Josh Allred's Blog

Relationships are highly defined today. You have a relationship with your spouse. A relationship with your kids. Your parents. Your friends. Extended family. Your boss. Your co-workers. Peers. Colleagues.

What we don’t think about is our relationship with ourselves. The relationship we have with the community. With the people we seek to serve. And then there are the relationships that distract us. We have a relationship with technology, social media, and the internet. There is a relationship we have with failure or victories. And let’s not forget the relationship we have with time. Since we as a culture have chosen to trade it as a commodity in exchange for pay, we now view time as something we are racing against. Ever balancing how much we give and how much we take. What we choose to pay attention to also says much about our relationships.

All these variables impact the depth of our connections with the world and the people around us. In the end, our personal relationship with the internal narrative also dictates how far we go with these relationships. In the story, we tell ourselves about being a hero, a protagonist, and a victim, and the people around us make such a profound impact.

The external is nowhere near as powerful as we give it credit for. It is our assessment of these forces that matter and that we can exercise some control. It’s a choice to delete social media and to take back time. It’s another to pick up the phone and reach out. And it is another to sit to the side, to choose to try again (or not and be at peace).

If we lived 10,000 years, we might feel closer to witnessing everything. But experiencing being scared, seeing something beautiful, or tasting something divine…well, we all have moments like these we can point to. 72 years, if we are lucky, is enough to experience the lifetime of 10,000 years. Its just set on repeat, but not anything new.

Better begs the question, “Compared to what?”

Better from when you started?

Better from last year?

Better since last month?

Better since yesterday?

That’s a interesting way to look at progress.

It’s better since yesterday squashes big leaps. (Small sample size.) As a result, you can only see marginal improvements. Baby steps that can’t be seen until all put together. But if the journey is overwhelming, we could ask if this went better than yesterday. And if not, how can it be better tomorrow? Not next year. Be present.

Chronic fatigue is something that persistently persists. And in a world of “connection,” the inbound doesn’t slow down. Because what capitalism does is extract. Extracting raw material, then money, then time, and now attention. However, the demand to scale attention hits the limits when all that is coming in is just noise. (Hang on, I just had another email come in.) It becomes easy to say to your team to put your head down and do the work. But when there aren’t enough hours in a day or showing no progress after putting in the time, we can all begin to understand why Newman from Seinfeld was always so cranky.

“Because the mail never stops Jerry.” — Newman

The more you get out, the more it just keeps coming in. We can point to the constant noise and interruptions coming in and say, “Do better.” But when will someone stop and say, “Turn the music down! I’m trying to get real work done around here.”

Facebook has been cautious not to add a thumbs-down button. You have to add an emoji in the comments. Reddit pushes the most popular comments to the top and the less popular ones to the bottom. But what we get confused about is how to dislike something. Disliking an idea doesn’t reflect the person who made the comment. It isn’t a judgment of character. However, how we have been conditioned to like something is equated to picking the person. Discourse has to evolve online. My prediction is it will continue to get worse before it gets better. However, every unpopular opinion cannot be an attack on a person. Safe spaces for dialogue are needed now more than ever.

In the end, most of what we read online is junk food. Content approval is not the same as a personal rejection, which will continue to be a barrier to meaningful conversation. At the same time, it says a lot about humans’ need to meet the approval of other humans—people like us.

Bees don’t question who they are and what they will do today. They’re bees. And they do what bees do. Protect the queen, build the hive, make honey…They understand their nature instinctively without the weight of the world on them.

Humans have a difficult time accepting what they are. Because, quite frankly, what is it to be human? We have existential questions and don’t live long enough to explore these answers.

The roles of bees are very narrow and defined, while the roles of humans are wide-open, fast, and without boundaries. Like walking towards a sunset, you can just continue, only to find another, paralyzing yourself.

The lack of these boundaries and the fact that we can create them is a gift and a curse. It’s an opportunity every day to define who we are and what we stand for. “Ignorance is bliss” for bees for the role they play. The meaning we find is in the role we play.

Freedom is the presence of choice and the absence of constraints. On the other hand, independence is the presence of that choice again without being controlled or dependent on the needs of outside forces.

It is subtle, but we need to be precise. Independence requires a system to exercise meaningful freedom, just like having a key to a door but no door to unlock. If you start a business, you can argue that it is freedom. But if said business goes under, then it cannot create independence—in this case, economic independence.

Freedom is the key condition to independence. Just because we are given a choice doesn’t mean we are independent of the forces around us. We can trick ourselves into believing this is what freedom feels like, but it isn’t in its purest form.

There is a growing sentiment that humans should be authentic all the time. When we express discomfort or something we don’t like, we are automatically off the hook in the name of authenticity.

This is a terrible approach to living a fulfilled life. Not because of the authenticity. It’s because we misunderstand it. My authentic self didn’t want to get up this morning, write a blog, or exercise. My authentic self is lazy. It is an appetite that can’t be squashed. Yes, be authentic in your work. But more importantly, be a professional because no one cares that the brain surgeon wanted to try a new technique today on the operating table.

We want something proven and reliable. Yes, be authentic in your relationships…to a point. Then, be humble, forgiving, and a good listener who serves.

The examples are endless. But at the end of the day, authentic people are overrated. Grown-ups understand that growth happens when we put authenticity on the chopping block.

Something that isn’t talked about enough is that we live in a capitalist system that depends on growth. COVID showed us what happens when we pause this Ferris wheel. AI is now revealing to us that we are approaching the ceiling of what is possible in the motivation for ever-better productivity. Here now is a tool that can think, write, and crunch any task you want in seconds—and do a pretty good job.

If you do not consider how AI will benefit you, you will likely someday work for AI. In a world where dopamine hits, the sky is falling, and robots will take over, I think it is way more likely that we will see AI take the jobs of a simple set of instructions to follow. There is no map. There is no step-by-step guide to follow in navigating a complex world. What we need is a compass to help us take the next step. The next step isn’t all lit with graduating high school, then going to a popular college, getting married, and getting a mortgage…that might be gone for most. So what’s next? What makes us more than happy? Because dopamine hits, convenience is one click away. The next frontier is finding meaning in our work rather than always being productive. A shift from “How much can I get?” to “What is my impact?”

We are not used to saying out loud what we can do to help those around us.

Look at the pile of bad ideas. Ideas are in the ether. Anyone can come up with an idea. It’s the execution gap that makes an idea valuable.

I think back to the early days of apps. A decade or more later, the conversation shifts to an excellent idea for a podcast. You’re too late, and most likely with the wrong intent. The mindset shouldn’t be extracted; instead, what can I contribute?

Since we are walking memory lane, it is worth remembering that Google wasn’t the first search engine. Instagram wasn’t a photo-sharing app at first either. Novelty isn’t the answer to great ideas. Remixing, blending, refining, reimagining, and finding something that rhymes…can be more valuable than being first. Version 1.0 rarely works better than the tenth iteration.

Ideas need to grow, too. They need time to see if they can stick to the culture. Driving on the right side of the road wasn’t just a given when the first cars were rolled out.

Good ideas can start by intersecting your point of view with an idea and seeing it in a different light and perspective that no one else can see. Slack, after all, was a gaming platform until they realized that internal communication was a good idea to go market with.

You may be sitting on a good idea, but it may be just another bad one. We can be sitting around a long time waiting for eurika. But getting action-oriented tends to have eureka moments built into them.