Conversations and projects usually revolve around an axis. It could be a goal or an urgency or a person.
It might be the boss. Wondering what they want, what they need, what sort of mood they’re in, what just happened, what might happen. “What would Jeff do?”
It might the clock. SNL goes on at 11:30, whether or not it’s ready.
It might be the bureaucracy. Figuring out what the rules are, who sets approvals, what the slowdowns might be.
In politics, it’s usually about the tussle of the day, the micro-crisis of right now.
Often, conversations at work are about (apparent) risk and safety, not possibility and innovation.
Inevitably, the center of gravity pulls attention and action from all around, straight to its core. The centered emotion and fear and objective is the silent moderator of the interaction.
Worth noting: the context changes as the day unfolds. The interactions in the operating room are different than those in the boardroom (or the lunchroom) at the same hospital.
And the center isn’t usually clearly spoken of or described. The center is less about the nuts and bolts of the tactics, and more about the fears, desires and power of the humans that have made themselves the center of the conversation–even conversations that they’re not present for.
Culture is what happens when human beings interact, and “people like us do things like this” creates standards and expectations that are built on the foundation of our shared understanding of the center.
A clear indication that this is going on is how it feels when that center isn’t in the room. When we try to center on something else, the system pushes back, whispering that the new path a distraction or moving it down the priority list. But when the center shifts, we can feel the conversations shift as well.
The most effective way to change an organization, a company or a relationship is to identify the invisible centering forces and address them.
Our opportunity is to weed out the toxic centers and get back to focusing on the work that we signed up for in the first place, the change that matters.
Two hundred years ago, there were a lot of violinists. Many made a living at it.
If you were of means and wanted to hear music, your best option was to hire someone to play it for you.
Of course, the invention of the phonograph and the radio changed all of that. Now, one great violinist could be heard by millions, not dozens of people.
The result is that there are now only two sorts of violinists:
People who play the violin because they love it. They might get paid, but they probably don’t.
People who are so good at playing the violin that it’s worth hiring them instead of listening to a recording. They bring humanity, possibility and power to their performance in a way that no streaming service ever could.
If you are hoping to make a living as a pretty good violinist, you were born in the wrong century.
As you’ve already guessed, we’re all violinists now.
A screwdriver works because the handle is bigger than the screw. You can twist the handle with leverage, causing the screw to turn. The bigger the handle, the more leverage you have.
We’ve spent a trillion dollars building a worldwide communications and AI network, and you can have access to the whole thing for $20, or free if you go to the library.
All that tech, those connections, the programs, the learnings, the communities–torque that’s available to anyone who earns our attention.
Corporations and governments used to need to hire 1,000 people to even come close to having the leverage that any individual reading this has right now.
Many organizations have a widget or service, something people already need or want, and they work to sell it to people.
Some seek monopoly power so they can force others to do what they want them to do.
But there’s a third path: we can create a brand or a movement or a community that seeks to do things with people.
A chance to accompany someone on a journey, to lead instead of manage, or to amplify and narrate. When we help people get to where they hope to go, persuasion isn’t as important as enrollment and engagement.
“Who’s it for?” is not simply a question about your target customer.
Milton Friedman offered to let us off the hook–the only thing the work is for is to maximize shareholder value, he said. Nothing else is worth measuring.
I’ve never met anyone who consistently believed this. There are folks who find it easy to allow money to make their decisions for them, but at some point, all of us move away from this empty path.
Work is an expression of ourselves, and a chance to find meaning as we make a difference and earn a living.
When we choose to serve our customers, we find a more reliable compass instead of only following the money. The customers are right there in front of us, and we can see and feel the results of our work every day. This is the doctor who spends a few extra minutes with a patient in need, or the staff member with a boss who rewards a customer-centric approach, even (especially) if it’s more expensive in the short run.
But how about artists who choose to produce paintings they love instead of those that will easily sell? This is a different sort of success, one that’s not measured in how many customers one has, but in our pride and satisfaction with the work we create.
Some symphony orchestras wrestle with the journey of finding a unified definition of success. There are musicians who have paid their dues, twenty or thirty years of practice and dedication. Many of them want to play challenging work, with time to hone their craft. The purpose of the work is to allow them to follow their creative path, the audience is just a way to achieve that. Others are eager to play crowd-pleasing programs, discovering that audience success rewards them even more than their own definition of artistry.
The conflict, in any organization, is a challenge. We’d like our team members to use their best judgment, to find the satisfaction they seek in their work. But what happens when these definitions of success don’t align?
Too often, management simply conceals what they really seek, or lies about it. If “employees are our most important asset” then why not act that way?
Let’s be clear about who it’s for and what it’s for. It makes decision making more productive and communication and measurement far more effective.
It’s probably hard-wired, the result of an evolutionary process. A creature with hope is less likely to give up and more likely to raise offspring, thus passing down an ability to find resilience in the face of change.
Disenchanted has come to mean something different from its original usage.
Today, we’re “disenchanted” when we’ve fallen out of love with a person, product or situation. Marketers seek to create customer delight, and when they fail, customers become disenchanted and fade away.
But that’s not what Max Weber meant when he wrote about Descartes.
Until just recently almost everything that happened was enchanted. Magical spirits kept us alive, kept the sun rising and falling and gave rise to the voice in our head.
When we didn’t understand, hope drove us to imagine enchantment all around us. And that hard to measure spirit force responded by giving us hope.
As neuroscientists and philosophers began to explore the idea of consciousness and that voice in our head, they helped us understand that the brain, like everything else in our knowable world, is mechanical.
The refrigerator isn’t magic. Electricity, pumps and gasses keep things cold. And our brain runs on neurons, not magic.
We’ve disenchanted just about everything that’s worth taking a hard look at.
For many people, this has stripped away much needed hope.
Perhaps disenchantment (and the desire for hope) is primarily responsible for the rise in make-believe ideas about how the world works, nonsensical medical interventions and the diminished role of facts in decision making.
When we allow others to manipulate us with their magical stories, though, we’re often setting ourselves up for a collision with reality.
We launched the Mentor Deck in beta two weeks ago, and I was thrilled and delighted to see how deeply it resonated with people. And now the Mentor Deck is updated, and joined by two other decks that are fun, inspiring and surprising. I think they’ll make great gifts, but they’re also worth keeping a set for yourself as well.
It takes a long time to print a deck of cards, and we’re timing this launch so we can get the decks to everyone in time for the winter holidays–and we want to make sure to print enough. Early birds save a bundle, and folks who were in the beta group can get a special deal.
How the decks work:
The most famous AI platform is chatGPT, but my daily favorite is Claude, from Anthropic. Anthropic recently launched a platform they call artifacts. An artifact is an elegant, complex, pre-written prompt that can be shared with others. I ended up building 150 of them…
Each of the cards in the three decks has a QR code on it. Scan that and it launches an artifact that you can interact with. I used the tactile, analog power of playing cards to create juxtapositions and combinations that bring delight to our very human interactions with the AI.
While it was complex to build, it’s really easy to use. And the combination of cards and AI is pure magic.
The Infinite Adventure Deck lets you choose your own text adventure. There are fifty worlds to explore–Alice in Wonderland, Cyberpunk, Noir PIs and even Al Capone.
The Modern Divination Deck unlocks fifty kinds of ancient and modern soothsaying. Our future is not pre-written, it’s up to us. This neo-tarot deck leads to deep conversations and insights about taking responsibility and taking action in creating a future we’d like to be part of.
And the Mentor Deck is a series of focused prompts that create a coaching conversation. Each coach has ‘read’ what Claude knows about an idea or author and then talks you through your issues, your challenges and your potential. You’re not talking to the person who coined the ideas, but to a coach who understands them.
All three decks are designed to amplify our humanity. Instead of pushing ourselves to be nothing but a more productive cog, these sorts of open-ended conversations can push us to stop waiting for instructions and start taking responsibility instead.
You can try a sample Mentor conversation here. In addition, there are three samples from the Infinite deck on the Kickstarter page (at the bottom).
PS If you’re around Wednesday, I’ll be doing a live Q&A with Oriana Leckert, the head of publishing at Kickstarter. We’ll be taking your questions about how Kickstarter has evolved and how it might help you with your project. Register in advance if you can.
There’s a FAQ and regular updates and more information at promptdecks.com
Also… beta supporters of the Mentor Deck should check the free bonus page for details on the private link for the extra decks. You’ll need the password that came with your deck.
Even if you don’t run a media company, the way media companies run matters. That’s because media shapes our culture and how we spend our time.
There are three kinds of ad models, and it’s easy to confuse them.
The most common and historically powerful is the traditional ad. The media company builds content that attracts us, then they sell off our attention to the highest bidder.
You can see the problems here. The first one is that the media company now has two things to focus on, not one. Instead of simply creating value for the viewers/users, they mostly have to create value for the advertisers. They have an incentive to give the users just barely enough content to get them to stay for as long as possible to see as many ads as possible.
The conflict is real, and we pay for it with noise, trite content, link bait and annoying ads. Those aren’t defects in the system, they’re logical outcomes of the way it’s built.
The second model, one that’s structurally aligned and elegant, is the classified ad. These are ads that people go looking for. For a long time, the classified ads in the paper paid all the costs of most great metropolitan newspapers. This model was taken to its ultimate expression with the magic of Google ads, a phenomenon that lasted decades until Google got greedy and broke it. You did a search, you saw an ad about your search, you clicked. There was complete alignment of all three parties.
The third model is permission marketing. Anticipated, personal and relevant ads that go to the people who want to get them. It’s ads that people would miss if they didn’t show up. It doesn’t work for all products and all users, but when it’s working (particularly for small businesses) it’s transformative.
The reason it’s worth thinking about these models is that new tech companies, as they gain traction, often have an important choice to make. One of the things that turned Twitter into a swamp was their ill-considered choice to run traditional ads. If, in that key moment before they went public, they had chosen to be subscription based, their user alignment would have led to a very different media landscape.
The AI sites are burning money in search of a business model, and given their scale, it must be tempting to simply auction off the trust and attention of their users. But seen through this lens, I hope they realize what an opportunity they would be wasting if they did.
When we choose media that has the same goals as we do, it’s likely we’ll get what we came for.
Moving is physical, travel is an emotional journey.
Moving takes us from one place to another, one job to another, one situation to another.
But if we seek to insulate ourselves from the emotional labor of travel, we can build a cocoon around our experience and discover nothing.
Once we choose to see what’s actually in front of us and experience it (as opposed to a defensive shorthand version that pretends to be it, but simply validates where we already are), then we can travel whenever we choose… even without moving.
The alternative is to spend the time and money to move around, but never go anywhere.
August 13, 2025
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