Month: August 2019

Today, less than 5% of our labor force is working to create food in industrialized countries. That is a dramatic shift from the thousands of years prior.

It’s important to note that as we moved from an age of agriculture to industrialism that jobs didn’t go away. But instead, we created new jobs in factories that never existed before.

And so the cycle continues, as we stand on the precipice of the age of AI.

As Albert Wenger has brilliantly pointed out, though, the way to read this chart isn’t to assume that AI will create different jobs for us to take. No, what Wenger argues is that now is the time to step out of the job loop.

What is the job loop?

The job loop is having a car payment so that I can get to work, I go to work so that I can pay for my car payment. We sell our labor to buy stuff and then you turn around and sell more labor to buy more stuff. In the process, creating a negative cycle of losing our time and attention.

The point of innovation isn’t to create more jobs to distract us and to fill discretionary time but to cultivate time and attention to solve interesting problems like democracy, climate change, nuclear weapons disarmament, healthcare….to create art.

We have more time than ever before in human history but we misuse it in all the wrong ways. Instead, we have let tech companies mind our attention and distract us from what is happening all around us.

There are now enough cat videos to watch for a lifetime. This one may be the weirdest:

Our attention is our most precious resource. How are you spending it? (Interesting word spend.)

…

Another thought about discretionary time: We have worked and innovated for so long to move away from the obligations in the fields, to build safety and security from the elements, to create lifesaving drugs to fight the invisible…for what? To waste away in distraction? Having discretionary time is a luxury that not even everyone gets to enjoy today (and certainly not what previous generations had.) Are we really that eager to sit around and wait until we are told what to do next?

Your job as a great teacher isn’t to share new stuff.

No, your job is to help others do important work.

The kind of work that people are afraid to do.

Open doors for people who will turn around and open doors for others.

Facebook is busy.

So is the office, traffic, your email, smartphone…busy.

Where is the busy taking us?

You have to fill your time with something, but unfortunately, too often, we fill it with the wrong things—status symbols, outward appearance, more zeros in the bank account, better title…

The never-ending cycle of accumulation is just that. Never-ending.

Here are 10 essential questions from Jerry Colonna that are worth asking ourselves every day:

1. How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?
2. What am I not saying that needs to be said?
3. What am I saying that’s not being heard?
4. What’s being said that I’m not hearing?
5. How are things going for me?
6. What would I like my children to feel at the same age as I am?
7. Am I a good person who’s doing the best I can?
8. In what ways do I deplete myself and run myself into the ground?
9. Where am I running from and where am I running to?
10. Why have I allowed myself to be so exhausted?

The teacher that is demanding her students to be compliant is exercising her status.

The boss who is requesting for everyone to come in on Saturday to submit the TPS reports is leveraging status.

And when parents say, “Because I said so…” they are, again, using status.

Status is everywhere.

When trying to get what we want, our first instinct is to use our status.

And the reason that there is so much conflict with teens is not that they are hormonal or difficult to work with; it is because they want to be seen as someone with higher status.

“I’m not a child anymore,” says pretty much everyone at that age.

The good news is that someone doesn’t have to lose in order to win. You can raise the status of others around you without lowering someone else in the process.

It’s important to understand that much of our conflicts are formed around this tug-o-war of status:

Who’s up? Who’s down? Who gets to eat first? What is the pecking order?

We can simply decide to play a different game, one where status isn’t won or lost after each interaction.

Imagine turning around every time we come across a downed tree. Or waiting for the escalator to be fixed before we start walking.

With so many choices, we think the path from Point A to Point B should be filled without adversity.

The downed tree is the perfect excuse to go home. “Oh well, I tried.”

Too many choices have created a stranglehold: when faced with adversity, we look around and say, “Is this really worth it?” When tempted with a way out, we will often choose to exit.

Which makes sense if you really think about it. No one has a problem starting med school or starting a diet. No, the hard part is finishing med school or finishing a diet.

No one is forcing us to walk the path of resistance. With attention mining so prevalent, its no wonder that the average American watches over 5 hours a day of television per day.

What in the world are we doing?

It’s hard to imagine a world of education outside of school. We spend over two decades being taught to be more compliant, to be more average, to fit in…We don’t pick ourselves, we wait to be told what to do next.

Is there any path worth taking that doesn’t have a dip?

Eventually, the marathon runner forgets each step of each mile and begins to embrace the race.

Every well-practiced piano player must stop thinking about each individual note they must play and start thinking about the whole piece.

This is called the long line. Shifting from what is to what could be.

For Abraham Lincoln, it was about abolishing slavery and reuniting a country. Nelson Mandela thought about his long line for 27 years while he was held captive in prison.

Today, Catherine Hoke is challenging our false assumptions we make about people with criminal histories and is creating a long line of second chances.

We can’t change the world without first imagining it.

HT Ben Zander

If you don’t apply, you won’t get in.

If you don’t plant the seed, it won’t grow.

If you don’t leap, you won’t fly.

And if you don’t put action into faith, your faith won’t be put into action.

It’s extremely difficult to pick up sarcasm on the internet.

Take this simple statement:

“Aren’t you a little old to be tricker treating?”

Am I being serious or sarcastic?

Am I really digging in or just using sarcasm as a chance to hide?

Two techniques to signal that what you are writing shouldn’t be taken too seriously:

1. Use the /s to indicate sarcasm. “Aren’t you a little old to be tricker treating? /s”
2. Use a different font or a string of Upper and Lowercase letters. “ArEn’T yOu A lItTlE oLd To Be TrIcKeR tReAtInG?”

Better yet: Skip the sarcasm altogether.

Whenever I have used it, I immediately regret it. Especially, when someone doesn’t understand the signal that I sent. And that’s the thing. It is so easy to misinterpret what is being conveyed in public forums.

People already have a hard time reading what others are saying with the use of body language, voice inflection, point of emphasis…take that all out of the equation and we are left with noise.

Noise in our head that gets in the way of seeing what is actually happening. Noise that clouds our judgment, amplifies our fears and confirms our biases.

“We don’t give children a name as an expectation to live up to. No, we give children a name as a possibility to live into.”

Labels are a human invention. When one label is not working, we can simply pick a new one.

Roz and Ben Zander have an interesting take on this. The idea is that you can give anyone in your life an A.

You can give your boss an A, your mother-in-law an A, the police officer that is writing you a ticket, you can give him an A too.

If we are going to label someone we might as well give them a label that makes them better. Better labels open the door for more possibilities.

Here’s the thing:

If I’ve accepted the label that I’m a bad public speaker, then I won’t see myself as someone who gives a TED talk. So, why would I ever apply?

If the school administrator has listed me as a troubled student, there are teachers that will treat me differently.

If no one in my neighborhood goes to college, why try to graduate high school?

In contrast, if people see me as an A student then my A work begins to shine.

Labels matter. As Jerry Cologna has pointed out, over time, we become complicit in the conditions that we constantly recreate.

This is not to suggest that we want a doctor to perform open-heart surgery who didn’t pass med school. No, this is about shedding judgments and strangleholds that grades hold in our culture.

Because once we give someone less than an A, then we won’t see or hear them. We close the door to possibility. We put them in a box and now only see the characteristics that make the person less than an A.

Consider this: The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was indeed less powerful than your cell phone in your pocket today. In fact, the AGC had about the same compute power as an Apple II (boasting 4KB of RAM).

Along with that, the spacesuits were hand-sewn using fabric materials that are found in bras.

Packing the chutes was so complicated that there were only three people certified in the whole country that could do it. As a result, NASA forbade them from all three riding in a car together to avoid an accident.

The restraints of the time were real. The list of challenges was endless. And yet…

While it is easy to focus on everything that is wrong with the world today, you can’t ignore the fact that when people come together and care enough about something amazing things happen.