“Working in the studio is like building a ship in a bottle. Playing live is like being on a rowboat in the ocean.” Jerry Garcia
You probably need some studio time, but you definitely need to play live.
What if they meant it?
What if your return felt special to the people behind the counter?
What if they knew, without looking it up, or being told–what if they knew that you were here, again, a vote of trust and confidence.
Returning home is one of the oldest human desires. It’s a feeling that doesn’t easily lend itself to automation, procedures, or scale.
Being welcomed home offers us dignity, safety and belonging. Hard to fake, worth working hard to create.
We transferred an idea from engineering to culture, but it’s incomplete.
If you build a watch that doesn’t tell time, it’s fair to say it doesn’t work.
But when a critic says, “that joke didn’t work,” after seeing a comic perform to a raucous audience, what they probably mean is, “that didn’t work for me.”
The problem might not be the comic. It might be the critic.
“It’s not for you,” is a useful, almost essential way to navigate the creation of our cultural work. If you say it too often to the people you were seeking to serve, your work needs improvement. But when you say it to a critic you never intended to please, you’re opening the door to serving the people you do care about.
“How few people can we get away with?” That’s a question many bosses think hard about. Automate. Streamline. Improve productivity and take humans out of as many tasks as possible. It’s a time-tested way to create profits and to increase a certain kind of reliability. Claude Code is popular with many organizations for precisely this reason.
“How can we include more people into this process?” is a less popular but often more valid way to create value. In an organization that is in the business of bringing insights, humanity and care to problems, more involvement from people creates better outcomes. The challenges make it far more valuable.
Which sort of organization would you like to work for?
We work so hard to have freedom and leverage and choice.
And then, as soon as a social network, boss or cultural force instructs us to do something, we fold our tents and go along.
Responsibility is scary. Sometimes it’s easier to find someone (or something) to blame.
Just because AI tells you to put your finger in a pencil sharpener doesn’t mean you should, said every mother ever.
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