Some vegans don’t eat avocados.
They’re concerned that the bees that are trucked in to pollinate the trees are mistreated, and so they choose to not support this practice.
But we live in community, and someone running a vegan restaurant or serving a meal to vegan friends, concerned that they might offend, doesn’t serve avocado. A few strong opinions change the culture.
And so the cycle continues.
Humans care about status and affiliation, and both are at play in a purity loop.
One can earn more status by caring more about the issue that others are adjacent to. And so the loop gains momentum.
Once a few people make it clear that they’re more orthodox or progressive or concerned or strict or unhypocritical or obedient, others seek to claim the same status. And that becomes a point of affiliation.
Just about every tribe goes through these loops.
Four hundred years ago, neck ruffs became popular among the aristrocracy in Europe. The neck ruff began as a modest collar but evolved into enormous pleated confections that could span two feet across. At their peak, ruffs became so large that special eating utensils with extended handles were invented to allow wearers to get food to their mouths. Some ruffs were so tall and stiff that wearers couldn’t turn their heads and needed help eating.
The instinctual response is to criticize the newest form of purity as absurd. But of course, the absurdity is part of the status on display.
Perhaps it makes more sense to see the loop at work and get back to the work at hand.
“Shut up and drive” is the answer to an argument about what song is playing on the radio. We can tune the radio as we go, but we’re here to drive this thing to where we’re headed.
Enrollment is at the core of the mission. Where are we going and why? If it’s not helping with that, let’s drive and work on it as we go.
Everyone is entitled to their own take. But when we focus on purity and status at the expense of the journey, the distraction costs all of us.
We’re going. Come if you’d like.
Sometimes it pays to accept and celebrate what we get.
And sometimes, we only get something because we settled for it.
It helps to be able to discern the difference between the two.
There’s a difference between telling someone their work can become better and saying it can become even better.
When we say even better, we lock in a foundation — we’re affirming that something good already exists — at the same time we create the conditions for improvement.
Ennui and disappointment, on the other hand, are multiplied when we promise things are going to get even worse instead of merely worse.
If you’re hoping for this meeting or this performance or this engagement to produce something extraordinary, why are you setting it up as if it’s ordinary?
The hard work of a brainstorming session, a pitch collaboration or a negotiation happens long before most people begin.
We hire architects to design expensive buildings, but we design expensive human interactions as an afterthought.
If it doesn’t feel like you’re putting a lot of effort into creating the conditions for magic, you’re probably not creating those conditions.
The door-to-door salesperson had no leverage. If he was at your door, he wasn’t at anyone else’s door. Every minute you spent with him was a minute he had to spend with you. While it was a tough gig, no one doubted that something was motivating this person enough to put at least as much into the interaction as you were. You might close the door in the face of the person who rang your bell, but at some level, you knew that another human was involved.
Spammers play a different scheme. One person can steal the time and attention of a million. It costs them nothing (actually, truly, nothing) to add one more name to the list. The lack of care and discernment comes through in their interactions. They steal attention in bulk and treat it casually. No one feels bad when they delete or filter spam.
In B2B selling and other high-value sales calls, the seller puts in a lot of effort. A custom presentation deck, useful spreadsheets, even a flight across the country to meet in person. That effort is expected, because the buyer sees their attention as valuable.
And now, here come AI agents. These are spammers disguised as door-to-door salespeople. They know your name, your history, your details–and they present a pitch that looks and feels as though a human spent a lot of time thinking about it and focusing on the buyer’s needs and desires.
But it’s done on a huge scale. It’s like seine fishing. A huge net is set to catch as many fish as possible, with no regard for the mass destruction it causes as a result.
Our instinct is to respect the work of a pitch that took more effort to create than it will cost us to consume (that’s why books are more respected than blog posts!). But AI agents, working at high speed to churn through the small amount of trust and attention we have left, upend that expectation.
Attention and trust continue their dance, and our choices determine how we’ll show up in the marketplace. Burning trust to get attention rarely pays off.
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