When the long-term cost of our situation is uncomfortably linked to the short-term expense and pain of changing the situation, it’s easy to feel stuck.
One way to deal with the feeling is to insist that there’s no way to change the situation. That the price we’ll have to pay upfront is so big, we simply have to live with the day to day consequences, forever.
An alternative is to realize that we might have a choice. If we choose to stay where we are, we’re not stuck at all, we’re simply selecting our best option.
From there, we can make an informed choice about whether we really want to live with the long-term consequences of that choice. If so, at least we can own the outcome.
If you had tomorrow to do over again, how would you choose to do it?
Stuck is a situation, stuck might be a problem, and stuck can be a choice.
This is the challenging insight that every generation comes to grips with.
It might be a rising cohort of teachers or managers. It might be the next cycle of companies. And it might be the shifting power dynamic in families or organizations.
No one gives you a certificate, an endorsement or a magical sword pulled from a stone.
Ideas open doors, lead to connections and make things better.
But not all good ideas are good businesses.
Crop rotation is a good idea. So is sous vide cooking and the sport of juggling. But these aren’t good businesses.
A business thrives when it can charge a premium–selling something for more than it costs. That means that there has to be a competitive advantage, an asset that produces value. Easy substitutions are a challenge for businesses, but useful ideas are often based on how easy they are to share.
Create something of value. And then find a reason why people will eagerly choose your version and happily pay extra for it.
[Update: After 20+ years, the original RSS feed for this blog doesn’t work any longer. The one to use is: https://newlifetrick.site/feed/%3C/a%3E I strongly recommend RSS, it’s the best way to read blogs. Own your communications, don’t let Google filter them.]
This is a bonus post about a couple of my hobbies. We will return to our regular scheduled post tomorrow.
Wonder is the feeling we have when our experience extends beyond our expectations.
It’s uniquely human, and available whenever we can create the conditions for it to occur.
Wonder is a fine place to do your work, but it’s also a reliable way to find joy in your hobbies. If most jobs are about meeting spec and following the manual, our hobbies can be about creating the conditions for wonder to arrive.
Recorded music is a miracle. Not sort of like a miracle, but an actual miracle. Transporting human voices across time and space. Bringing people long gone back into the room. Giving us a chance to hear music that we’d never experience otherwise.
And then, when we added stereo, a second bit of wonder. Because a well-designed stereo brings music into the space between the speakers–and sometimes, the soundstage extends beyond the speakers. How can this be? Voices coming from another place, and then landing far from the device itself.
I became an audiophile when my friend Steve introduced me to the original Stereophile magazine in 1990. Since then, I’ve traded my way through hundreds of speakers and amps, usually breaking even as a I bought and sold used equipment designed with great care and at great expense (lots of people only buy new stuff, making the purchase and resale of used equipment a resilient proposition). Along the way, I discovered the magic of ancient tube amp technology.
The late Art Dudley wrote many reviews that inspired his friends and readers to give it a try.
The short version: transistors are cheap and plentiful. Transistors give your car stereo 40 or 100 watts per channel of power. Lots of power makes it easier for speaker manufacturers to create modern speakers, because the power available means they don’t have to be as efficient (sort of like race cars not needing to worry about gas mileage).
But the old tube amps bring wonder. The old tube amps might not be powerful, but they’re magical.
I was a columnist for Copper Audio Magazine when I discovered the Glow in the Dark blog. That led me to the work of Don Sachs and Oliver Sayres. I wasn’t going to give up my extraordinary PSAudio DSD and Lens, but these amps rekindled my love of the hobby.
The problem is that a 2A3 amp only generates 2 or 3 watts per channel of power. That’s 1/30th of your car stereo. Hook them up to a modern speaker and nothing worthwhile will happen.
I needed new speakers. And so I went down the high-efficiency rabbit hole. Horns and other more obscure devices. Fussy, oversized and not always a home run.
About this time, I discovered a few companies that were making drivers (those round things you see in every speaker) that were extremely efficient.
I bought a pair and built my own baffleless speakers:
This speaker is painted Yves Klein Blue, a paint made by my friend Stuart at Culture Hustle. A story for another post. And yes, that’s a subwoofer, but my office has just the speakers, no sub…
These speakers are baffleless. There’s no box. That’s simply a piece of plywood suspending the driver rigidly in space. It’s impossible. And again, the wonder. The sound so exceeds expectations that wonder arises.
A few months ago, I found some lumberyards that were selling live-edge slabs of wood. Hardwood is a wild animal, not farm-raised. Each pull on the spokeshave reveals something surprising, and when you finally apply the finish, chatoyancy may arise. How?
Do they sound better because I made them and like the way they look? Of course. Placebos are real, especially in the arts.
Do they sound better because of all the steps in the journey to get here, the people I’ve met and the tech I’ve encountered? Perhaps. It’s also possible that being a snob makes them sound worse.
I’m going to post some pictures of the latest speakers on this page.
Wonder can lurk in places we don’t expect, and it’s worth seeking it out.
Seth Seiders, (Al Capone’s accountant) wrote a book about the “pivot man.”
This is a key function in industrial organizations, bureaucracies and any organization with more than thirty people.
It’s someone (often not a ‘man’) with a boss and with employees.
In our modern world, this person goes to meetings. That’s their job. The company can afford to pay them well and give them resources to help keep things in sync.
Pivot people rarely make decisions and they don’t make widgets. They have influence, but their real work is in the pivoting part. Bringing human energy to the art of coordination.
It might be your website, your brochure, the inside of your store…
This is a fine thing to do, but it’s not particularly effective.
The secret isn’t to optimize the landing page. It’s to optimize the reason people are coming to your site. You can’t convert people who don’t want what you have… you need to attract people who do.
When we build a system and create the conditions for engagement and growth, it happens without tweaking the last step. And if the system isn’t there, all the tweaking won’t help.
If the answer is over there, then we’re off the hook. If it comes from the future, comes from away, comes from someone else, then our job is to simply wait for it to arrive.
But it could be that your organization already has all the resources it needs to change the dynamic in the marketplace. It could be that your keyboard has all the letters needed to allow you to type the book you have inside you. And the interactions we’re struggling with–the fear is inside us, but so is the bravery and generosity we need to move forward.
The solution isn’t coming. The solution is already here.
Solar and wind are already cheaper than the alternatives. We have the tech in hand to make a serious dent in our climate problem. Medicine is waiting on some silver bullet magic cures, but in the meantime, doctors have developed the expertise and the tools to alleviate the suffering of billions. Off-grid energy for two billion people is a solved problem waiting for distribution and implementation.
In a rapidly evolving world, hope is a natural response when things are always getting better/getting worse.
Acting like we have what we need already, though, gives us the chance to take action right here and right now.
Each task brings three options. But first, let’s be clear what we mean by “delegate.”
If I can hire someone to do a task so well that my customer can’t tell, I can choose to delegate this work.
The Uber driver is probably capable of changing the oil in the car, but if the passenger can’t tell, doing it herself is a choice, not a requirement. Same goes for the restaurant that buys pre-minced garlic, or the executive who has her team do much of the work…
If it can be delegated, doing so is a choice and an opportunity.
So, the three options:
Delegate everything. Find people or AI systems to do every delegatable task, reserving for yourself only the work that can’t be delegated.
Delegate some things. Hire yourself to do some of the delegatable tasks. Perhaps it’s to build up insight or skill or reputation that will help you serve people in the future. Or perhaps you are hiring yourself as a way to hide from other, more difficult tasks, or because it’s fun.
(And it might be because you don’t want to support some of the encroaching systems that offer outsourcing–our work and our dollars are also a vote about the future we’re building).
Delegate no things. Do the work with your own two hands, because the craft and the doing are giving you joy and satisfaction.
It’s a choice. Now, more than ever, it’s a choice because access to freelancers and AI lowers the cost and increases the quality of the work we delegate.
The opportunity is to use leveraged delegation to create opportunities that cannot possibly be delegated. To make our craft more particular, more human and more distinctive.
The alternative is to race to the bottom. That’s no fun.
Landlords collect rent, tenants pay it. Landlords own an asset that increases in value over time. Tenants have the freedom to move on.
If you’re building a business, it pays to own an asset. Your labor doesn’t scale well, and success can be exhausting.
It’s better to be Google than it is to be hoping for traffic from Google. And it’s better to own trust and attention than it is to have to borrow or lease it.
What do you own?
Do you own shelf space? A proprietary technology or machine? A significant reputation? A well-trafficked place online or off?
Is it possible to re-arrange your day to produce just a little more ownership each day?
If we’re busy paying rent, it’s often difficult to find the focus and resources to build an asset, and so the cycle persists.
If you’re not sure where you stand, you’re probably a tenant.
November 5, 2025
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