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What gets you up in the morning?

 

There are no wrong answers in work and life.

Just choices that will take you to places that make you, personally, happy and fulfilled. Or the opposite of that.

Question for you.

What gets you more excited?

The prospect of doing great work, where you feel like you’re blazing a trail where few have been. Work that gets better as you move through life clocking up more skills and wisdom. And if you like external validation – which is most of us — work that others admire and recognise as quality.

Or would you prefer the prospect of cranking out a vastly greater quantity of crappy, just-usable work, indistinguishable from a billion others, but still you’ll make some money.

That’s your choice right now in 2024 as more tools appear that remove the need for thinking. There is no black and white right answer here, it’s your call on which way you go.

 

Rick Rubin says: do the work

 

I was reminded of this by Rick Rubin, the music super-producer whose book The Creative Act is worth a read even if you’re not creative.

Because business is art. Art is basically making people feel something, understanding how to create emotions in others. Even if your business is manufacturing clothes pegs or outsourced actuarial services, you won’t get far if you can’t create an emotional bond with customers and staff.

If your business is a clear expression of your own values, people will relate to it. Not everyone, but the ones who do will feel a strong attraction.

All the other logical business skills – the cold calculations – are essential, but they only measure the results of the emotions you created. The stronger the bond, the higher the returns in pure sweet cash.

If you don’t read the Rubin book, here’s the line you need:

The world is awash with tips and hacks on how to not do the work. I feel bad coming back to the AI topic twice in a fortnight but there’s a lot of it about at the moment.

Adam Biddlecombe says: don’t do the work

 

My social feeds are full of this sort of thing. An entire skilled career that old mate here reckons he can replace with an hour’s cut and paste.

 

To save you the time, I used some of his prompts along with a detailed brief on our own business. Here’s the opening line of what it produced.

 

Oh cool, generic self-praise. Nothing further, your honour.

Adam Biddlecombe has plenty of advice on work he’s never done. Here’s his entire track record.

It’s all so easy in Adam World.

Adam has never experienced launching a product, then having it snuffed out in its prime because Giant Groceries decided to put their own house brand duplicate in its shelf space instead.

He’s never had to develop a marketing plan good enough to persuade a head office CFO to give him the budget he needs.

He’s never had to personally tell a room full of dedicated staff that their jobs are under existential threat.

He’s not done the work.

 

Spider senses get you places

 

You do the work, you develop the spider senses. You can see things others can’t, instantly. These are useful lifelong skills.

I love a financial statement if it’s ours, but I’m just OK with numbers. I watch in wonder at numbers people, who can spot a spreadsheet error on cell Z49 at a glance. It just lights up for them. From years of being immersed in it.

Of course AI can do some of those things. AI can also get it wrong, and if you don’t have the spider senses, you’ll just accept what the AI says. More so as it takes over search.

The work world is a gymnasium of irritations that you must train on or you’re useless.

Sports people don’t believe there’s an AI shortcut to getting to the top. Nobody is telling them: why bother lifting those heavy weights? Why bother with that 10K dawn run in the rain? Here’s a hack to get the same result with just a few keystrokes whilst sitting!

At the core of this issue is: unless you do the work, you can’t recognise what good work even looks like.

Clown Story

 

Here’s an AI influencer clown telling you how to crank out your own screenplay by scraping Pixar’s story framework. We’re getting close to peak blasphemy here.

Pixar. An iconic organisation with some of the greatest creative, story-crafting and technical minds on earth. People who have devoted their lives to using insane technology to move audiences to the bottom of their hearts.

People who kill 99% of their own ideas, because those ideas still don’t meet their own standards.

Meanwhile Mister AI breezily reckons he can do it with a few prompts downloadable from his website. The results are awesome to him and his many followers. Because he hasn’t done even a thousandth of the work needed to recognise the difference between magic and barely adequate.

Is Pixar using AI? Of course. They’ve earned the right. They know it’s an amazing tool to do more with their world-class skills. Rather than something to crank out a higher volume of mediocre while doing less work.

Like dermatologists using AI to find melanomas. They understand the context of why it’s so good, because they’ve done the work.

Where’s the love?

 

I recognise this is going to sound sappy, but it’s true: greatness doesn’t happen without love. AI screenplay guy has no love for stories or movies.

I fucking love writing, and I love our businesses. I can’t not think about them. Talking to the people I work with fills me with mad energy. Story ideas and random sentences are assembling in my head while I’m pushing the supermarket trolley around.

They’re my default activities and I have to remind myself to do other things.

I don’t know anyone who’s really good at anything who doesn’t love it. And that love includes the bad bits and the hard work. The solitary reflections, the time it takes to let stuff sink in, the long periods where nothing seems to work, the making of stupid mistakes and the shame of pondering them afterward. All of that is still great. All of it is teaching essential lessons.

If you love it, everyone around you can tell. Staff. Customers. Investors. Even if your business is all-digital, they can just feel it.

How other good people can tell you’re good

 

If you’re to get anywhere, you can’t be working off the AI teleprompter all the time.

When you meet someone influential, and discuss your subject, the questions you ask and the answers you give shows a grasp of the detail that says: you get it. So they will speak of you to others.

I posted on the inspirational Zoë Foster Blake last week, after reading an interview with her in the AFR (paywalled). She sold her cosmetics business Go-To to listed outfit BWX for $89M, then bought it back for pocket change.

 

Every word she says rings true. She’s been through the whole “lil ol’ me, I have no head for numbers” phase, and thought: it’s my job I’ll do those numbers.

As a business person reading it, I think: yep, you’ve been there, you’ve done the work, you get it. You’re better than me. Respect.

The subtext of every word the work hack guys write says they don’t get it. They don’t know enough to know what they don’t know.

They don’t understand that people might choose to take the difficult path because it’s rewarding and it will give them skills they can use to take it above and beyond in future. These guys would offer you tech that solved your crossword puzzle for you, like that’s an awesome solution to a need you have.

 

AI ain’t going away

 

Unless you do the work, you can’t develop nuance. That’s what makes you valuable. Any idiot can apply a documented process.

Good people can balance out all the factors and find an answer that makes a situation work for everyone involved. And they can teach others to do that. They understand, and rejoice, in the deep illogic of human nature.

I’ve employed a few work-hack people at times. That mindset is a burden on your organisation. Speed and efficiency are good things. The urge to take a shortcut every time is not. It leads to trouble. Plus they bring an arrogant disregard for other people’s skills. Everyone else’s job looks easy until you try it.

Adopt the AI guy mindset – and I’m not saying don’t use AI – and your work brain will atrophy. To the point of being flat on its back for so long it develops bedsores.

I’m no futurist. But if you base your future career on keying prompts into the tech, just sayin’: it ain’t going to be long before the tech can do its own prompts.

AI isn’t going away. Your future success depends on you being able to recognise where it’s useful in the wider context of your industry, amid a sea of simplistic lazy-ass nonsense.

Because you did the work.

Speaking of work, that’s what I’m not going to be doing for the next month. I’m out of the country until the end of April having a nice time. See you in May.

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