There are two easy ways to tell:
First, if you have a script or a highlighted goal in mind, you’re pitching. You’re simply asking questions to create connection, tension or forward motion.
Second, if you’re willing to learn and change your point of view as a result of the conversation, you’re asking. That’s rare.
People can tell.
It’s possible that your day will be more enjoyable if you are insulated from the market.
If you have a boss who has a boss…
If you don’t have to review the sales numbers for the products you created or edited…
If you have raised a ton of venture investment…
If you are embracing the discontent of being unpublished, undistributed or unfunded…
An alternative is to seek to strip away all market insulation, the equivalent of the kid selling cookies at a table in front of their house. Either people buy the cookies or they don’t.
The market might be wrong, it might be callous or it might be stupid, but there it is, right in front of you.
Too much market awareness pushes us to be short-sighted, hustling to pander.
And too much insulation almost guarantees that we’ll end up solipsistic, listening only to one voice and ultimately bitter when it turns out the voice was wrong.
The first was radio and television. Humans around the world spending a significant portion of their waking hours consuming audio and video recordings of other people.
The second was the internet. Five to ten hours a day interacting, in real time, with other people, many of them strangers.
And the third is AI. We’re about to spend almost all of our time interacting with software that appears to have an understanding of us and the world around us. All the time, in real time.
There’s often doubt.
Giving someone the benefit of that doubt enables us to move forward, and that requires us to realize that our doubt might be unfounded.
Systems that assume goodwill create possibility, connection and utility far easier than those that don’t. Being invited to find a place in those systems is a privilege worth earning.
Massive leaps in utility and quality are extraordinary events. Going from ver 2.0 to 3.0 is a step change.
But that is almost never what improvement looks like.
Instead, the persistent commitment to slightly better on a regular schedule inexorably makes a difference over time.
In just about every group, people decide in advance how they’ll show up when it comes to learning, to winning and to responding to opportunities. They’re wearing a hat with a label, and over time, it’s not hard to recognize.
This can change based on pedagogy, social conditions and the juxtaposition of status roles, but it’s really quite sticky.
A few people are not simply autodidacts, they’re actually motivated by the journey itself. They show up early, do the training, focus on prep and learn what they can, merely because they can. This is the person who trains for a marathon and then runs one, without waiting for an organized race to happen.
The second group gets a lot of attention. They are fierce competitors–not only against their personal best, but in regards to the rest of the pack. If others in their investment bank work 10 hours a day, they’ll work 10 and a half–but when they move to a new firm, the first thing they’ll figure out is what others do.
The ‘almost win’ group are very much like the winner group, except they almost always come in third or fourth. Resistance is real, and while competition motivates them, fear or other internal limits holds them back. Some people in this group manage to whine and blame the refs or self sabotage… the external symptoms may change, but the outcomes remain.
The next group doesn’t want to be left behind. They’re willing and able to expend effort, but not too much. If they’re in a fast group, they’ll go faster, but they never see themselves as contenders.
And the last group, with no capital letters, finds satisfaction and solace in doing the least amount possible in this situation.
These hats aren’t permanent, and different people wear them in different settings. We may have been handed a hat from an early age, but ultimately, it’s a choice.
The only resilient choice, the one that leads to agency, contribution and a cycle of improvement that doesn’t depend on the outside word… is the top left quadrant. You either push yourself or wait for others to push you.
Where’s your permit?
Who said you could try to solve this problem?
I don’t get it…
That’s too original.
It’s not original enough.
You missed a comma.
That’s not funny.
That’s been done before.
That’s never been done before.
It’s not your best work.
None of us are authorized to solve interesting problems.
And there are no guarantees.
Do it anyway. Generous creativity is the only way things can get better.
Two of the building blocks of a resilient society.
And the opposite of the lazy shortcut.
The meanings of both clauses change over time…
Play fair:
Work hard:
Social media and politics have done a great job of celebrating people who seek selfish shortcuts, simply because it’s entertaining or easy to believe.
Few of us do the hard work of manual labor these days. Instead, we have the chance to sign up to work hard on solving useful problems in a way that’s generative and resilient.
I hope it’s pretty clear that most of us would like to work in a culture like this. But if we don’t work at it, it disappears.
PS Play Hard & Work Fair helps us see the list with even more nuance…
AI agents are going to overhaul the way we think about buying and selling.
Uber already did this in a small way. They organized the drivers, and now they organize the riders. Hailing a cab was already sort of anonymous, but with competition and structure, AI will continue to get better at finding the right passengers for the right drivers, and vice versa.
But there are far more markets where this sort of transformation hasn’t happened yet.
Real estate (both buying and renting) has been slightly changed by the internet. They’ve made markets a bit more efficient and given buyers more insight. But the choices people make are based on intuition, and data sets are incomplete and have more “I know it when I see it” than we’d expect from such a large and regular transaction.
What happens when the right person finds the right place to live, and the connections have value far beyond building awareness?
Tinder and other dating apps changed some of the inefficiencies of people connecting with one another as they pursue relationships, but it’s mostly focused on displaying many options to people on both sides of the marketplace. It’s a very large singles bar with some pre-sorting and ranking going on. Participants aren’t eager to give up their agency, and there’s not a lot of data about what happens after a match is made.
Linkedin amplified the ‘find a job’ x ‘find an employee’ dynamic, but it’s a similar approach. They don’t know who came in second at the end of a grueling job search, nor do they know a lot about which bosses make good bosses or accomplish useful hires.
These marketplaces feel so vast and so human that it’s difficult to suggest that AI is going to make much of an impact. But I’m confident that it will. There’s so much expense and wasted time and anxiety around these essential connections that some part of the market will be open to engaging… and success will lead to more success.
We have a lot of fake agency, where we think we’re making a choice in hiring or connecting with others, but that choice is influenced by structures and dynamics that aren’t actually related to what we want. If it’s sunny on the day of the open house, more people make an offer…
We’re using false proxies and amplifying negative cultural tropes to shortcut our selection processes, and it harms everyone involved.
We don’t need a better digital resume, or a way to get the word out. We need to get much smarter about what we want, why we want it and what’s likely to work.
Creating connections between and among buyers and sellers in dramatically more productive ways is (possibly) around the corner.
“Just a little more,” might be a useful way to self motivate, until it isn’t.
N + 1 pushes us to win every race, every argument, every bank balance competition. Sometimes this is simply a self challenge, not designed to hurt others, but the problem with never being satisfied is that the loser is also going to be you.
“Enough” is often attainable and always useful.
