In some fields, it’s always been pretty easy to tell. Either the building falls down or it doesn’t. Either the car starts after you charge the battery or it’s still dead. We can ask easy questions about how long it took or how much it cost.
But endeavors with crisp measurements often don’t attract people looking for a different sort of work. At many schools, more folks sign up for humanities than engineering.
Lately, more data is showing up in fields where it was elusive. Not just the efficacy of medical approaches, but the user satisfaction or time spent on creative endeavors or the stickiness and yield of educational approaches.
And closer to home for many, public health. We can actually tell with a great deal of granularity the impact of things like hand washing or placebos.
The irony? When data shows up in a field where we’re not expecting it, a common response is to either ignore or challenge the data. Not because it’s not helpful, but because it is not what we’re used to.
After twenty more minutes of searching, there it was, right on the cookbook shelf. But the spine was much more subtle than the cover, and it hadn’t been what I was looking for or expecting.
We spend a lot of time on our (metaphorical) book covers. That first impression, the way we tell our story or introduce ourselves or earn the sale.
But the real win is often later, when someone finds us when they’re looking for us.
This isn’t SEO. That’s what happens when we try to win a search for a generic category. SEO is coming up first in the search for ‘plumber’.
This is human search. Being there when someone is looking for you. The first step is being the sort of resource that people care enough to look for. And the second is being findable.
Here’s a simple XY grid to help you think about your next project, freelance career or startup:
All too common are ‘fun’ businesses where someone finds a hobby they like and tries to turn it into a gig. While the work may be fun, the uphill grind of this sort of project is exhausting. If it’s something that lots of people can do and that customers don’t value that much, it might not be worth your time. Taking pictures, singing songs or playing the flute are fine hobbies, but hard to turn into paying jobs.
On the other hand, in the top right quadrant, there’s endless opportunity and plenty of work for people who can do difficult (unpopular) work that is highly valued by customers who are ready to pay to solve their problems. A forensic accountant gets more paid gigs than a bagpipe player.
When you choose to take on a real problem that involves difficult work, but you’re serving a customer base that has few resources, thank you. Your quest is going to be a long one, but if you believe in the impact you’re creating, this can be a useful way forward.
And in the bottom right quadrant is a professional athlete or another gig where if you actually are the best in the world, you’ll do fine. Just know what you’re getting into before you start. The Dip is real.
AI pushes us to do what we actually get paid to do: make decisions.
Craft used to drive our hours or even days. Get the pen lines just right. Source the Letraset. Get your instrument in tune. Sweat the details, because the details are everything.
Now, I can choose from 1,000 typefaces, and they’re all optically correct. Autotune has transformed commercial music, and the new AI grammar tools make it trivially easy to make edits or find errors.
The part of us that’s focused on getting it done so we can move on to the next thing accepts the defaults and settles for what the algorithm offers.
That ignores the real work. Taking ownership of the decision.
This or that. The system tees them up. We decide (or answer with “none of the above.”)
Reclaiming agency pushes us away from, “I’m just doing my job,” and into, “I made that.”
PS I made this art in a few moments with AI, but I’d like to be clear that every word I publish, in every book or blog post, is written from scratch, by me. No team, no AI. If that changes, I’ll let you know.
It could be that the constraints that led to the default are long gone.
They might be perpetuating bad choices, injustice or sub-optimal outputs.
The best way to fix something is to look at what we assume is the ‘right’ starting spot.
In persistent systems, it might be difficult to change the default setting, but knowing what it is and how it got there is a great place to begin.
PS on this topic, in two weeks people are going to give out a bazillion dollars worth of cheap chocolate for Halloween. Please don’t buy cheap chocolate.
Different kinds of people prefer pop tarts to pizza, or prefer expensive wine to beer, or prefer amusement parks to bowling.
Except everyone is the same and everyone is different.
What’s actually useful is to realize that in this moment, under these conditions, this person and people who have this person’s preferences, will often choose a certain path.
When groups of people with a shared preference or attitude choose to do something, we see markets and cultural trends.
But these people aren’t different kinds. They’re simply people responding or reacting to what’s on offer. This means that people can have different responses based on different offers and different conditions. We’re not stuck forever, simply grooved into certain patterns.
It could have been way better. It could have been far worse. It’s easy to imagine that outcomes are inevitable, but they’re not.
Was it your fault, or was it luck (good or bad)?
If our story of the past is filled with second guesses, shame or blame, it can carry forward. Or perhaps we’ve over-sold ourselves on just how talented, hardworking and insightful we are, when in fact, we sort of got lucky.
When we rewrite our narrative of the past, we end up creating a different future.
We have more control over that narrative than we give ourselves credit for.
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