After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate, professional job that cost more than $1,000. As he was finishing the job at 1:30 am, he was arrested and charged with a felony.
A hundred years ago, the default was that pedestrians were in charge. Cars were guests, only going where they were invited. But the persistent productivity and cultural force of the automobile carried the day, and the default flipped. The roads must roll.
If it can be paved or straightened or sped up, it is. If the car wants it, the answer is “yes.”
80,000,000 people have died as a result of automobiles over time. (It’s harder to estimate how many lives were saved or enriched by this massive shift in the transport of food, people and resources.) A successful system can redraw our maps and our expectations.
When systems gain momentum like this, it’s because they create urgent and immediate value, enough to disrupt the status quo. And once the status quo has changed, the momentum becomes normal, the way things are, until persistent community action (or another, even more relentless system) changes the defaults.
The system doesn’t care about Joseph Brandlin’s kid. It cares about the flow and the status of those that maintain that flow.
Ironically, his arrest is almost certainly going to result in a stop sign being installed. Using one system (the media) to change another.
We’re all living through the biggest and fastest systemic shifts in a century, whether we want to or not. The internet, healthcare, the aging of populations and now, particularly, AI–they’re changing defaults. It’s possible (even likely) that individuals will go out in the middle of the night and seek to change something in their neck of the woods, but as we’ve seen with system change before, that’s not usually the reliable path to make a lasting impact.
Every system eventually acts as if it’s more important than the people it was built to serve. HAL isn’t going to open the pod bay door merely because you insist. But persistent systemic action often bends the system toward better. And better is up to us.
You can be fashionable without reading Vogue. You can be informed without watching the nightly news. You can be smart about science without going to MIT. It’s possible to be a great chef without buying a cookbook. In fact, you can probably thrive without reading this blog. There are millions of songs on Spotify that have only been listened to a few times each.
Not only are more humans publishing more often on more topics, but we’ve built LLMs that are always ready to create even more content, on demand, for an audience of one.
For generations, content has created the demand for more content. A few movies increased our desire to watch more movies. AM radio created the demand for FM, which sold more records, and then Napster magnified our desire for even more music.
Until we hit the wall of enough.
The ennui of infinite content is reversing our spiraling desire for more of it.
That’s a great reason to dumb things down. It’s also a trap that leads us to stasis and mediocrity.
Let’s break it down:
People: Which people? All people? The majority of voters? Day traders or institutional long term investors? Every VC or just this one?
Pick your people, pick your future.
Complicated: If it can be made simpler and just as effective, then by all means, please do so. If you can tell a more compelling and actionable story, do that as well. But ‘complicated’ just might mean, “we don’t understand it yet.”
Understand: Few people understand how the iphone works, or even the refrigerator. But that doesn’t mean we can’t effectively use it. The people who were moved by The Rite of Spring or Miles Davis or Esperanza Spalding might not have understood the music but it still succeeded.
People walk away when it’s not worth the effort to pay attention. People ignore innovation when the network effect is insufficient to overcome their fear. People rarely understand something the same way the creator does, but that’s okay.
Our first job is to do work that matters for people who care. It helps to follow that up with the scaffolding needed to cause cultural change, so the idea spreads.
But don’t dumb it down to reach people who don’t want to be reached in the first place.
If you tell me your ID number, your phone number or the wiring instructions for your bank account, not only will I forget them, I’ll need you to repeat it a few times so I write it down without making a transcription error.
When we first started using serial numbers (the Roman Legion did this thousands of years ago, and the British Board of Ordnance required it by law in the 1700s), it made perfect sense. Issue the next number on the list and move on.
But numbers alone are difficult for humans to error check and handle. So we use computers to help. The problem lies in the pesky humans who are still part of the chain.
So, here’s a simple hack. It’s unlikely to catch on worldwide, but I think it’s fascinating enough to consider…
If you had a list of 150 three letter words, all selected to be easy to say, spell and discern, you could use them to replace numbers in a productive and useful way.
So, big bob zap car cat is five words next to each other. There are 75 billion combinations of five words, which means that it replaces a number like 4839450381 with room to spare.
For ATMs that are four or five digits, you only need three words.
Think about that the next time you need to tell a customer service person your order number or serial number, or share a wifi password.
In tennis, golf or just about all ball sports, the follow-through determines the flight of the ball. Great players always have a complete and confident follow-through.
But the ball is long gone before that happens.
So, what’s the point?
It turns out that the ball can tell that you intend to have a serious follow-through. A weak or non-existent follow-through requires that you start slowing down before your racquet ever gets to the ball.
The metaphor should be pretty clear.
If you show up for the audition, your first TEDx talk, your early blog posts, the job interview or your start up hoping to see what happens (“I’ll commit if I get picked”) we can tell.
On the other hand, when it’s clear that you’re going to keep on showing up, it’s an invitation to get aboard now.
Follow-through doesn’t always work. But it always works better than the alternative.
State nouns are verbs that we talk about like they are nouns. Hurry, panic, frenzy, rage, funk, stupor, daze, fog, rut, bind, pickle, fix, slump, tailspin, tizzy. Notice that they’re almost all negative…
You’re in a hurry.
Really? I get that you’re hurrying. There might be good reasons for this. But the hurry hat isn’t what you are, it’s what you’re doing.
We can own our agency and our choices, not announce (to ourselves or the world) that we’re trapped in a container, unable to escape.
Until we start saying, “I’m in a joy” perhaps we should find the grace to choose what sort of verb we’d prefer.
The essential thing about a hat is that it’s easy to take off.
Tonight, when you’re off the clock, what will you listen to, watch or read?
I imagine that most of us would agree that this is a free choice. To watch a silly video on YouTube, read a book on Greek philosophy from the library or scroll your feeds. We have time (surprisingly called “free”) and we allocate it to focus our attention on something.
While it might seem like a free choice, well-paid people and powerful forces are working to shift our focus. Many systems are built to manipulate us into focusing on things that benefit them, not us.
If you’ve ever felt lousy after doomscrolling, you might question how free your free time actually is. It takes effort to regain our freedom of focus.
We can take this one step further. We not only make choices about the media we consume, we also make choices about our internal focus. Until you got to this sentence, I’m guessing you weren’t spending much time thinking about your high school graduation.
We don’t need research to show us that the internal narratives we focus on shift our attitude and soon become our reality. We’ve all experienced it. Soon after we stop the broken record, things get better.
Perhaps it’s not a free choice, though. Perhaps the stories we relentlessly focus on are simply the byproduct of our brain’s chemical reactions, a reaction to the world inside us and around us.
And yet… many people have learned to shift the stories they rehearse.
The first step: change the external focus. Change the people we interact with, the media we consume, the attention we offer. Not all at once, but as a habit, a persistent practice of being mindful about the triggers and amplifiers we consume. If you’re not happy with what your attention is bringing you, you can change it.
Aristotle said that we become what we do, but before we do, we focus.
And the freedom and responsibility of that focus belong to us.
March 19, 2026
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