In my lifetime, we’ve invented 7 billion or more jobs, which is great news. Great for the people who were able to earn a living, and productive for everyone who experienced some of the value created.

“Value” doesn’t always mean profit.

David Graeber defined a bullshit job as “A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

But over time, there are no pointless jobs. It might be that the value created is hard to measure, creates status for the boss, or is part of a larger system. It might seem pointless to the employee, but someone gets value out of it. Boats have ballast to keep them steady, and many big company jobs serve a similar purpose. Sailing a boat without ballast is difficult, regardless of how pointless carrying dead weight seems to be.

The person who pays for the job is the one who decides if it’s valuable. Calling it pointless from the outside is just substituting your judgment for theirs.

Graeber was right that doing a job that feels pointless is enervating. Even if it has a point, the more obviously connected we are to the creation of value, the more purpose we can find in our work.

And now, here comes AI.

It’s already good enough at many tasks that it’s cheaper and faster and perhaps more reliable to have an AI do those tasks instead of a person.

But we’ve seen this before. The Luddites weren’t anti-technologists. They were defending their livelihoods, a specific job: weavers. People who created clothing.

Today, around the world, we’re all clothed, but it’s quite unlikely you know a weaver. The cost of truly handmade clothing is so high that no one buys it. A handmade t-shirt might cost $500 if you could find one. Machines replaced skilled labor, and all of the weaving jobs disappeared, because the machines created more value per dollar invested.

It took a generation or two for the weaving workforce to fade out. That sort of labor change is now happening in months or years, not decades.

Most people reading this post have a job that didn’t exist a hundred years ago. Some of these jobs create easily measured and obvious forms of value, some less so. And all of these jobs will change as a result of AI.

Jevons Paradox is worth understanding. When the efficiency of coal combustion increased, it didn’t lead to a drop in coal use; instead, more uses were found for coal power, and consumption went up. This will likely happen, at least for a while, in many uses of AI. If it’s easier for programmers to write useful code using AI, then more programmers will show up and write more code, solve more problems, and create more value.

We keep building machines, and the machines give people chances to add value. But that value creation is more likely to happen when people use the machines for leverage, not when they try to do the work that the machine can do.

Bullshit jobs will disappear, especially as the meme of corporations with less ballast catches on. More status will be earned by having a smaller workforce, not a larger one. CFOs will get more value (for a while) from laying people off than from hiring them. The turmoil is certain, the human costs will be real, but the likely outcome is more value created by more people, over time. That’s not much solace for someone who has invested and trained to create value under the old rules, but consumers of value don’t often care about that.

The best plan is resilience. Find a way to create value, more each day. Consider enrolling in the bumpy ride that change brings, because holding on tight to the job we have today is probably going to be insufficient.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Figure out who is seeking value and create it for them.

        

Most of us take the tools we’re given and use them as instructed. We follow the manual. We color inside the lines. We accept the functions as defined by those who came before us.

But the ruckus maker asks: What if this tool could do something else?

Umfunktionierung isn’t incremental improvement. It’s about repurposing or reimagining. Taking the apparatus of production and fundamentally changing its function. Brecht coined the term in his work on the theory of theater, and the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote about it. But it isn’t just for playwrights or Marxist philosophers from the 1930s.

Twitter wasn’t built for social movements, but activists transformed it into a tool that wasn’t planned for. Email wasn’t designed for newsletters, but creators repurposed it and invented a new medium. Smartphones weren’t made for documentary filmmaking, but filmmakers redefined their use.

Functional transformation doesn’t ask us to build something new from scratch. It requires us to look at what already exists and see possibilities others have missed.

This is how industries evolve. Not always through invention, but through transformation.

Sometimes, we make an impact by transforming the function of what already exists.

        

But if you want to complain about the hours of the gym, the hotel’s environmental footprint or even their late check-in policy, you’re almost certainly wasting their time. And yours.

Every organization with more than a few people in it has night clerks. Most of the people who work at the phone company, for example, and even the person clearing tables at the local pizza place.

It’s the night clerks that have the most customer interaction–in fact, they’re almost certainly the highest leveraged, most insightful marketing cohort in your organization.

They have information, and if we give them agency, they could transform the customer experience.

Alas, our systems rarely help. Many night clerks are underpaid and underappreciated, and systems around them push them not to care.

When your organization gets stuck, don’t blame them. Instead, find a way to help them become the contribution they’re capable of being.

Some useful questions you might not be asking:

How much does the information we’re not collecting cost us?

What is the customer service cost and brand dilution of depriving our people the freedom to take action?

If we built a culture of mutual respect with our night clerks–using training, compensation and engagement–what would our new customer experience and reputation be worth?

        

Each person has exactly the right running style–and none of those styles are the same. Each is wearing what they think of as the right clothes, listening (or not) to the right sort of music, going in precisely the direction and at the pace they’ve chosen. They’re all correct.

And yet, they’re all different.

The same is true for the dogs they’ve chosen to adopt, the place where they’ve chosen to live, and what they plan to do when they’re done.

Given the chance, each of us chooses the right path. Based on who we are, what we believe and what we want, of course, that’s what we do.

The challenge of ‘everyone’ is that there’s no such thing.

        

The search for perfect never ends, and it’s a great place to hide.

Would you rather wait for the perfect job, or take this new one, which is better than the one you have?

The perfect leader is elusive, but we can probably find a better one.

When we produce better often enough, we get ever closer to the impossible perfect.

        

“Don’t be late,” isn’t as useful as, “We’re going to leave on time.”

“I don’t want to be rude, but…” can easily be replaced by simply saying something that isn’t rude.

And of course, “with all due respect…” is often the preface to something said without due respect.

        

Hobbyists can take it personally.

We arrive and make a promise. We do it on behalf of the client, and that promise has little to do with what we might want to do–it’s what they need us to do.

And so we make our promises carefully, and keep them with effort. That’s serious.

But it’s not personal.

        

A cat gets fed and thinks it is.

How we see ourselves in this analogy is actually up to each of us, every day. It also tells us a bit about how we think about customers, vendors, and partners.

        

My friend Ty actually had this happen. In that moment, she decided to stop wasting her days on a career that pleased her family, and committed, if she survived, to quit and go build something that mattered to her.

Of course, in the months that followed, honoring the commitment was hard. If it were easy, she would have done it far sooner.

But it’s an oath. The sort of promise you don’t negotiate.

The really cool thing is that you don’t need to avoid a possible plane crash to wake up, see what’s going on in your life and take an oath. You can do it simply because it’s May 13th.

What a chance we each have. To take agency, to make a deal and to honor it. Don’t wait for an excuse to care enough to take an oath. Simply begin.

        

But, at the time, they’re pretty hard to live with.

All we can do is remind ourselves that it’s an unskippable part of a useful journey.