRS website. It also doesn’t take long, but I suspect there might be a human at the backend of this process because you can only get service during normal business hours. 

Once you have the EIN, you can setup your financial system with checking, credit, and tax services. Services like Found already exist to combine banking with bookkeeping and basic tax filing. 

All of these services already exist, so one part of the automation with AI is just connecting it all together—a true automation task. However, the other, more important piece is when AI doesn’t just create the infrastructure you tell it to but it decides what it should be based on the conversation you had at the beginning. Automation with AI might currently be closest to handling these pieces, but it’s certainly not there yet. 

The legal and financial decision-making and tasks required for this basic type of business is cookie-cutter and broadly applicable across most businesses of this type. If you currently work in any of these areas, AI is coming, and may replace the people that do the specific tasks in the near future. However, the connective tissue required to string all of this together is further off. 

But the basic legal, banking, and accounting professions should be on notice. 

Imagine you have an idea for a business. Let’s say you’ve developed an innovative fishing rig, and now you want to share it with the world (and get paid). 

So you go to “autobizinabox.com,” and a chatbot conducts about an hour-long conversation with you, asking you a million questions. Less than an hour later, you get a notification that says.

Congratulations Mr. Fancy Pants! 

FreakTheFishOut, LLC has been created with you as the founder and sole operator. Your federal EIN number is 12-3456789, and business checking and credit accounts have been created and connected to a bookkeeping and tax service that falls within your business case’s projected financial picture. We’ve pushed a mobile application to your devices for all financial transactions. You’ll find a founder gift of $100 in your business checking account as a thank-you for using AutoBizInABox. 

The domain “freakthefishout.com” has been purchased, and the website has been created along with a full set of social media accounts. We’ve generated a baseline of video and visual content with you as the hero figure for each of those accounts. We highlight the excitement of the launch of your product and company but contrast it with the content that resonates with your audience, which tends towards introversion, outdoor pursuits, and a requirement of trustworthiness. We gathered enough video of you from our initial conversation to generate the first 30 days of content. We’ll ask for another conversation with you in two weeks so that we can generate the second 30 days’ worth of content. The social media campaign will continue for the next 60 days, as defined in your introductory AutoBizInABox plan, and can be extended indefinitely with follow-on plans. 

In addition to the website and social media content, we’ve generated a social media and web advertising strategy, and the first ads will start to run today at 6 pm. These ads draw the engagers to the top of the sales funnel that we’ve connected to your entire online presence. We’ve created a strategic communication campaign that resonates with your target audience and reuses much of the content they’ll see on your social media to ensure continuity and build the trust they require. In compliance with the marketing strategy and business objectives, we’ve set a pricing structure that requires two versions of your product with slightly different feature sets for each. This varies from your original idea of a single product but will result in a better overall product strategy and pave the way for follow-on products in the future. We’ve named your products the “BassBlaster Pro” and “BassBlaster+” and have adjusted your product definitions accordingly. 

We’ve generated a set of technical drawings and specifications for your products, forwarded these to a manufacturer that meets specifications, and created the distribution pipeline. You were hoping for a same-day service from order through shipping, but the cost analysis, considering pricing and manufacturing, doesn’t support it. The manufacturer we’ve chosen to support the business case will manufacture-on-demand and has indicated that each product will require 14 hours to build. Therefore, we cannot guarantee same-day shipping for your customers, but we can guarantee next-day shipping. The manufacturer has locations in Brazil and Mexico, so 2nd-day arrival can be guaranteed for US customers but not European and Asian customers. We know this does not meet your original intentions, but given the business case, this is the best financial scenario for you.

Congratulations again! We love helping human innovators such as yourself realize their dream of bringing human ideas to fruition. 

We suggest you hop onto freakthefishout.com and see all that you’ve brought forth into the world…

AI like ChatGPT is now creeping into the Organizational Augmentation world. 

Organizational augmentation is like outsourcing a skillset or having an excellent assistant. They’re not totally autonomous, but they do a lot by themselves without you needing to get involved. You set the rules and expectations, and they do the work. Plus, you’ve empowered them to make some decisions on your behalf, but staying with the guidelines you’ve set up. 

Organizations and teams start to feel some benefits here.

The Helpdesk is a great example. If you train an LLM on your stuff, it can effectively hold a conversation about it with humans. Even as that conversation twists and turns around an unknown number of curves. If the training data is sufficient, the chatbot can keep up.

The virtual graduate assistant is another example. You can offload a specific task, such as analyzing data to find trends, researching and summarizing prior art, or even interpreting legal briefs. 

But organizational augmentation comes with a required expertise and a financial cost. 

It requires programming your own application and incurs a dynamic cost across the interface to the LLM. To bring virtual bots into your workflow or team, you must use the LLM’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Which means, “you have to write your own code to create the bot.” And you have to pay for every piece of information you send and receive to the LLM. More data == more cost.

Organizational automation is where it starts. Maybe you need less helpdesk people. Maybe you need two grad assistants instead of three. Maybe you don’t need to hire out some specific task.

But at the end of the day, the effect is minimal.

Next, we’ll look at the holy grail — Autonomous Automation.

The first level of automation is Personal Automation.

Personal automation devices allow you to do your work faster, more accurately, and more effectively and do multiple things simultaneously. The electric drill and dishwasher are personal automation devices. Basically, they allow you to do something faster or more accurately and/or do something else while the machine performs the task.

Personal automation makes you more productive and generally happier. But you’re still intimately involved in the input and outcome. It’s like having to micromanage the shitty intern, but when properly directed, that intern is very helpful.

The drill hasn’t put any construction workers out of a job. No restaurant manager has fired the human who washes dishes because they bought a dishwasher machine. Both of these tools enhance those people’s contribution to the organization, but the organization isn’t materially benefitting beyond your uptick in productivity and happiness.

This is where AI, like ChatGPT, currently lives. You can offload tasks like editing your writing, creating ideas, summarizing TLDRs, creating code and script snippets, analyzing data, and generating images. It’s very helpful to you, the person, but you’re still required.

Like the electric drill, it’s not putting anybody out of work.

Next, we’ll look at the genre of automation that AI is starting to poke into — Partial Automation.

I see fear-mongering about AI all over the place. 

People worried about their jobs and their place in the world because of AI’s ability to automate. To be fair, some of this is warranted, i.e., AI automation will replace people in some roles. Including in my orbit directly. But let’s give it some context.

First, automating people out of jobs has been going on for 100’s of years through the introduction of machines into the workforce. Machines don’t get tired, have the strength of thousands of people, and can do the same thing repetitively with great precision. Nothing about the current wave of automation fear is novel or scarier than when machines joined the workforce. 

Second, as with the introduction of machines, certain activities and jobs are more exposed than others. The current fear-inducing AI, ChatGPT, and its competitors are a type of AI called “large language models.” 

“An LLM is akin to a vast library staffed by an incredibly fast and knowledgeable librarian. Just as this librarian can sift through thousands of books to provide information, summarize stories, or answer questions based on the content of those books, an LLM scans its extensive database of text from the internet to generate responses, make predictions, and understand context in a way that mimics human conversation and writing.”

The previous paragraph shows you what an LLM can do. ChatGPT wrote it. I asked it: “Describe what an LLM is in a couple sentences with an analogy.”

So, an LLM is good at certain types of writing. An LLM is also good at a few other things, such as generating images (and soon video) and writing code. 

So where does that leave you and me, and will AI automation put us out of a job?

As someone who works in both software development and automation (both squarely in the sights of AI), I have a unique perspective. I see three broad levels of automation:

• Personal automation
• Organizational augmentation
• Autonomous automation

Over the next several days we’ll take a look at these, what they mean, and how AI fits into each.

I think a lot about the importance of struggling and failing as the catalyst to move forward and succeed. It’s one of the essences of my self and team leadership.

I think about it mostly because I’ve seen and experienced a bunch of it anecdotally in my own life both personally and professionally. Anecdotal evidence is fraught, but in this case, many of the experts and much of the data agrees. 

But it’s not just that you fail. It’s how you fail and your attitude about it. Failure only does you good if you can learn to recognize the lessons within it. When learning how to fail, change the statements to questions:

“I’ll never do that again” => “What will I do differently next time?”
“I’m such an idiot” => “What did I miss or didn’t understand?”
“I should have known” => “Could I have known?”
“I could never be that person” => “How do I become that person, and is it worth it?”
“I’m not good enough” => “How do I get good enough?”
“I don’t know the right people” => “How do I meet the right people?”

Failure can beget success.

But only if you learn how to fail. 

“We’ll just use AI for that!”

Heard that this week. And I heard something that sounded exactly like it in 1997: “We’ll just use the internet for that!”

It’s a great marketing pitch. It’s a great pitch from the CEO or the COO. It’s a great pitch for your social media feed or a TEDx talk.

But currently, just like in 1997 with the internet, that’s a meaningless, confusing, or possibly scary statement. It’s just buzzwords. Anybody can say it. Anybody can theorize ways to use AI. Most don’t really know what it means, what it can and can’t do, and how to make it do anything.

Which creates quite the opportunity for us humans. Just like in 1997.

Your name is valuable.

To some degree, it defines your identity. People change their names to redefine their identity, either personally or professionally.

A brand name is valuable. It defines the identity of a company, organization, or movement. Brands change their name when they want to redefine who they are.

If you want to understand or connect with someone or some group better, start with their name.

You’ve been there. As have I.

Sometimes, it just all falls apart. No amount of good intentions, proper practice, or belief could save it.

What do you do?

First, you mourn. That’s OK. In fact, it’s necessary. Your beliefs and intentions, although ultimately askew, were initially well-placed. Their nobility requires acknowledgment.

Second, you learn. What happened? Is there anything to take from it? Yes, there always is. Find that.

Third, you turn the page. Could be scary. Could be exciting. Should be both. The clean sheet of paper.

Imagining all of the beautiful colors, shapes, and designs that may end up on that clean sheet of paper is the most important part.

A conversation I had recently:

Them: “I know you think that life’s better with AI, but I just can’t get on board with this AI thing.”

Me: “Really? Why not?”

Them: “AI will be our downfall. Our lives will eventually suck. That’s how they’ll get us.”

(Note: this person didn’t mean in the “Skynet-AI-will-kill-all-humans” way but in the “Vonnegut’s-Player-Piano” way.)

Me: “Ah, well, to be clear, my view is not ‘life is better with AI!’ My view is, ‘it’s an inevitable technology and it’s here and it will continute. Therefore, I want to learn about it, how to use it, and where the dangers really are.'”

Them: “But aren’t you afraid? Afraid that it will make you obsolete? Afraid that it’ll f— everything up?”

Me: “I don’t think about it like that because it’s here. I can’t change that. I accept it. I consider it like the car. Was life better before a car? Some think so. I could definitely argue that it was. But if you gotta get somewhere, would you rather have a car or not?”

Them: “Yeah, but nobody forces the car on me.”

Me: “OK, fair enough, but again, if you gotta get somewhere, would you rather choose a car? It’s a tool.”

Them: “Yeah, but I don’t understand AI. I don’t understand how it works. I don’t understand how to use it. I know how to use the car.”

And now we’re at the heart of the matter. The fear of the unknown. Which is all the more reason to dig in, figure it out, and join the conversation.

I do believe that life with AI has downsides. Maybe giant downsides. I think shared reality will suffer. I very much worry about bad actors and incentivization. I think truth may suffer. I’m concerned about the growing gap between have’s and have-not’s. I’m worried about more division. 

“Is life better with AI?” isn’t a very useful question at a macro level. AI is here. The cats out of the bag and ain’t going back in.

I think a better question is, “How do I make life better with AI?”

“At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with–and may even hate.”

– Sebstian Junger, Freedom

Yes, and not just governments. Great teams share this trait.

Plus, there is another quality — a willingness to lose.

In a healthy democracy, it’s the willingness to admit you’ve lost the election and will commit to the peaceful transfer of power.

On a healthy team, it’s the willingness try new things that don’t work out. It’s the willingness to admit that the other idea is better. It’s the willingness to commit to something you don’t (yet) agree with.

It’s ok to argue. It’s ok to debate. It’s ok to not agree. It’s ok to passionately and emotionally defend your position. But it’s not ok to work against it for the sake of winning.

Great team members, like great government leaders, have a willingness to lose. 

Seth Godin often laments the race to the bottom.

I’m with him. I paraphrase this as the hyperbolic version of “if some is good, more is better” — faster, bigger, cheaper, easier, less thought required, more dopamine engaged, bigger margins, all the colors, more buttons, etc. The Costco approach. “Why buy the amount I need when I can buy six times as much for four times the cost?!”

But another way I think of it is “lowest common denominator product and service development and offerings.” The race to the bottom is the illusion of “it’s better for everyone” — the public, the shareholders, the executives, etc. 

The paradox of the race to the bottom is that, taken over small windows and myopic variables, maximizing (or minimizing) can lead to a great product or service. Apple was a master at this in its heyday (which it has long since lost).

There’s no doubt that AI enables exponentially more. More videos created faster. More articles created faster. More books created faster. More web pages created faster. More ideas created faster. More choices created faster. More code created faster.

And more is better, right?

You’ve been here before. You know how it plays out. The last time it happened, you were optimistic it was the last time.

But here you are again because, once again, you aren’t in control of your own destiny.

How will you handle this one?

You will mourn appropriately but then transition.
You will focus on what you can control.
You will take care of your people.
You will be a professional.
You will be an example.
You will try new things.
You will be optimistic.
You will have faith.
You will add value.
You will try again.
You will learn.
You will lead.

How many more shots do you have left? Well, as many as you’re willing to take. 

When I was a little kid, I remember watching cliff divers on TV. ABC’s Wide World of Sports, if I remember correctly.

“That is the coolest thing anyone could ever do! I want to do that!”

The diver stands calm and stoic on the smallest of rock outcroppings. The camera (brilliantly) set up behind and above pans slowly, giving the viewer the perspective of nothing but the sunny, warm air and the blue water seemingly miles below. He closes his eyes, takes a breath, coils slightly, and launches into the great beyond, arms outstretched, body arched, legs together, and toes pointed. Two seconds or two minutes later, he breaks the plane of the beautiful blue water and disappears beneath, leaving no trace that he was ever there. The very definition of majestic. 

Well, my 8-year-old self had no idea that my 18+-year-old self would be wildly allergic to heights. Consequently, I’ve never cliff-dived from 60+ feet into the gleaming and warm Pacific like those majestic divers in Acapulco. I have, however, jumped from a 10m diving platform and 20-ish feet from the rocks along one of the local streams running in and around Warren, VT. 

In both cases, I was neither calm nor majestic. At the 10m board, I needed a physical push from a friend.

Sometimes it’s gonna be ugly. Sometimes, you’re gonna need a push from a friend. Sometimes, you’re not gonna know exactly what’s at the bottom.

But you’re gonna have to dive off the cliff anyway.

Does he make something that he likes, or does he make something that will sell?

These, of course, are not mutually exclusive. He can create something that he likes and sells. On one axis, this is what separates professional artists from amateur artists. But not entirely. Professionalism is a mindset, a commitment, and a practice — not strictly “I got paid.”

Now with AI, the artist has access to new tools and techniques that can both expand their creative possibilities and increase the speed at which creation happens. AI might even help the artist bridge the gap between something that he likes and something that will sell.

Maybe AI helps create more artists — people with ideas but not skills. AI provides the skill set, and humans provide the perspective.

But the artist’s dilemma remains.

Nature certainly has an order.

The circle of life. The laws of physics and chemistry. Evolution. Our understanding of this order changes over time, but we recognize that order exists objectively, and that it has been designed in from the beginning.

Humans also have an order to our world.

Justice. Altruism. Aesthetics. Purpose. As with nature, our understanding of human order changes over time, and we recognize that this order is not designed in, but relative to culture, time, and place.

I sometimes wonder if the natural order of things and the human order of things are at odds. Maybe the magic happens when we seek to align the two orders.

Excitement. Apprehension. Nervousness. Optimism. Dread.

New adventures bring out all the feelings, whether you signed up voluntarily or someone else forced it on you.

The question isn’t whether you feel them. The question is what you do with them. Like everything else in life, it’s about perspective.

And you control your perspective.

Mediocre. Average. Meh.

Nobody wants that label. It doesn’t matter if it’s applied to you at work, the dinner you just made, or your skills as a spouse. I feel like I’ve spent much of my life trying to outrun mediocre.

Extraordinary. Outstanding. Exemplary.

Those are the labels you want.

But each set of labels have one thing in common — they’re relative to the people in the room. They require a comparison. Mediocre in relation to who? Extraordinary compared to what?

Sometimes, you just gotta change rooms. Recognizing when is next level.

What energizes you?

I’m energized by making stuff, learning new stuff, and starting new physical or mental adventures.

But energy is fickle because sometimes it leaves you. This is one of my big problems. I have a ton of energy to start something, but then the energy wanes to finish it. For example, I have four books started. None finished.

Finishing is just as important as starting. The difference is commitment.

Follow your energy, but back it up with commitment.

As a parent, have you heard about or been a part of a story like this:

“My 12-year old (7th grade) sends me a frantic text message because she forgot her notebook and homework assignment at home. The teacher said she’ll get a zero on the assignment if she doesn’t hand it in today.”

How do you handle it?

When I was 12, I get the zero. As would all/most of my classmates.

But parents today (myself included) are increasingly allergic to allowing kids to face the consequences.

What are the consequences of a 7th-grader getting a zero on a homework assignment?

None. It’s not going to affect her ability to get into college. It’s not going to effect her ability to get a job. It’s not going to affect her ability to do anything in life. 

But, if she’s allowed to fail and get the zero, what might she gain?

An understanding of consequences. An understanding of responsibility. An opportunity to experience and then learn how to handle emotional turmoil. 

It’s all in a 100% safe environment with no long-term downside. It’s the emotional equivalent of the playground full of rounded-edged, not-too-high-off-the-ground, and PTO-approved equipment surrounded by a dump truck full of ground-up rubber tires.

Sometimes we need to let them fail. 

AI and algorithms today know you pretty well.

Instagram will show you what you want.
The Netflix recommendation engine will show you want you want.
Facebook advertisements will show you what you want.

If you don’t like what they’re showing you, maybe its time you re-evaluate what you want.

If you’re a cyclist, you know.

The hills and headwinds separate the men from the boys. If you want to get better, faster, stronger, climb the hill and ride into the wind.

But then that killer, stand-on-the-pedals, crank-to-crank climb crests, and now you’re screaming at break-neck speed down the other side. Eyes streaming tears. Fighting to keep it together.

Or you take a turn, and that wind, which you’d swear had turned the smooth, hard road into hot, mushy sand, is like a hand on your back. Pushing you forward. Your legs now require half the energy to propel you forward twice as fast.

The hills crest, and the wind changes direction. Best to train for both.

Just like life.

I just got a text message reminding me of my dentist appointment tomorrow. I’ll get another one an hour before the appointment.

You probably do also — from your dentist, doctor, hair salon, and any place that requires you to make an appointment. It’s one of the great features of modern technology.

But it’s also subtly shifted responsibility.

When I was a kid, my mom took her calendar book every time we went to the doctor or dentist. At the end, she’d make an appointment for six months or even a year from then and write it down in that book. Each week, she’d look at the calendar and plan our week around who had to be where.

“On Thursday you’re going to the dentist. I’ll get the note ready.”

No electronic notifications. No text messages. No automated phone calls. No confirmations. She made the appointment — no, a contract — six months ago, and we’re going to show up right on time.

What happens when you miss an appointment? Who’s responsible?

The answer to that is generational. Technology has shifted it. My parents wouldn’t dream of thinking it’s the dentist’s responsibility. My kids wouldn’t dream of thinking it’s their own responsibility.

Me? I’m caught in between. My generation bridges the gap between personal responsibility and systemic responsibility.

Where else has technology shifted responsibility from the person to the system?

Showing up is important.

You never get anywhere if you don’t show up. Some say showing up is half the battle. But is half the battle useful?

Is it helpful to connect to the Zoom meeting but not pay attention?
How useful is it to go into the office but surf the web all day?
Are you getting better if you show up at the gym but just go through the motions?

Rather than just showing up for a million little tasks, people, and asks in your life, wouldn’t it be better to just say no to the ones you’re just showing up for?

I’ve been knee-deep in all things SBF, FTX, and Effective Altruism over the last year or so. If you’re interested in this topic at all, but have no interest in wading through the millions of pieces of content that exists, this is a “you’re welcome” post. 

Here, I curate the scads of content that I’ve been through. A Cliffs Notes version, if you will. 

Books

Whether you “read” books through your auditory or visual interface, you can focus on just two: Michael Lewis kicks it through the uprights (of course, he does) with “Going Infinite,” and so does Brady Dale with “SBF: How the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto’s Very Bad Good Guy.” 

If you’re just looking for the interesting, salacious-adjacent, mostly human, partially f’nancial story, go with Lewis’s. He’s just so damn good at rooting out and then telling a story. A true master of the art, and I enjoyed his take on it immensely. You’ll know why SBF is in jail after this. I listened to this one, and I highly recommend it that way.

Dale’s is equally interesting but from a different angle. He dives deep into what happened on the crypto side. The other stuff, too, but he nicely fills the crypto mechanism gaps that Lewis (purposefully) left out. Listen, crypto is nerdy, geeky, engineery shit. And you do not need to know what the hell happened in the Crypto Winter and leading up to it to know why FTX failed and SBF went to jail. But if you do, Dale does a masterful job at unwinding it all and laying it out. Plus, he’s got a different style, and I really enjoyed it. He’s a hardcore (crypto) journalist, so it has the reporter kind of efficiency. But he coupled it with his snarky and maybe a bit cynical perspective. I read this one with my eyes, and I recommend the same for you. It’s a little too techy for listening. 

Podcasts

You couldn’t go wrong by just searching your favorite podcast app for “Michael Lewis” and then choosing one of your favorite interviewers. He’s done interviews on many of the big-name podcasts, but unfortunately, not Joe Rogan. I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Lewis is a member of the anti-JRE tribe. Regardless, I found the Freakonomics interview very compelling.

Michael Lewis used his own “Against the Rules” podcast (the sub-title to the SBF series is “Judging Sam”) to somewhat live-cast the trial. I found it interesting and worthy. Not all of the episodes are required, so feel free to skip around. Lewis isn’t the star and only appears in a few of them, but his reporter/producer (Lidia Jean Kott) does a great job manning the con. Lewis does, though, interview Brady Dale in one of the episodes and that’s how I found Dale’s book. 

The Wondery series called “Spellcaster — the Fall of SBF,” which is one of the big ones (maybe the biggest) is worth a listen. The host has some inside connections that are interesting and it’s a good mix of story telling with dry details.

Articles

I’ve read a million online articles. Everything from the mainstream media to the fringe, to just bloggers like me. 

If you just want the highlights and a little perspective on why it happened, I think my series of articles is brief but useful. OK, that’s shameless self-plugging, but I guess if you’re already at this sentence in this article that I’ve written…

You can use your favorite media outlet, and they likely have an article. I like this one from Investopedia because it presents the whole thing like a timeline — just the facts, ma’am. 

The tribes are hilariously hypocritical. Like just plain bald-faced about it all. I like to read the MSM takes on it simply for comic-relief. Mostly the headlines. The meat of the articles themselves are usually less tribal, but they’re not immune. So, the left media has turned SBF from a mimetic symbol of “how we should all live our lives — someone truly doing good in the world” to the poster child for “criminal and evil capitalism.” The right media has turned SBF from a mimetic symbol of “the embodiment of evil leftist political funding and communism” to an almost sympathetic character.

If you got here, I hope you found this helpful. If so, don’t hesitate to let me know john@johnmaconline.com. 

The engineering world runs on requirements and specifications. Until it doesn’t. The magic happens when you recognize when to go off-script. 

I’m at Agere Systems, and we’re having a requirements meeting with the Apple guys about the iPod. We were going to be supplying the engine — the CPU. 

The topic comes to the mp3 Codec (which is the piece of software that turns your mp3 file into music). Our guy says, “We have the best sounding mp3 decoder on the market” and then goes into why based on meeting the mp3 spec, and these other specs, and spec, spec, spec.

Apple guy says, “OK, thanks, but we don’t actually care about meeting those specs. We assume it will sound good enough. What we really care about is that your codec can gracefully handle malformed and broken mp3 files.” 

Our guy, “But if a file is malformed or doesn’t meet the spec, how do we know what to do? That’s a violation. We can’t be expected to handle that.” 

Apple, “We don’t care what you do — you can blip, skip, or whatever — but you cannot, under any circumstances, stop playing.” 

Our guy, “But the spec says…” 

Apple guy, “Again, we don’t care, and this is the last time we’ll talk about those specs. Seriously, don’t bring it up again.”

Our guy, “I don’t understand why you don’t care about the specs.”

Apple guy, “Think about the main iPod use case. It’s a person running or walking around the city or somewhere outside on streets and sidewalks. They cannot be distracted under any circumstances because that’s a safety issue. They must keep their focus on what’s happening around them. If that thing stops playing, it immediately distracts them from what’s going on around them.”  

Apple guy continues, “Plus, these people probably struggled to get their music library onto the iPod (this is just before or right at the beginning of the $0.99 song in iTunes). They don’t even know what a music library is. They either ripped the songs from CDs themselves, by some miracle, or they downloaded them from someplace like Napster. In either case, it is highly likely that those files suck. But they don’t know that. Nor do they care. If we now tell them that it’s their fault and their music files don’t conform to some esoteric engineering spec, they’re just gonna give up and say that this piece of shit doesn’t work. Because it’s freakin hard enough to get the damn music onto the player to begin with. We must assume that the files suck, and it’s our job to deal with it. Therefore, you will handle it.”

Was it any wonder that the iPod was such a market maker? 

More questions about freedom.

Is it the ability to take a walk?
Is it the ability to drive a jet ski on any body of water?
Is it the ability to speak your mind?
Is it the ability to not listen?
Is it the ability to drive to the coast, a lake, or the mountain?
Is it the ability to shoot a gun in your backyard?
Is it the ability to try?
Is it the ability to fail?
Is it the ability to succeed?
Is it the ability to build a gold-plated bathroom?
Is it the ability to not get mugged or raped?
Is it the ability to shop downtown?
Is it the ability to travel anywhere?
Is it the ability to walk on sidewalks?
Is it the ability to own anything you want?
Is it the ability to own almost nothing?
Is it the ability to build whatever you want, wherever you want?
Is it the ability to worship whomever, however you want?
Is it the ability to be protected from thieves?
Is it the ability to hunt in any field or woods?

What is freedom?

Is it the ability to do anything, anywhere, at any time?
Is it the ability to think, say, or feel anything?
Is it the ability to live anywhere, in any type of house, with or without anyone else?
Is it the ability to own, protect, and defend?
Is it the ability to roam the prairie, sleep under the stars, and kill and forage for your own food?
Is it the ability to drive to the 24x7x365 gas station to fill your personal car with gasoline, drive to the 24x7x365 grocery store, and buy strawberries in January?
Is it the ability to play whatever music you want, as loud as you want, at whatever time you want?
Is it the ability to grab your smartphone, create a video of you talking about your religious beliefs, and then post that video to X?
Is it the ability to identify as whomever you want, marry whomever you want, and never experience discrimination?
Is it the ability to make a living wage, work a reasonable amount of hours, and take a vacation once a year?
Is it the ability to not work, have plenty to eat, and have access to the best healthcare?
Is it the ability to work hard, learn new things, and make a pile of money?
Is it the ability to homeschool your kids, choose any public school, or choose any private school?
Is it the ability to invest your money, take the risks you want, and reap the rewards?
Is it the ability to drink whatever you want, smoke whatever you want, and inject whatever you want?
Is it the ability to make whatever you want, market whatever you want, and sell whatever you want?
Is it the ability to vote, protest, and lobby?
Is it the ability to access electricity, clean water, and the internet?

Make something that helps others make something.

For most of my career I’ve been making tools. Often, tools that just help me or us do our job better. For internal consumption only. 

But sometimes, the tool is the end game. It’s what we’re making for someone else — the point of the business. 

Here’s what makes a good tool:

• Intuitive (for the target audience — ie, it’s not for everyone, so it doesn’t have to be intuitive for everyone)
• Works (can’t sorta work, require support, or break often, etc)
• Makes life better across the variables of time, effort, quality, and repeatability

A good tool is always worth making. But here’s what makes a great tool:

• Makes possible what was previously impossible
• Exponentially increases productivity or quality
• Can’t imagine life without it
• Delightful to use

For a roofer, a hammer is a good tool, but an air-nailer is a great tool. 
For an accountant, a calculator is a good tool, but a spreadsheet or Quickbooks are great tools.
For a writer, a typewriter is a good tool, but a word processor is a great tool. 
For a software developer, a code editor is a good tool, but ChatGPT is a great tool. 

Look around. How can you make life better for someone?

Lazy can be a great motivator and indicator of what to make if you know how to use it.

Ask yourself these three questions:

• What are you tired of doing? 
• What would you like to get done quicker? 
• What do you do repeatedly? 

Laziness is exactly why all home appliances exist. Laziness has given us hot water heaters, coffee makers, and gas fireplaces. Laziness begets smart lighting, smart pet doors, and just about anything that starts with “Alexa…”

And laziness isn’t just for our homes. Drive-thru windows, escalators, automated car washes, delivery services, fast-casual eateries, check-in kiosks, and streaming services — all derived from human laziness. 

Laziness isn’t a bad thing when you’re trying to decide what to make.

I met Tony Fadell when I was working on the iPod. 

It was brief. He attended a meeting between his Apple team and my team from Agere. Shook his hand. A few pleasantries. He kicked off the meeting and then left. That was it. He wouldn’t remember me.

He and I are the same age, interested in the same things, and have the same education. But other than that brief handshake and my doomed time working on his project, that’s where the similarities end. 

I’ll sum it up this way — he’s got a Wikipedia page. I do not. 

But not long ago, I thought about him again (and relived my nightmare that was iPod) because I read his book “Build.” In it, he talks about making great things and how to decide what to make. I say all of that, first as catharsis (you’re just a voyeur) but also to get to the point I’m trying to make, because he talks about it in this book:

When deciding what to make, make it a painkiller rather than a vitamin.

Painkillers are solutions that people voluntarily use. Vitamins are solutions that people should use but may or may not. 

Some might say need versus want, and although that’s also a reasonable approach to determining what to make, they’re not the same. Do you need anesthesia before the doctor cuts off your leg? No, but you sure as hell want it. You’re volunteering vigorously to have the painkiller. 

So painkillers may skew more towards the want end of the spectrum. If a painkiller disappears, people feel it. Many people use vitamins, but if the vitamin suddenly disappears, what happens? Some people will care, but many will not. 

There is an emotional immediacy and visceral reaction to painkillers. There is a general malaise towards vitamins. 

When deciding what to make, make it a painkiller. 

I like to make stuff.

I’ve dedicated my entire career to making stuff, and many of my hobbies are also about making stuff. I learned early in my career at a giant defense contractor that I’m happiest and most productive when I feel like I’m contributing to making stuff.

The first lesson of making stuff is to decide who its for. Because whatever you make is always for a person.

Is it for you? Someone else?

Once you know that, start by applying one single golden rule:

How can I make the right thing to do the easy thing to do for that person?

People, yourself included, tend to gravitate towards and fall back to what’s easy. Watch what they do, not what they say. If whatever you are making can make it easier for them to do the right thing, you have a winner.

Over the next few days, we’ll explore how you can make the right thing to do the easy thing.

Plain ole inertia is a powerful force.

Some people simply would rather keep doing what they’re doing than go find something new and different. The devil you know…

At first blush, you might be thinking, “Yeah, but if that’s why that person is staying, they’re probably not that good and they’re not the one we want to stay.”

But I’ve found that’s not always true, or even mostly true. Inertia is strong and may be in place for many reasons unrelated to the work itself.

Can you use inertia to your benefit?

The surrounding environment is a compelling reason for people to stay where they’re at.

I’m not talking about perks — how great the office is, or where it is, free lunch, ping pong tables. I’m talking about the people and the work itself.

Does the person enjoy the work itself and the people they do it with?

If so, that’s a great incentive to stay and keep going. Enjoying the people doesn’t mean they all agree on everything. In fact, some times it means just the opposite. But the good workers recognize the difference between creative tension that pushes the team forward and petty personality conflicts that keep it stuck in the mud.

How do you provide opportunities for the people to do the best work of their career?

Belief is a powerful motivator. Maybe the most powerful.

One of the reasons someone who has a choice of work chooses to stay at a particular job, even if the company isn’t doing well, is belief. It can be belief in the mission, the leadership, or that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Belief that we’ll get there and we’ll do the thing and I want to be a part of it.

Belief is about story. So, what’s the story of the mission? What’s the story of leadership? What’s the story of our future financial gains?

Build a great story in order to create belief.

As a leader or manager, you should care. A lot.

I’ve seen quite a bit written about why people leave, but quite frankly, not so much about why they stay. This is important, especially if you’re in a company that’s failing, falling, stagnant, or otherwise unsexy. 

I’ll qualify these reasons with the following statement: I’m talking about workers who could leave. They have the skills, desirability, and the ability to move on to greener pastures. Therefore, we’re excluding people who are stuck there for any reason (ie, geography, lack of skills, etc). 

People stay for one or more of the following reasons:

1. They believe in the mission, leadership, and/or financial upside.
2. They like the work they’re doing and the people they’re doing it with.
3. Inertia.

Over the next few days, we’ll take a look at each of these. 

One of the interesting narratives in this upcoming national election cycle is democracy itself. 

Each side has labeled the other side as “undemocratic” — accusing each other of trying to destroy democracy through authoritarian control. You and I might agree with one side. Sometimes, we might even change our minds. We’d like one side to shut-the-hell-up; thank you very much. We’re people. We have opinions. Our opinions are based on feelings shaped by perspectives, experiences, and a host of other inputs that may or may not have to do with data.

But WWAID?

AI has no feelings. It has no awareness. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. But what it’s really good at is combing through its training data and spitting out statistically governed results, even if (especially if?) those results are novel or non-obvious.

AI does, however, respond to incentives. Incentives are, of course, defined by people and then given to the AI. 

From one perspective, AI has no inherent political incentives, therefore, almost by definition, it is more democratic. Yet, at the same time, AI doesn’t do anything without being incentivized by people. From that standpoint, AI is like an accelerator for undemocratic practices. The social media algorithm controversy is an example that has already occured.  

So which is it? 

Well, it’s neither, because yet again, AI as a technology and as an entity is not the problem. 

The problem is how we, the humans, use it. 

Several days a week, I run at lunchtime. Also, almost every day, my thoughts turn to the intersection of AI, robots, and humans. Many times, the Venn diagram of those two activities shows a large overlap.

Today was such a day. I’m out there running, and I couldn’t help but think about…running.

Today’s dominating thought topic was yet another fundamental difference between humans and AI-powered robots — regeneration versus degeneration.

Why do humans go for an exercise run, do squats, or take a Barre class? Because it’s good for you. It’s how your body (and mind) regenerate. The more you use it (to a certain degree), the better it becomes. Use begets regeneration.

AI-powered robots would never exercise. Why not? Because they break down with use. The more a robot exercises, the worse it gets. Use begets degeneration.

Simple but profound.

When the robots try to take over, we’ll use this against them.

AI video — deepfake, etc — was already here, but now OpenAI (ChatGPT) has launched a text-to-video creator for the masses. Now it’s about to explode.

I can’t try it yet because the release is so far limited to a select few. I’m not a member of that tribe. I’m not important or good enough. However, I’ll be lost for a few hours the first time I can try it.

Will we use it for good or evil?

Both, of course. Follow the incentives.

Ozempic is a problem.

However, the problem isn’t the drug, it’s stated intention, the people who use it, the mentality around it, the side effects, or the cost. The problem is it’s designed to keep you on it in perpetuity. That creates an incentive mismatch.

If you’re an executive, employee, or shareholder in Norvo Nordisk, what do you want?

If you’re a user of Ozempic, what do you want?

Those two wants don’t align.

Whether you’re building a house, making a spreadsheet, writing an article, or cooking dinner, it’s not for everyone.

That sounds obvious to your brain. But probably not to your heart. Your heart wonders why shouldn’t everyone love it? Why not?

That’s a trap. Because it’s not for everyone.

When soliciting feedback, start with who it’s for. Did I make this spreadsheet for a tax accountant or my mother-in-law? Is this article meant for my engineering team or my Church group? Are we serving this bread to our gluten-free friends?

Be careful, because even though that sounds simple and obvious, it’s not always. It starts with well-meaning people.

“I’d love to read it!”
“Can I try?”
“I’d be happy to give you some feedback on that.”

The sooner you get clear about who it’s for, the more useful feedback you’ll receive.

Getting useful feedback is an art.

As someone who has been building stuff for others to use for many years now, I’ve learned the following rules of feedback about the stuff I’m making:

1. Watch what the person does. What they do speaks louder than what they say. It’s not because they’re intentionally misleading or virtue signaling. It’s because, as humans, we are good at compartmentalizing — so good we often fool ourselves — and bad at self-awareness. 
2. Ask good questions. Yes, there are dumb (or useless) questions. Good questions are specific, empathic, open-ended, and encourage detailed feedback. Bad questions are vague, leading, or closed-ended. 
3. Negative feedback is the most useful. If someone complains, it means they care. Caring is the most important part of feedback. It means you’re on the right track. 
4. Positive feedback might be useful, but you must consider the source and their motivation. 
5. Silence is feedback. It means the person(s) doesn’t care. Does that matter to you? Maybe not, but if that person is your direct target audience, you’re likely on the wrong track. Re-evaluate everything.

As it turns out, these rules are pretty good for soliciting feedback about anything.

You’ve probably seen the photos comparing people on the beach in the 60s/70s versus now.

Not very flattering, for sure, and everybody’s got their opinion on why it is. Lifestyle, food, Big Ag, medication, Big Pharma, capitalism, racism, the income divide, America-the-evil, luck, etc. Pick your favorite political slogan.

How does one find the cause and then a solution for such a problem (ie, the kind of problem that didn’t exist but then shows up)?

In the engineering world, we use two concepts to find causes and solutions: white-box testing and black-box testing. White box testing requires a map and deep knowledge of what’s inside the box. Black box testing knows nothing of what’s in the box and focuses solely on the inputs and output. Black box testing is ideal when you know that nothing inside the box has changed, yet the results are different.

In this case here, we are the box. The human biochemical system today is the same as it was 50 years ago.

So what changed outside the box?

The beat writer observes. The coach participates.
The professor observes. The CEO participates.
The pundit observes. The Senator participates.
The parent observes. The child participates.

And also vice versa.

Doing both leads to better perspective.

I learned a long time ago that I listen to music wrong. 

I have no idea what the singer is saying. Even if the title of the song is in the lyrics, I rarely pick it up. Yesterday, I had Chris Stapleton’s “Broken Halos” running through my head all day, but as it turns out, I didn’t know that was the name (or the chorus) because I was singing “Broken Arrows” in my head. Arrows vs halos makes no difference to me. The shape of the words and melody are unphased by the substitution. To me, arrows works just as good as halos. 

That’s a mondegreen. That’s your word for the day. You’re welcome. 

I hear the vocals as an instrument, much like the lead guitar or keyboard. Sure, I pick up a word or phrase here and there (often incorrectly, as above), but its just gibberish without any meaning. It’s just a sound. Broadway musicals make little sense to me because I can’t follow the narrative through the words of the singers. 

My family thinks there’s something wrong with me.  

I also did for a long time. But as it turns out, we have a whole tribe of people like me. We’re not the majority, but we exist. I can’t find a term for our condition, but I’m not the only one.

So I just coined a name for us. We’re the tribe of musical mondegreenarians. 

You’re welcome to join. 

Time seems to accelerate as we age.

One year for a 10-year-old is 10% of his life.
One year for a 20-year-old is 5%.
One year for a 40-year-old is 2.5%.
If you get to 80, it’s down to 1.25%.

Each year is less important in terms of percentage, but also, each year lived provides so many more opportunities. The 10-year-old just hasn’t enough years yet. The 80-year-old has had exponentially more.

What are you filling your years with?

The time is yours.

As a child of the 70’s and 80’s, many of my inputs were curated without my having any control.

My parents, of course, were the initial curators of just about all inputs. Record labels and radio station programming directors initially curated my music, but then, luckily, my bass player and his infinite library of imported vinyl augmented that curation. The big three VHF stations and two little UHF stations curated my TV choices, then cable TV arrived in semi-rural Pennsylvania, and the curator list expanded greatly. The local newspaper and evening news show curated my current events inputs. The public school curated the 3 R’s and my history inputs. My mom’s cooking, plus the limited selection of restaurants in our geography, curated my food inputs. Any exposure I gained to inputs from other cultures, food, or worldviews came through our vacations or curated by my Dad’s adventures as a corporate pilot.

I don’t feel like I missed anything (important). I don’t feel like I needed more choice. But I also recognize that curation shaped who I was and am. Curation is important because curating your inputs affects your mental health, energy, perspective, knowledge, and outlook.

In today’s world, it’s harder than ever to curate your inputs, and it requires frequent attention. Plus, you run the risk of building an echo chamber around you.

Can AI solve the problem?

Oh, for sure, AI will be (already is) curating your inputs. If done properly, AI will definitely solve the problem. Let’s be careful, though. We need to follow the incentives.

Who’s incentivized? What are they trying to achieve? Who’s in control?

AI has no awareness. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. But it’s really good at curation.

My wife and I spent a long weekend in Austin last fall to celebrate our 30th anniversary. 

We stayed in an Airbnb in a sleepy little neighborhood a couple blocks east of the famous Franklins BBQ. We’d walk back from the downtown area each night (not that late because we’re not that young) and see them cruising around. A pack of three. Tightly knit. Just spinning around the empty streets in the neighborhood. Coming back around every few minutes. Dutifully obeying all of the traffic rules like a newbie teenager with the instructor and his clipboard wearing a stern expression in the passenger seat. They never got in our way and even stopped noticeably short when we crossed the street in front of them. But it was disarming to see them.

Driverless cars. Chevy Cruise’s to be exact. Testing. Learning. Figuring it out.

Even if you know nothing of ChatGPT, you probably know about driverless cars. And you probably have an opinion. Most of the loud opinions are negative.

Maybe, “I’d never get in a car without a driver!”
Or, “Nobody’s taking the wheel away from me!”
Or, “Ain’t no way a machine can drive better than me!”

In 2023, fully autonomous, driverless (or, more accurately, AI-driven) cars logged 3.3 million miles in California alone. Waymo, the largest driverless car company, has logged 7.1 million miles since its inception. Over that time, it has recorded three minor incidents. If humans had logged those same miles in the same areas, we would expect around 13 injury crashes.

Testing. Learning. Figuring it out.

Fully autonomous cars driven by AI are coming. It’s not an if. It’s a when. Maybe not in my lifetime, but it’s coming.

For now, AI continues on the path of testing, learning, and figuring it out. 

I hate cars. 

OK, let me qualify that. I love life with a car — the freedom, flexibility, and utility that a car provides for me. I certainly wouldn’t want to have no car. At least not where I currently live. Also, the engineer in me really likes cars and all of their mechanisms and software. 

But I hate cars. I hate shopping for them, buying them, selling them, registering them, fixing them, parking them, putting gas in them (or, if I had an EV, which I will someday, I’d hate charging them), and cleaning them. It feels like I spend all of my money on my cars. 

And, unfortunately, I have a pile of them. Five to be exact. Ask me some other time. 

Americans love cars, or rather, pickup trucks. Americans bought 15.5 million new vehicles in 2023, with the top three selling vehicles being the Ford F-series, Chevy Silverado, and the RAM pickup. The first EV, the Tesla Y, shows up at number 5, and the first car, the Camry, tops the list at 8. 

Even though it feels like I spend all of my money on cars, I don’t. The average American household spent 12.8% of their income on transportation. I looked at my own data, and I’m right around there myself. 

I guess its like so much else in my life. What it feels like and what the data says rarely align. 

So much of modern life is about managing acquisition.

Partner, friends, job, wealth, kids, pets, food, clothing, vehicles, house, trinkets. Look around.

What is the opposite of acquisition? Disposal? Loss?

Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, it seems to me that managing the opposite of acquisition is an underrated human skill.

What if, instead of telling people they are weak, we allow them to be strong?
What if, instead of telling people they need help, we allow them to help themselves?
What if, instead of telling people to blame, we allow them to take responsibility?
What if, instead of telling people to fit in, we allow them to stand out?
What if, instead of telling people they can’t, we allow them to?

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

– Matthew 5:13

Add value. 

Live amongst those that add value. Work with those that add value. Surround yourself with those that add value.

Adding value doesn’t require academic intelligence. It doesn’t require special skills, a college degree, or a certification. It doesn’t require a particular worldview or faith. It doesn’t require money. It doesn’t require voting for a particular person or party. It doesn’t require privilege. It doesn’t require followers. It doesn’t require a particular kind of job or business. It doesn’t require activism. It doesn’t require data. It doesn’t require a particular type of diet.

It just requires caring about someone or something else and then acting. Add value to one other person or billions of others. Size doesn’t matter. 

Do it humbly. Show empathy. Have a pure heart. 

Sometimes, I think we’ve lost the thread.

I was young
I was a hockey player.
I was a drummer.
I was a triathlete.
I was a coach.
I was a father of small children.
I was a college student.
I was a hardcore engineer.

I am middle-aged.
I am a runner and cyclist.
I am a husband.
I am a father of adult children.
I am a student of life.
I am a leader of engineers.
I am an employee.
I am a community member.
I am an observer.

I will be old.
I will be a writer.
I will be a grandfather.
I will be a community leader.
I will be self-employed.
I will be a finisher.

The arc of a life revolves around the movement of our labels between these three lists. Which of the “I was’s” can be moved forward to the “I am’s”? Which can’t or shouldn’t? Which of the “I am’s” can continue forward through the “I will be’s”? Which can’t or shouldn’t?

Emotionally, I think we navigate the arc if we still have a bunch of “I am’s” and especially “I will be’s” that inspire us. Because if either of those lists gets pessimistic, how do we conduct our day and what do we look forward to?

Focus on keeping those lists of “I am’s” and “I will be’s” long and inspirational.

We usually use the phrase “end of an era” to signify a sad or at least nostalgic end. We may feel a sense of loss or disappointment, are trying to cope with an unwanted or unfamiliar transition, or are reflecting on the passage of time itself. 

We don’t really use it when we’re happy it’s over. If we’re happy about it, we use phrases like, “free at last,” “dawn of a new day,” and “fresh start.” These phrases signal to the outside world that we’re ready to move on. Happy to move on. Optimistic about what’s next. 

Today was the end of an era.

“it’s not as if this barricade
blocks the only road
it’s not as if you’re all alone
in wanting to explode”

– Neil Peart, Rush, The Pass

But the end of an era is the beginning of a new one if you have the right attitude. The right attitude turns an end of an era into the dawn of a new day.

And you control your attitude.

For space, it was the 1960’s.
In physics, it was the 1920’s.
For the internet, it was the 1990’s.

These were the decades of exciting times. New discoveries. New use cases. Leaps forward. Lots of money made.

Sometimes, you need hindsight to know you were in the exciting times. But sometimes you know you’re in it right now.

If you can see that its happening now and you’re in the middle of it, you can contribute, add your voice, make your mark, or at the very least, catch the wave.

Right now, the decade of the 2020’s is the exciting times for AI.

What will you do?

Elon just announced that Neuralink has implanted its first brain interface chip into a person.

It’s called Telepathy.

” It enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking. Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal.”

If you play this out, one can reasonably see a future where you can choose to have one. Where you can choose to be augmented. Truly bionic. 

Yes, we gotta ask all the questions like who, where, when, why and let all the sides argue it out and consider this, that, blah, blah, blah. Probably for generations.

But if you could, would you get one?

“Your vote matters!”

But that depends on what you mean.

If you mean outcome, then scale plays a role, and truthfully, your vote might not matter. If you’re a contestant on Survivor, your single vote probably directly affects the outcome at tonight’s tribal council. However, as a US citizen, your single vote won’t determine the next President.

If you mean alignment, then scale doesn’t matter, but your vote certainly does. Your vote signals, “I’m part of this tribe over here. We’re smart, care about the right kinds of people, see the world correctly, and know how best to move forward.” Even if you choose not to vote, you’re aligning with the abstainers.

When deciding if your vote matters, it’s helpful to know what you mean.

In 1989, I saw Metallica at Stabler Arena on Lehigh University’s campus in Bethlehem, PA. The And Justice for All tour. Queensryche opened.

It was me and my two best friends from college. One particular moment during Harvester of Sorrow left an emotional impression on me. I almost cried. I’ve told the story several times over the years — Hetfield in a particular spot on stage, in a particular stance, perfectly timed pyro blast, lighting, sounds, etc. All of it burned indelibly into my brain. I can still picture it. The whole thing created an emotional welling-up that survives in me to this day.

About a year ago, I found some YouTube footage of the moment. I’s wrong. Or at least, the particular facts of the moment that I remember and describe are wrong. Hetfield wasn’t stage left; he was stage right. Oh, there wasn’t a pyro blast timed perfectly. He didn’t pose or move the way I describe it. Huh, I remember the lights very differently.

And then just a month ago, I was telling my brother about this show, and he said, “I know, I was there with you!”

“What? You were? I don’t remember that.”

“Dude. It was you, me, Scotty, and Gerk.”

Oh my, 0 for 2 with a memory that was “burned indelibly into my brain.”

I got the facts wrong, but not the story. Because the story was about the feeling I had in the moment. That’s what’s burned into my brain.

The “facts” are just there to support the emotion of the story.

Our memories are just stories. Many times not so filled with facts.

A couple of years into our marriage, both in our mid-20s, Chris and I started the discussion about kids. The result was that we decided the time was now.

I remember feeling excited, nervous, optimistic, and apprehensive at once. 

I can vividly recall that specific conversation. It was a weekday, and we were eating dinner on the couch, as we regularly did, watching some reruns of Friends. An episodic point about children came up and launched us into our discussion. By the end of our conversation, I was sure, but Chris was not so sure — but we decided now was the time.

Excited. Nervous. Optimistic. Apprehensive.

Chris and I recently replayed that conversation, and apparently, she remembers it totally different — except for dinner. For starters, it wasn’t a single conversation but a series. No, we didn’t start it on the couch on a weekday. It was the weekend, and we were out to dinner in the city. The conversation started there, but then lingered over several days. I was the apprehensive one, and she was sure.

Who’s story is right?

Who knows. We disagreed on the facts, but we agreed on how we felt. 

Excited. Nervous. Optimistic. Apprehensive.

Our stories matched up our feelings not the facts.

More to come…

Vinyl doesn’t sound better than digital. 

Nor do digital recordings sound better than analog. At least not scientifically or as a blanket statement. There are exceptions, of course. But the exceptions are a product of recording and production techniques (or failures) and playback equipment, not a product of the medium itself.

Many studies show that equipment and listeners can’t discern these differences, but those who favor one format have a confirmation bias based on their preferences or values going into the test — i.e., people like us.

Vinyl-lovers is a club with exclusive membership for people like me. My story about myself confirms my membership. We all want to be part of an exclusive club, even if that club is “people who don’t join clubs.”

Our stories tell us which clubs we’re part of. Which people are “people like me.”

Next time you insist that vinyl or digital sounds better, remember that’s your heart talking through the story you tell yourself, not your ears.  

People like me.

Not only can others use story to influence us, but the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and our people also does.

People like me appreciate the art of an album and the vision of the artist for the work. The extension of the music to the production and recording, to the album jacket, and to the medium itself.

People like me care about the whole experience of listening to music. We care about the equipment, the setting, the furniture, and the company with whom we are listening.

People like me are discerning and appreciate subtleties and nuances. We are experts.

People like me enjoy the real thing, and we care about important things.

People like me shun the modern throw-away culture and know that a song or album is an art form to cherish over the long haul of life rather than something to occupy interest over the next two weeks of driving in a car. It’s something to hold in your hand and to show another person.

People like me enjoy nostalgic memories. Sometimes, our own, sometimes borrowed from others, and we find them to be deeply impactful on our current self.

Do you find yourself in any of those statements?

If so, you know that vinyl LPs sound better than digital music. Of course, they do.

More to come…

This wine tastes nothing like it did when I was at the tasting. What’s the difference? Did the winery pull some sort of fast one on me?

Nope. The difference is the story.

When at home sipping while making dinner, there’s no story, or at least it’s a very different story. There’s no mood, no ambiance, no emotional connection. I’m no longer invested in the vintner’s success. Without that emotional investment, the taste just isn’t the same.

The story directs the physical to be an outcome of our emotional connection.

Stories captivate us. We bend facts to meet our emotional memories. We overvalue stories that left us feeling good. We become emotionally invested in a positive outcome for people who’s stories resonate with us. Anchoring and confirmation bias are real tactics that feed our investment.

We’re humans. That’s what we do.

Stories don’t have to be real. They don’t have to be based in fact. Or they can play fast and loose with an interplay of facts and non-facts. Because it’s not the facts that influence us. It’s the feelings.

Stories influence us for the good or bad. When trying to understand why a person thinks or says something, start with their story.

Have you ever bought a bottle of wine after tasting it at the winery, got it home, and it tasted nothing like you remember it? Maybe even undrinkable. 

Yes, of course. We all have. What happened? What’s different? Did they bait and switch?

Nah. It’s the same wine. The difference is the story. 

You’ll probably recognize this script…

Your personable host greets you warmly and starts the tasting experience with the winery’s background, its ownership and winemaker, and the sourcing of the grapes. The who, what, and why behind the wine you are about to sample. The setting relaxes you, the background piques your interest, and knowing the winemaker invests you in the vintner’s success. You’re here, spending time and money. Of course, you want the vinter to be successful.

She then tells you in interesting detail what you are about to experience across the entire flight — anchoring bias, with a side of confirmation bias setup. 

As she offers each wine, often with some taste-enhancing or palate-cleansing cheese, cracker, or chocolate, you are taken further on the journey of that specific wine. She compares this one to the others. Then she’ll tell you exactly what aromas you will notice as you swirl the liquid, followed by the mouthfeel and, ultimately, the full taste profile from the first touch of the tongue through several seconds after you swallow. And she’s right (imagine that)! 

When done right, it’s amazing. I can’t help but want to love the wine, and hence, I love the wine! But once I get it home, it rarely tastes the same. 

What happened here? Why did I love, or at least like, this wine just a few days ago at the winery? Were there shenanigans? Is this a different year or lot, or has some chemical shift occurred?

Heck no. Its influence (manipulation?) through story. 

More to come…

If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a noise?

Yes, of course it does. At least from a physics point of view, the falling tree produced sound waves regardless of available receptors. But are you asking the question from a physics point of view or a personal perception point of view?

If you run five miles but your watch goes dead and doesn’t log it, did you do it?

Yes, of course you did. At least from a physical point of view, your legs ran, your heart and lungs pumped, and you burned the calories. But are you asking the question from a physical point of view or from a social point of view?

If you fail to stop completely at a stop sign in the middle of the night in the country, did you break the law?

Yes, of course you did. At least from a legal technical point of view, you must come to a complete and full stop at all stop signs. But are you asking from a legal technical point of view or from a practical safety point of view?

When we’re talking about noise, we’re rarely talking about physics.

That’s for the birds.

The origin of this phrase is believed to be from the observation that birds tend to peck at animal droppings to find seeds. Something that’s “for the birds” is as insignificant or unimportant as the undigested seeds found in the ubiquitous early 20th-century horse manure.

It’s not worth considering seriously.

But those worthless, manure-embedded seeds are important to the birds. In fact, its what keeps them alive. It might be their only source of food.

Just because one person thinks it’s for the birds doesn’t mean that it’s true.

Everybody has a boss.

Even solopreneurs, single folks, and living-off-the-land loners. Every body. Most people answer to many bosses.

Looking back over your life, you probably remember the good ones fondly and the sucky ones with disdain. What made the good ones good and the bad ones bad? Was it the way they spoke to you? Respected or disrespected your time? Allowed you to flourish or kept you shackled? Maybe they had great vision or no grasp at all on where you were going. Empathy?

Contrary to what productivity consultants, the street, and executives will tell you, a good boss isn’t just someone who gets results. There is no objectively accurate definition of a good boss. Not from your standpoint.

You can feel a good or bad boss.

Now look in the mirror, because one of your bosses is you. Chances are you suck at being your own boss.

What can you do today to take one step towards being a better boss for yourself? Start by remembering how the good and bad bosses of your life so far made you feel.

It might seem like everything stinks or trending down right now, but that is far from true. In fact, 2024 will likely be the best overall year for humanity since our genesis.

Bad stuff that’s decreasing (source):

• In 1989, the amount of ozone-depleting gasses in the atmosphere was 1300 thousand tons. In 2021, it had fallen to 17 thousand tons. Projects are completely removed by 2045.
• In 1970, 24% of the world’s population was food-deprived/hungry. In 2022, it was only 9%.
• In 1920, you needed to care about smallpox. Over 400k cases were reported. Since 1980, smallpox is 0. Yes, vaccination.
• In 1800, 191 countries had legal slavery. By 2020, it’s 0 (legally).
• In 1800, 43% of children died before age 5. In 2022, it’s 4%.
• In 1970, we had 79 oil tanker spills. By 2010, it had dropped to 6 per year.
• In 1950, 25% of children aged 5-17 worked to help support themselves and their family. It’s now less than 10%.

Good stuff that’s increasing (same source):

• In 1800, 10% of people could read. In 2022, it’s 87%.
• In 1980, 58% of people had practical access to clean drinking water. In 2022, it’s 91%.
• In 1990, 74% of the world’s population had access to electricity. In 2022, it’s 91%.
• In 1893, one country allowed women to vote. In 2023, it’s 195.
• In 1970, 69% of girls finished primary schooling. In 2022, it’s 89%.
• In 1972, there was one single female CEO of a US Fortune 500 company (Katherine Graham, The Washington Post). In 2022, there were 52. 

Sometimes you gotta turn off the news, get your head out of the echo chamber, and look around. 

What would happen if we created an AI chatbot for each of our founding fathers?

AI versions of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and all the others.

This isn’t a crazy idea. It’s already being done. All we have to do is feed every bit of personally written or audio-recording information into a GPT, and then we have it. Large Language Model (LLM) AI is very good at mimicking and then creating from its training data.

Once we have that, we can start asking them.

What would Thomas Jefferson think of the Jan 6th events? Would Ben Franklin have any insight on abortion? Would Alexander Hamilton agree with the current operation of the Fed? What would George Washington think of our immigration policies?

Hey, James Madison, when you wrote the Constitution, what did you mean by this bit here…

Interesting, for sure.

But there are two downsides. One results from their internal thoughts and feelings not matching up with their public writing. That’s a training data issue.

The other is more relevant. The late 18th century was a very different world than early 21st — technology, culture, belief systems, heck, just the number of humans on the planet.

Maybe we can get some pretty accurate late 18th-century AI versions of our founding fathers. But I’m not so sure they’d still think and feel like they did.

Old guys like me say things like, “Why don’t kids play outside anymore?” Or, the even more dubious, “When I was a kid, I could play with a Hot Wheels car all afternoon.”

And generations before us have said the same things since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Replace “play outside” or “Hot Wheels car” with whatever activity or toy/mechanism/object lines up with that generation. My kids will say the same thing. Their kids will also. 

Let’s face it: Have you seen an iPad? If you were six and someone plopped a pile of rocks and sticks in front of you and an iPad next to them, what would you choose? What does a pile of rocks and sticks have compared to an iPad? Nothing, that’s what. 

We’ve built a callous up against wonder through technology. What once was magic and sci-fi is now commonplace. 

There’s nothing wrong with the younger generation. Each generation finds its own magic in the world, albeit through different lenses. The core of human curiosity and playfulness remains; it simply evolves with the tools and times. 

We just have different thicknesses to our callouses.  

Maybe you’ve heard the term “prompt engineering.”

Prompt engineering refers to asking the right questions of an AI model like ChatGPT to get out of it what you want. It makes a difference what you ask, how you ask, and the way you ask.

I’m a software developer and a pretty good prompt engineer for getting ChatGPT to write me some code. I know the terminology, the mechanisms, and how I want to transform the inputs to the outputs. I know the right questions to ask.

But when I ask a dumb question? Garbage in => garbage out.

Just like with humans.

People say, “Follow the money.”

But money isn’t the only powerful incentive. Power, love, God, altruism, recognition, purpose, adequacy — all incentives that people follow.

Follow the incentive.

We’ve done a lot of painting in our house over the 21 years we’ve lived here.

In the early spring of 2002, we moved into a monotonous sea of white. All walls and trim were bright and clean but repetitive. Since then, we’ve changed the color of every single wall, most of them several times. We’ve gone through bright and primary colors, earthy tones, faux finishes, and accent walls, and now we’re in a mode of whites, grays, and black.

We’ve done more than the walls over the years as well. We’ve changed the color of doors, trim, vanities, and furniture. We even painted our kitchen cabinets ourselves, turning the mid-90s maple aesthetic to a modern and clean off-white with black knobs. Currently, we’re tackling the open stairwell between the first and second floors for the first time. What has been a stained red oak is transforming to an opaque black with off-white kick plates and trim. The railings following suit.

The key to a good-looking and lasting coat of paint is preparation. Filling holes, washing, sanding, taping, and priming. If you rush through it or skip steps, you’re always disappointed. It’s what underneath that counts.

The beauty of a fresh coat of paint is it can totally change your perspective about what’s already there. Just a simple color change. Fresh and new. Different and exciting.

This article ain’t about paint.

“Trust is earned, not given.”

What if, instead, we all started with, “Trust is freely given.”

Yes, sometimes you’ll get taken. But also…

More comfort with risk. More support in failures. More possibilities. More empathy. More collaboration. More innovation. More growth. More speed.

My sump pump has been torturing me for the last three days.

It’s been running a cycle of 10 seconds on and 11 seconds off since the middle of the storm that dumped three inches of rain. First, the clunk of the float valve, followed by the relentless hum of the pump, then another clunk signaling the valve’s closure. This sequence reverberates across my entire ground floor, forming a tedious, drawn-out melody I can’t stand. My desk, where I sit this very moment, is positioned directly above the pump in the basement.

Torture. But then…

The pump has created a little creek running down my front yard that starts at its outlet at the corner of the house. It runs down the now mushy yard and into the swale at the edge of the road. From there, it follows the swale across the end of my driveway towards the bottom of the hill a quarter mile down the road. Where I sit, I can watch the water make its journey from under my house to the bottom of the hill a quarter mile away.

And then I feel it — the gratitude.

There’s always something to be thankful for.

My feet hit the ground.
My knees springy and strong.
The hard and smooth road.
Fields, barns, and grass bursting with optimism.

My feet hit the ground.
My knees resilient yet questioning.
The rough and ready road.
Fields, barns, and grass jaded with experience.

My feet hit the ground.
My knees tentative and weathered.
The pitched and unforgiving road.
Fields, barns, and grass mocking with the passage of time.

Scientists think that an itchy feeling is a mechanism to protect us from harmful external physical elements like parasites and chemicals. The irritating feeling reflexively prompts us to scratch it, which may help to remove the irritant, providing some protection.

However, sometimes, the itchy feeling results from an internal source. An external response to something irritating from within. In such cases, the medical world seeks to help us find the source of that irritant because that itchy feeling may be an indicator of something more harmful and foreboding within. Something that, if left unattended, can lead to bigger problems.

Life experience generates a wisdom that youthful naivety can easily miss. Having gone through the shit, seen some things with your own eyes, and been at the receiving end, you start to get a feel for when stuff might go down.

You get that itchy feeling.

Always listen to that itchy feeling.

“Never quit” is a dumb mantra. 

It embodies everything that’s wrong with hustle culture, toxic positivity, and faux leadership (and parenting) through motivational posters. By the way, manipulators use the “never quit” mantra to keep you hooked in, not for your benefit, but for theirs. Yes, that’s how they get ya.

The most successful, happiest, and content people you know, follow, and admire don’t “never quit.” Rather, they figure out what and when to quit. Not every path leads to success. Not every path leads you to where you want to go. Not every path is good for you.

To be successful, happy, and content, you will have to go through the shit. Not around it. No shortcuts. Sometimes, to get where you want to go, you will definitely have to not quit. But not always. You need to do the work to know when to quit and when not to.

Your new mantra — Sometimes quit!

It doesn’t look good on a poster. It’s not a great sound bite. Rocky would never tape it to his mirror.

But it’ll serve you better. 

AI is here, and 2024 is the year you should be using it.

I’ve seen people draw analogies between AI as a technology disrupter to the computer/smartphone, fire, steam engine, printing press, electricity, internet, and the entire industrial revolution. All seem reasonable to me. Only in hindsight will we know the effect AI will have had on our culture, species, and planet. That’s for future historians to debate.

However, as someone who is now using ChatGPT every day, I believe that regardless of the global and historical ramifications, it offers a very personal benefit — it’s an amazing tool. A tool too good to ignore or not to use.

Would you prefer a rock over a hammer? A sharp stick over a drill? A flat rock over a frying pan? An abacus over a calculator?

Over the last several posts, I’ve outlined how I currently use AI as a software developer, writer, and team leader. ChatGPT is now a tool I won’t live without.

2024 is the year. The year of AI.

Need a logo? What about an icon or graphic for your presentation?

AI is your answer. Either DALL-E (a wing of ChatGPT) and Midjourney.

I needed some icons to use in a presentation. I used DALL-E like this: “Generate a set of icons that represent code, build, test, and release. Make them monochrome and simple.”

Then I iterated on them a few times, such as: “Make the code icon look more like a file with text.” After less than five minutes, I had it — a set of four icons that I’d be using in my presentation.

Here’s what I got.

Prior to AI, I would have done a Google search and definitely found what I was looking for. However, I would have to start by eliminating all of the images that Google presented from paysites. Then, I would have to search through those left to find four that had a similar look and feel. Finally, I would have no idea which of these might be at risk to copyright or trademark issues.

Not so with DALL-E. I’m free and clear and have exactly what I wanted.

Similarly for a logo.

“Generate a 150×150 logo for a devops company named IdeaGantry. Make it rocket themed and use colors and an image that invokes trust.”

A few iterations later, here’s what I got.

DALL-E won’t replace your marketing department, but if you’re in the marketing department, you sure want to use it to help you.

Here is where it gets interesting and where you can fully harness AI’s current power.

Whether you are a marketer, salesperson, team leader, project manager, student, blogger, screenwriter, author, journalist, pastor, or you write the newsletter for your mom’s group, ChatGPT is your new best friend. You can and should use it to both help you create and edit. It’s like having a fabulous assistant, a group of friends you sit around with getting sloshed and talking about big ideas, and access to a focus group all in one beguiling little prompt.

For content generation, you can use ChatGPT at whatever level you want to, from generating ideas to writing whole articles.

“Write a 200 word summary article of this weekly crime data for a blurb in the police ledger of a newspaper”
“I’m writing a sermon about Psalm 23 for a liberal Presbyterian congregation that has a large income diversity. Suggest 5 themes I can explore”
“Give me 25 recipes that meet the following criteria: protein > 20g, carbs < 50g, fat < 15 g, no eggs, gluten free”
“Write an end of the year message to my team that summarizes all of our accomplishments and sets out a path for the next year”

Then, iterate in a conversational context to get to what you want.

For editing, you can ask ChatGPT specific questions.

“Edit this blurb about crime statistics so that it fits into less than 200 words”
“Here is my sermon. Suggest some improvements so that I can better relate to my economically diverse congregation”
“Here are 10 recipes. Modify them so that they are all formatted identically to the format I provided earlier”
“Edit this end of year message to my team so that it reads more succinct and ensures we keep optimism for the upcoming year”

Or you can retarget an audience.

“Here is the documentation on our software application. Create a 500 word article that summarizes it and is targeted to an audience marketing and sales people”
“Here is my article about XYZ. Rewrite it for a an audience of elementary school kids and use analogies”

This is just the tip of the iceberg. ChatGPT and LLM Ai, in general, are built for writing.

If you do any work with people outside the United States, ChatGPT is an indispensable tool for written communication.

Google Translate is a great tool, but it lacks something very important — context. You can craft some communication, formal or informal, that makes sense in English, dump it into Translate, and you’ll get back and direct translation. But sometimes, it loses meaning or even creates incorrect connotations. 

ChatGPT is much better at context and the nuances of formal and informal communication in different languages. 

Here’s an example:

“Craft a marketing brief in Italian to be emailed to our list about the launch of the software application found here: https://idex-biometrics-fuze.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/latest/index.html”

ChatGPT understands the context and nuances of marketing briefs in Italian, plus it will go figure out from the URL what that software is all about. It will create something useful and hit the mark.

Also, harkening back to Part 3, you can create a chatbot that translates languages in real-time, making it seamless to the people talking with your chatbot.

ChatGPT is bringing the world closer together and making your life easier through written translation. 

Yes, in 2024, you’ll be conversing (written) with AI quite a bit. Here’s how you can get in on the game.

You can use ChatGPT in two main ways for written conversation:

1. Real-time with chatbots
2. Generating responses for you

If you’re tech-savvy, creating your own AI-backed chatbots is within your grasp already. I won’t describe the details of how to do it here, but you can create the chatbot and train it on all of your information, then make an interface to it available to the public. 

Granted, creating chatbots appeals to a limited audience. So number two may be more interesting to you. Here’s an example of how I use it. 

I’ll get a long email thread that started way before my inclusion. Assuming no confidential material, I’ll paste the entirety of the thread into ChatGPT and ask it the following:

“Summarize this thread for me. If I am being asked to do something or respond, tell me, and then formulate a response”

Out pops a summary of the thread, an indication of whether I’m am tasked with something, and if so, an initial response. Often, that response is good enough to go as is. If the required response does need a decision from me, ChatGPT will ask me what I want the decision to be.

The bottom line: ChatGPT can help you both speed up your ability to respond and improve the responses you give.

Much of writing, if even just an email reply, requires research first. Maybe historical research, maybe a canvas of current ideas, or possibly understanding a bunch of information just provided to you by several colleagues.

How do you learn about things now?

Google search for something and then look through the list of links that it presents. This is great. Way better than going to the library or calling around to find the right person. Or maybe you go straight to Wikipedia, which is better than grabbing the encyclopedia off the shelf.

ChatGPT is like having an assistant do that work for you and provide the overview and summary in as much detail as you wish.

“Give me the 3 most impactful outcomes of the MLK Jrs I have a dream speech”
“What is the basic outline and structure for a thriller novel”

Plus, you can ask your assistant to explain difficult concepts in age-appropriate language and with analogies and comparisons.

“Use an analogy to explain quantum mechanics as if I’m 10 years old”

ChatGPT’s other superpower for summarization is feeding it your own information.

“Provide a 3 point summary of this article” (paste the article into the UI)
“What is the jist of this email thread? Am I being asked to do something?” (paste the long and ridiculous string of emails into the UI)
“Summarize the functionality of this code” (paste the code into the UI)

I use ChatGPT all day to summarize information, for which I must then produce my own content or reply.