Josh Allred's Blog

A Weatherman is not the same as a Meteorologist.

A Meteorologist goes to school and studies the patterns of the Earth.

A Weatherman is an entertainer.

The goal of the Weatherman is not to be accurate but to boost ratings. As Nate Silver puts it, they “add ‘value’ by subtracting accuracy”.

Making noise, creating urgency may give you 15 minutes of fame. But this approach doesn’t scale. You can’t earn trust just by getting our attention. You need generosity and connection.

The problem is that *Weathermen don’t bother to make accurate forecasts because they figure no one will believe them. And people don’t believe them because they don’t make accurate forecasts.

The Meteorologist isn’t going to make noise like a Weatherman. No, he is behind the scenes. Analyzing and predicting so that people (including Weathermen) can do their jobs better.

Drip by drip by drip. Earning a little bit of trust with each interaction.

It’s extremely difficult for anyone to predict the future. Even a 5-day forecast (or a presidential election). No one has a crystal ball. But I much rather listen to someone who sees the world as it is, rather than someone who sees it as they want it to be.

[* It turns out there are lots of people who will ignore data, cherry pick the facts and manipulate the system to push a personal agenda. Finding accurate information about candidates is increasing difficult in a world full of noise. Look for someone in the accuracy business not in the urgent one.]

In a world of tracking and measuring it’s easy to fall into the trap of comparison.

I must be doing something wrong because…

• Everyone’s life on Facebook looks better than mine.
• You have a million Twitter followers. I only have a hundred.
• Someone gave me a 1 star review on Amazon.
• I spent all day writing this post and no one read it.
• The picture I shared has no likes or comments.
• The Jones’s bought another new car.
• Your co-worker who constantly slacks off made partner.
• That lousy professor you had made tenure.
• Our stocks are going down and the competitions is going up.
• I’m in the middle of the Dip.

It’s easy to get down on yourself when you’re choosing to seek discouragement.

No author ever got better reading all of her 1 star reviews. Life on Facebook always looks more polished than what is actually being published. And the Jones’s? Well, they’re broke.

Keep things in perspective. The universe is a big place. Earth is just a drop in the bucket.

We would like to think that a genius is someone with a high IQ or wins a Nobel Prize.

Our internal narrative is that people like I us don’t do stuff like that.

That is reserved for the likes of Albert Einstein or Marie Curie or the person who cures cancer.

But the Romans called anyone a genius when they would release their gifts. In Greece, they were called Daemons.

So if we redefined what it means to be a genius as someone who uses their talents to solve interesting problems or to make a difference; maybe people like us can do stuff like that.

Work is something we do by the hour. Work is urgent. Work is “this for that”. A fair trade. Even Steven. No one owes anyone anything. Follow the instruction. Do what your told. Get paid.

The funny thing is, we do all sorts of projects for free growing up. But suddenly, we graduate and turn 18, and we don’t want to do work anymore because it’s our job.

Labor, on the other hand, can’t be quantified. It has it’s own time table. Writing this blog post is labor. Raising your children is labor. Solving new and interesting problems is labor. So is making a difference or making better art. We don’t necessarily get paid for our labor (although sometimes we do). We do it cause we love it.

Why work if you are leaving labor on the table?

Labor has something interior to it.

Labor is an expression of love.

I was reading the other day that there are people in low-income areas purposely seeking loans with higher interest rates. They believe that the higher the number is, the better it must be.

Huh?

These victims of predatory lending are not the only ones.

It was just announced that Obamacare premiums will have a 25% increase next year. You can find people excited about it here.

What’s going on?

It’s marketing. Brilliant marketing at that. People want a story, an internal narrative, that matches their world view. They are buying with emotion, not logic.

We don’t say your Obamacare payments will be increasing or your Obamacare costs are rising. We don’t use words like taxes or charges. No one wants to buy that.

Instead, we call it premiums. Because premiums sounds like a good thing. Your getting an increase in premiums. Your getting more premiums. More must mean better.

(It’s called Affordable Care Act.)

Bad choices are the easiest mistakes to avoid. It seems painfully obvious what people should do. The culture has to do a better job if we are going to build something that we can all be proud of.

Be happy but never satisfied.

The phrase, “Do not be afraid,” appears in the Bible 365 times.

I think God is trying to tell us something.

Uber has completed its first delivery using a self-driving truck.

In the next 30 years, we won’t be seeing truck drivers behind the wheel delivering our goods—it will be computers, robots, VR and AI.

Using people will be too expensive and too inefficient. People need bathroom breaks, they need to eat and sleep, they cause accidents, they run from accidents, they have labor laws, they get overtime pay and benefits, they need healthcare, they make messes, they are slow, they aren’t compliant and, most of all, they make mistakes.

Truck drivers are not the only ones being replaced. Look at grocery store clerks, short order cooks, anyone in a warehouse. The more repetitive the motion, the easier it will be to replicate and replace it with a robot.

No industry will look the same as it is today. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, programmers, developers, law enforcement officers—you name it. Some of these jobs will be completely eliminated while other will change so much we won’t even recognize them.

We have never seen this much change in one lifetime. (The printing press took several generations for it to spread.) It is scaring a lot of people to think that their industry could be wiped out in the next couple of decades.

But that’s what revolutions do. They tear down the old and enable the impossible.

So what happens when all the jobs are gone?

What are we going to do with all this time we have freed up?

What will it mean to be human?

By eliminating menial tasks from our daily routine, we will free up more time to solve more interesting problems. We will have more opportunities to do work that matters.

We shouldn’t be afraid of what technology has to offer. The smart ones will be running with technology, not away from it.

The sad thing is that sometimes life can end before anything actually dies.

On paper it might seem right but your gut maybe telling you something different.

Listening to your gut is an underrated commodity.

It really comes down to faith.

Unshakable faith that at the end of the story, things will work out.

Don’t let one bad chapter ruin it.