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.
October 21, 2025
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.
October 20, 2025
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.”
October 19, 2025
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.
October 18, 2025
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.
October 17, 2025
Even though it’s possible to design an oral thermometer that measures body temperature to a hundredth of a degree, there’s no reason to do so. In fact, 98.6 is overkill. 98 is enough information.
More digits don’t give us more information, they simply distract or confuse us.
The same is true for time. Knowing what happened in a one-second snapshot interval is useful for judging a horse race, but hardly interesting if we’re measuring interest in a new Broadway show.
Just because we can add more digits doesn’t mean that it’s significant. We can intentionally ask for less.
October 16, 2025
A powerful metaphor from a long hike:
Every hiker is intimately aware of their backpack. They picked it out, choosing from dozens of options. They know which straps are loose and which are digging into their skin. They can tell you if it’s lopsided, and what is in each pocket.
And yet…
Even after days on the trail, they probably couldn’t tell you a thing about anyone else’s backpack. Except, perhaps, that everyone else has one.
That’s the first step toward empathy: Realizing that everyone else has a backpack, and that it’s different from yours.
October 15, 2025
Most people do the obvious thing, that’s why we call it obvious.
A new product, idea or technology is rarely obvious, at least at first.
So the work of scale is to be seen as inevitable. The stepwise process of becoming the obvious choice.
Skipping steps requires insisting that we’re the obvious choice, but that rarely works. Instead, we work to create the conditions for others to decide that we are.
October 14, 2025
Create a document, several pages long, that explains who you are. What sort of learner are you? Do you have degrees or expertise? What sort of change are you making, who works with you, what are your standards? How do you want to engage?
Periodically, upload the doc to the chat you’re having with an LLM. Let it know you’re offering a reminder of how you want to work together.
One size doesn’t fit all.
Also: Don’t look to AI as a source for verified facts. The phrase, “That can’t be right, please double check and offer sources,” is not going to hurt the AI’s feelings, but it might save your project.
Human beings are used to being productive by decreasing the amount of time and effort we put into something. Computers don’t work that way. Give them instructions on how to take the long way around and you’ll both come out ahead.
October 13, 2025
If you want to make a change (or make a living) it might pay to find a topic that people hesitate to talk about. There’s enormous leverage in making the uncomfortable urgent enough to take action on.
One of the easiest ways to improve public health and reduce cancer is by increasing the adoption of colonoscopies. No scientific breakthrough is needed, just a cultural shift.
The same sort of impact happens when we prioritize women’s health, or retirement savings or drunk driving.
Culture works hard to maintain its status quo, and persistent community action can change our standards.
October 12, 2025
