2025-10-22 17:03:00
It’s difficult to spend the entire day working on outcomes. Sooner or later, there are tasks to be done, tasks we believe will get us to the outcome we seek.
But it’s easy to spend the whole day on tasks, failing to recalibrate and ignoring the fact that the tasks might not be helping us get the results we set out to create in the first place.
2025-10-21 17:16:00
It’s quite likely that your favorite TV show wasn’t written by a single person. There’s a room filled with professionals, bouncing ideas back and forth, provoking each other and creating a script.
The songs on your favorite artist’s hit record might have been written by them, but the music involved other musicians, engineers, producers and perhaps compression, digital editing and tuning.
The most famous magicians in the world often hire other magicians to devise and produce the tricks they perform.
And every author I know uses a spell checker, an outside editor and other support to create their work.
We understand this, it’s part of the creation process.
Rembrandt had a studio of artisans, as does Kehinde Wiley. They didn’t make their own paint, either.
Almost nothing we encounter is fully handmade if we want to be literal about the “hand” part.
When an artist, entrepreneur or organizer says, “I made this,” what they almost certainly mean is, “the people and tools and tech in my writer’s room made this with my help and under my direction.” And that writer’s room goes all the way back to the influences beginning before kindergarten.
And yet, every time the scale or technological prowess of the assistance in the studio ratchets up, it makes us uncomfortable. Powerful new tech makes creators wary, and some consumers and patrons as well.
Until it doesn’t.
Then it’s normal. Then the standards are set and we have trouble imagining productive work without them. Painters who use artificial light so they can work at night. Artists who use a camera instead of a paintbrush. Photographers who use autofocus or digital cameras…
When we use a new technology as a shortcut to replace our judgment, we’ve handed over the human part, and it won’t work. The magic disappears.
But when we use new technology to provoke and amplify, when we use it for tasks instead of projects, we’re doing what we’ve always done–creating something for the people we seek to serve. Work that matters for people who care, created with vision and risk.
The quality of your work is directly related to the skills and agenda of the people and tools in your writer’s room.
2025-10-20 17:03:00
It’s easy to believe we have an accurate understanding of ourselves. After all, we spend a lot of time looking in the mirror.
It might be worth wondering about why the mirror is deemed to be accurate at reflecting what we see as our flaws, real or metaphorical, but indistinct and a little fuzzy when we consider our opportunities, assets and contributions.
When we remind ourselves what we have to offer, it’s more likely we use those resources, but rehearsing our defects simply holds us back.
Amplifying one’s flaws is a non-productive hobby.
2025-10-19 17:03:00
So many options, so little time.
A friend asked if he should put his podcast on YouTube.
After all, that’s how many people are consuming this sort of content, it’s low cost. The comments and subscriptions offer interesting tools for engagement, and it could grow their base.
But just because something might be worth doing, that doesn’t mean you should.
More always comes with a cost.
If you can’t do it as well as the medium demands with the resources you have, you should either find more resources or take a pass. And if the not-silly thing you’re considering is going to add more metrics, not better ones, then walk away.
Annoyingly, yet productively, we keep coming back to, “who’s it for” and “what’s it for.”
2025-10-18 17:03:00
Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to.
Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability or performance. Luxury isn’t a more accurate watch or a faster processor. Luxury is a marker that we can afford to do something others might consider wasteful.
A Birkin bag is a luxury good, and so is reading an entire non-fiction book, listening to a public radio broadcast or attending a concert when we could stay at home and listen for free.
By ‘wasting’ our attention on nuance, narrative, experiences and everything except the checkbox takeaway, we’re sending a message to ourselves and others. A message about allocating our time to something beyond optimized performance or survival.
If you’ve signed up to offer an attention-luxury good, you undermine it when you also try to make it quick and convenient.
2025-10-17 17:03:00
Enrico Fermi found a paradox: If there’s intelligent life on other planets, why haven’t we heard from them yet?
Perhaps the answer is this:
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to travel great distances will have to work in community.
This pro-social behavior, combined with the tech they develop, will inevitably lead to some sort of social media.
And once social media arrives, the civilization will struggle to survive.
I’m more optimistic than this ‘law’ would have you believe, but it’s worth acknowledging that we become the stories we tell, and the social media algorithms we live with cause us to tell stories we might regret.
It’s not our job to be used by social media, or to become tools of the algorithm.
Hat tip to Hugh.
