The Trip of a Lifetime
June 3, 2024
Buzzwords Guaranteed to Annoy
August 1, 2024
“Life is harder when you expect a lot of the world and little of yourself.
Life is easier when you expect a lot of yourself and little of the world.
High standards, low expectations.”
~ James Clear, Author of Atomic Habits and keynote speaker
Whoa. That’s deep, but I like it.
James Clear’s words remind me of business leaders I used to work with who thought they were under promising and over delivering, when in fact they were masters at the mirror opposite.
I got a sinking pit in my stomach every time I watched them cast a vision by introducing a new corporate project or direction. “Here we go again,” I would think to myself. Their visions were words filling up space and time because there were no supporting plans, timelines, funded budgets, commitments, or buy-in from anyone other than the one casting the vision.
Metrics to measure progress and drive accountability? Non-existent.
Too many times to count, I (and many others) completed plans and talking points, drafted preliminary budgets, designed logos, and scheduled meetings to discuss potential ways to achieve the vision casters’ bold intentions.
Ultimately, our carefully crafted planning got glossed over. Ignored. Eventually forgotten. Because the most effective way to take everyone’s mind off a transitory idea that has no structure is to cast a new, nobler vision. Some attribute the behavior to a lack of focus—the vision caster is perpetually looking for the next shiny object. I believe the behavior is a survival tactic, a deliberate diversion driven by a need to recapture a perceived loss of control.
The process of hopping from one disorganized idea to the next was grueling to accommodate, but I became shamefully accustomed to the routine.
That was then. Nowadays, planning activities previously performed by humans can be knocked out in seconds by AI (artificial intelligence), so all the time and company resources we expended in the past will likely someday not be as costly.
I say someday because today’s machine-generated planning ideas are not always relevant or even coherent, but we’ve been assured AI will keep improving. We simply need to figure out how to accommodate the demanding infrastructure needed to make AI more mainstream, including gobs more energy to power data centers, more powerful AI chips to train machine learning algorithms, and potentially a new generation of computing capability, including quantum. Efforts are well underway on the last two challenges, but the projections of future energy demands due to AI are staggering. In January, the International Energy Agency forecast that global data center electricity demand could more than double from 2022 to 2026, due in large part to AI.
Progress always has a price tag.
In reflection, my efforts to accommodate the vision casters during my years in corporate America could have been classified as mere busy work to pass the time and justify some of the jobs I had. Those experiences were uncannily similar to kindergarten when my teacher, Mrs. Fernley, “assigned” me pages in a coloring book to color because we’d already had nap time and still had an hour to kill before recess.
I’m driven now by what matters (high standards), not on what passes the time (low expectations).
To priorities!
