2025-06-01 17:03:00
In the theatre, the play is written before casting begins. This gives the playwright freedom and responsibility, and it puts the text first.
Writing for a sitcom is different. The 50th episode of Seinfeld was a lot easier to write because the cast and the tropes were already set. Easier, but also more difficult to find a breakthrough.
In our organizations and communities, we’re often asked for a strategic plan, which is a sort of script. The question that might be worth asking is: How many new characters are we planning to cast?
Where do we go on vacation? How should our company put AI to work? What’s the best way to increase donations?
If the strategy is required to use every asset and individual we already have, our freedom to innovate is limited. Perhaps we should be clear about who’s doing the casting before we begin writing the script.
2025-05-31 17:03:00
What’s the attainable, practical and generous thing you haven’t done yet?
What will it take for it to become a priority?
2025-05-30 17:03:00
There are people and organizations that are working overtime to redirect and manipulate your attention.
The question is: Are they more aware and careful in how you spend your attention than you are?
The act of focusing on what we focus on pays enormous dividends.
2025-05-29 17:03:00
“AI is brilliant and it can do everything.”
“AI hallucinates sometimes and it can’t be trusted.”
“AI is a trick, a clever way to induce people to believe it’s human-like, but it’s not.”
It turns out that AI hallucinates all the time. Sometimes, these hallucinations are useful, worth interpreting as helpful contributions, and sometimes, not so much.
In some senses, then, AI isn’t that smart.
But neither are we.
At work, we spend very little time accurately synthesizing new information and creating breakthroughs. We mostly do tasks, simple inputs and outputs, based on little understanding of the overall system in which we live.
AI is good at line by line coding, because that’s an iterative process that piles up useful hallucinations into a working whole.
AI is less good at conceptual system architecture problems. And most programmers are less good at this as well. Often dramatically less good.
AI is good at multiple choice questions and banal copywriting. So are most people.
In less than 24 months, we’ve seen LLM apps become better and better at things we never thought they’d be able to do. Human work, it seems, is in retreat.
In fact, it’s not a retreat. It’s a chance to advance. The same way the steam shovel put a focus on the hard work of architecture, project planning and smart choices about what to build (instead of the hard brute force work of shoveling), AI is doing the same for indoor work.
It doesn’t really matter that AI doesn’t “know” what it’s doing. Most of the time, we don’t either.
Human work is any work an AI can’t do (yet.)
2025-05-28 17:03:00
Pop songs are 200 seconds long because the mechanical properties of 78 and 45 rpm records can deliver one song with decent fidelity of that length. They can’t handle ten minutes, and one minute is too short to charge for.
The number of books carried by a local bookstore was the right amount to balance paying the rent and satisfying most customers. And the number of books published reflected the fact that the only way to get a new book in was for the store to take one out.
Movies are long enough to justify buying a ticket, but not so long that the theater can’t have multiple showings.
Books are around 350 pages because pamphlets are too hard to sell and books that are too long are hard to bind and manipulate.
Sitcoms are half an hour long because two sitcoms an hour maximizes the possible audience more than extending one to double the length might.
The newspaper is the length it often is because the editors are balancing the time each subscriber can spend with it against the publisher’s desire to sell the most profitable number of ads. “All the news that fits.”
When technology changes the media, when distribution and consumption shift, the definition of just the right length shifts as well. Podcasts changed the length of interviews, Linkedin changed the length of a resume and YouTube changed the length of funny videos… the cycle continues.
2025-05-27 17:03:00
We notice the current most when we’re headed against it. It’s easy to take our advantage for granted when we’re headed the other way and it’s helping us.
Related: When I’m on my bike, I generally hope that drivers will cut me some slack–a lesson that’s easy to forget when I’m the one who’s driving.
