No one knows the name of the maternity nurse who helped with the delivery of Marie Curie or Esperanza Spaulding. You might grow up to be a genius, but the team that helped your mom give birth don’t have to be geniuses–they simply have to be pretty good at their craft.
The same is becoming ever more true when it comes to the way tech is changing our lives.
The folks running these companies are not marketing geniuses. In fact, most of them aren’t even good at it. The same goes for their management style or strategic insight.
What’s required is someone who is committed enough to the possibility the tech offers to show up and persist, and then get out of the way.
Kevin Kelly helped us understand that tech is best understood as a new sort of species, one that symbiotically uses us to advance its goals.
We shouldn’t mistake the midwives for the end result.
March 11, 2025
Freelancers looking to build a career have two good options:
- Be so good at doing the work by hand that you’re a better alternative for a client than using AI. This is going to get more and more difficult.
- Be so good at having AI work for you that you’re the obvious choice when there’s work to be done.
The lousy options are to insist that you don’t use AI, but to be slower, more expensive and not as good as the AI option.
Or to do tasks that an AI assigns you.
Hiring an AI to work for you and getting very good at producing value feels like the future for most programmers, creators, business development folks and marketers.
March 10, 2025
You have a strategy. Perhaps you didn’t even choose it but you have one… and it’s not working.
The dominant question is, “what do I do now?”
Which tactic do we use? How do we get the word out? How do we close this sale, solve the problem and succeed?
Perhaps we should look to others that have succeeded and use their tactics.
The problem is simple. You don’t have a tactics problem. You have a strategy problem.
Borrowing tactics from someone with a useful strategy isn’t going to help because it’s their strategy that’s better, not their tactics.
And using tactics from someone who got lucky isn’t going to help either. Someone needs to get lucky, and it was them. It’s not their tactics that made it happen. Going to the same bank as Charlize Theron isn’t going to make you a movie star.
When in doubt, focus on your strategy. The tactics will follow.
March 9, 2025
While it’s tempting to compare suffering, inconvenience, unfairness or general no-goodness, it’s not helpful.
Someone else’s trauma doesn’t diminish yours. In fact, when we can find the space to see that others have their own mess to deal with, it opens the door for forward motion. The past happened, but all that’s available to us now is the choice of what to do about it.
And doing it together is more nurturing, resilient and effective.
This is difficult.
Care requires time and effort, and we can’t care about everything, all the way, all the time.
If you’re prepared to care about every element of your work, then you also have to decide to not care about something else. Because caring equally about everything means that someone else cares more than you do about something.
If a non-customer doesn’t like your product, perhaps it pays to not let that bother you.
If there are features in your service that don’t matter to your key customers, perhaps you can let them go.
Deciding to care also requires you do the hard work of not caring.
March 8, 2025
It’s one thing to say that 7,000,000 people will die next year from smoking cigarettes.
It’s a totally different thing to list those folks by name.
When we confront risk, two things make it seem less real: We’re not sure who, and we’re not sure when.
If you want to clarify our understanding, it helps to be specific.
March 7, 2025
The first impression is vitally important. It positions us, establishes the tone of our relationship and earns trust.
But we’re human, and it’s unlikely that every first impression will be as useful as we’d like. Fortunately, people can speak up and let us know, particularly if we make it easy for them to do so.
When a customer or partner lets us know that we made a lousy first impression, it’s time to lean in. You’re not going to get a third chance to make a second impression.
If a customer service call goes wrong, or if a new employee is stumbling, this is the moment to escalate and get the second impression just right. It shows that we can recover, that we’re listening, and that the relationship is worth something to us.
What an opportunity to make things right. If your team isn’t empowered to escalate support at the first hint of a problem, you’re letting them down.
March 6, 2025
might also be a good idea.
The hard part isn’t finding proof before you begin.
The hard part is beginning, knowing you might not succeed.
March 5, 2025
Media theory pioneer Harold Innis saw it 70 years ago:
Some cultures and ideas are built to spread across SPACE.
And some spread across TIME.
It’s the tension between space and time that lead to the rise and fall of societies and cultures, and they’re worth understanding.
Clay tablets, household traditions and local governments persist over time. But they don’t travel widely.
On the other hand, newspapers, radio broadcasts and memes are ephemeral. They’re fast, they go wide, and then they often fade away.
The Greeks were an early culture that used both, which Innis argues is part of their longevity. And the Bible and Quran are books (time based) that were propelled by cultural forces to also be space based.
As you’ve probably guessed, TikTok is the speedball of moving ideas across space. The ideas are often as long-lasting as a hot pizza, but they can reach millions.
Innis would argue that many of the dislocations and painful collisions of modern culture are being caused by the abrupt shift to space-focused ideas. We’re starting on a second generation of people, worldwide, who are day trading their emotions and confronting ideas that have no past and little future.
Systems under stress expose themselves, and when you feel the stress, it’s worth looking for the juxtapositions that are causing it. In this case, it’s worth asking whether the idea that’s changing things was built to last or built to spread.
And what about the biggest shift of our lifetime–how does AI fit into this? Does a platform like Claude deal in time or space?
Claude and I discussed it, and my theory (Claude is giving me full credit) is an LLM of this sort is not a communications medium at all. There’s no way for a human to put a new idea directly into it and no way to send that message to another human. Instead, my take is that Claude brings us everything it knows, and that its function is to help us go within, not across.
This gives people a different sort of agency than the manipulative algorithms at TikTok or the manipulated ones on social media platforms.
Innis (like Doctorow) was very clear about the perils of media monopoly. If a communications medium has a middleman, that middleman will seek to create short-term profit, often at the expense of the users of the system. The phone company doesn’t care what you say on the phone, but modern media platforms are optimized to push the ideas that will spread to spread, regardless of their cost to the rest of us.
We’ve been indoctrinated from a young age to avoid agency, even in our media consumption. To wait and accept the next idea when it arrives. To not change the channel, to go to the big movie of the moment, to listen to the top 40, to parrot the talking points of the boss.
And now, perhaps for just a brief moment, there’s a chance to take back agency and go within.
The self-publishing revolution gave everyone a chance to write a blog, publish a book or record a song. A few took advantage of this to build ideas optimized to go across space or time. Most people, though, sank back into long-trained rhythms and simply became consumers instead, sheep with more grass.
I’m not sure how many more moments of maximum agency will present themselves, but right now we have a rare chance to go within, to discover and connect and lead, and then to publish. To publish not just across space for the quick hit of a like or a view, but for the long-haul benefit of changing our culture over time.
[Thanks to my friend Cory Doctorow for introducing me to Harold Innis. All errors are mine.]
March 4, 2025
Our instincts might not be as good as we hope.
Going with your gut is thrilling. It’s personal, vulnerable and brave. And if it’s getting you what you seek, keep at it.
But often, our instincts are a way of hiding, undermined by a lack of knowledge. If you haven’t done the reading and can’t see what the alternatives might be, instincts might be all you have left. And if you know the best way and persist in going with a hunch, it might be Resistance, a trap put in place by the part of you that feels like an imposter and is hesitant to do too well.
If ‘my way’ isn’t helping you get to where you’re going, it could be that the highway is a more direct route.
March 3, 2025
