Month: August 2024

Over a hundred years, Fredrick Taylor went around a factory with a stop watch taking notes to make it more effecient.

Today, Zoom calls are being monitored to see if someone is working when they say they will be. Like all seeing eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings–always wathching.

Watching every move of someone who has no incetive to go faster or cheaper isn’t a way to move faster and cheaper.

The alternative is trust. The alternative is agency. Give people the keys to decision making and all of sudden they will make decisions. Perhaps, not all at once. Perhaps, not the decisions you would make. But with time, most of us want something significant. Something to point to and say, “I made this.”

The industrial mindset is dated. And frankly, is unsustainable going forward. Workers are wising up and this ecosystem is falling apart in the apparent need for growth.

Growth isn’t the answer and neither are babysitters. Which means there is room for something else.

If your job is to look at the work of other, what are you even contributing?

When you close your eyes, we tend to think the world stops.

The mountains continue to be there. The wildflowers will move with the breeze. The ocean still breaks waves.

Humans are the ones who can’t comprehend this idea that life goes on. Even when we are not paying attention. The world functions much better without humans. It’s humans that need to learn to function better with the world.

This is THE story. The path you are on. Not the one you wish you could take.

We get so lost in trying to write it instead of trying to live it.

Occam’s Razor recommends you seek the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions.

Here are some statics:

Seven out of ten people believe in angels, heaven and the prayer.

Five out of ten believe in the devil and astrology.

Three out of ten believe in reincarnation.

4 million people believe they have been abducted by aliens.

Social media makes it difficult to find space for quiet voices and straightforward explanations. It’s never been easier to fall for conspiracy theories than it is today, and that is why they are so rampant. We want to believe there is something greater happening, but often, the conspiracy is people doing people things.

We don’t have much of it. By the time we get out of bed, head to work, make dinner, rinse, and repeat—there isn’t much left to spare.

In fact, it’s better to pretend it isn’t there. In the modern world of distractions and convenience, there is no willpower left.

The alternative is to think about the systems we build. Where we live, for instance, significantly impacts our lives. What’s the commute to work? Is it walkable to amenities? Are you connected with your neighbors? And so on.

Automatic withdrawal from a 401k is a decision you make once, and then you make do with what’s left in your budget.

Opal makes the decision easy to how we consume social media.

I published this post today because that’s the deadline set. I’ve been doing it long enough, and there is no decision.

We build systems to remove cognitive decision-making.

We understand the state of flow. But you might not realize what it is until you read the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

In other words…

The Aha, eureka moment is often not a piece of knowledge that we didn’t know before. It’s the discovery of something we have always known but didn’t know the language around it.

An accumulation of talent doesn’t mean you have a team.

A team is made up of intangibles. Not just what you have on paper.

We can choose to go alone or to go together.

The price for doing things on our own in isolation.

Perhaps the path forward must be done alone. Disappointing your family, for instance, might not have much support. That’s the path of unpopular decisions. These are reserved for what is important. Because the wind will not be sustainable going against it, you’ll need to paddle, and that is a lot of work.

I’m not sure why we can’t just go together for everything else. Life is just easier when we can pick a direction and go together.

The golden rule is to treat others as one would be treated.

In this age of social media, it would be wise to adopt the Greek philosophy of the golden mean.

The golden mean is simply finding the middle between two extremes.

For example, between corruption and legalism, you find integrity. Between cowardice and recklessness, you find courage. You can find love, respect, discernment, honesty, temperance, self-control, diligence, and so on in these spaces.

In the age of convenience, it isn’t enough to treat others like how we see ourselves or the world. In fact, at the dawn of AI, we need more middle ground for what is ahead.

The gurus have learned the meaning of life but they don’t talk about it.

The reason?

Because the meaning of life is to live it.

We talk so much (even gossip) in search of the right frame of reference instead of just taking the path before us.