Josh Allred's Blog

To optimize, there must be a standard in place. To have a standard, you must have a proven/reliable method. Which means you must measure something. Which also means someone along the way picked what that measurement was. Doesn’t mean it was a good way to measure something. It just means someone along the line decided it.

SAT scores that eventually became IQ. But does this score actually measure intelligence? What about emotional IQ, resiliency, or problem-solving?

Time on the assembly line became “production.” But is it valuable?

Are profits a signal that a company is growing? Or…does anyone like working there? Is it destroying the planet?

We have let signals become the hallmark of passing judgment. I can talk about systems thinking and the way ideas spread all day across our culture, but I am awful at fixing my car and would be the last choice to perform brain surgery. I need to outsource these things. We often do.

You might be excellent at a couple of things, but we can’t be good at everything. I suggest getting good at decision-making, changing your mind, seeing the world as it really is, looking someone in the eye and telling a story, changing the emotion in the room, and making a sale…things that won’t go away in the age of automation and AI.

Don’t get good at the standard. Instead, become great at the things that can’t be easily measured.

The default setting when sick is to wish this were over. But this is the wrong approach. It’s amazing (perhaps even a placebo effect) when you instead turn to feel the pain. Not to run away from it. Not to wish you were in the future. But to embrace it. Life isn’t just roses. It is suffering too. And we want to return to the status quo as soon as possible. When we do this, you might be surprised to discover that your body tends to let go to what it is feeling in order to the next thing in. Sounds weird. But try it. It helps to find the silver lining. When one is sick, it forces us to slow down.

In a world of convenience, inconvenience becomes a perceived enemy.

But inconvenience carries the juice of anything worth doing that creates meaning in our lives.

Boot camp and med school are prerequisites to becoming a Marine or a doctor, which makes those pursuits worthwhile.

And it isn’t just an inconvenience. It can also be exclusion, time and money restraints, and emotional labor requirements.

We must stop and ask, “Is this a feature or a bug?” Once we reframe the problem, the solution can feel closer to attaining.

Showing up to work in your uniform might seem inconvenient in the morning, but it is a valuable signal once you step into the office.

The idea that the American Dream is possible through merit is worth examining. While it’s clear that economic mobility through hard work is increasingly difficult (if not impossible), we need to recognize how exclusive that dream is in terms of who it is available to.

For example, you can cite the 30 years of economic growth post World War II, from 1945 to 1975. However, the caste system had too many barriers for this dream to be realized.

Dreams are dreams. They are personal. In the shared dream of human dignity and prosperity, it never ceases to amaze me that we resort to economic terms to prove the existence of progress.

It’s never the problems we can see but the blind spots that get us. Issues around the corner we can’t predict until they show up.

When a problem becomes apparent, it may be too difficult to solve without a cost.

I recently had a chance to listen to Just Kids by Patti Smith. In it, Smith writes how uncomfortable Robert Maplethorpe was for her to go to work while he was at home working on his art.

When the gift is enormous in someone’s life, we can’t help but feel the shame of inadequacy.

I believe that is more of a contemporary phenomenon. When we chose to break the mold of a “job” instead of something meaningful like art—the culture will not be supportive of such endeavors. But make no mistake, this is culture at work nudging (maybe pushing) us to fit in, don’t stand out, and be compliant.

Compliance will always be rewarded in the culture, but never remembered.

Debt.

Money.

Politics.

Capitalism.

Religion.

Sex.

What are these things for?

Each force or system works differently depending on each person’s story and experience.

Are they working for humans, or are humans working for these forces?

The hard part about saying no (or, in other words, breaking a habit) is the number of times you must say no. Think about it. Three hundred sixty-five days per year, but add in how many times per day you say no to that dopamine hit.

You have to say no thousands of times, but only give in again once.

I had the privilege of taking a couple of weeks off to hike the John Muir Trail. It’s a magnificent thru-hike.

Here’s what happens when you are disconnected for a couple of weeks:

The problems are still there. And so is the past trauma and responsibilities, the bombardment of emails and notifications.

But at least I got to take a break from them.

The lesson: You can’t run away from your problems. Not ever.

The irony of anger is this:

It has this way of making us destroy what we love most.