When focused on the things we can change, dissatisfaction is a powerful tool. Accepting everything else--the parts we can't or won't change--reserves our energy for the places where it's useful. The tricky part is telling them apart and then focusing our agency and leverage on the useful. Solving problems for others is how we create value.

The djinn go back millennia, powerful and elusive creatures of the supernatural. They show up across time and culture. Three hundred years ago, Charles Perrault retold a short story about a headstrong woodcutter and his wife. On being granted three wishes from Jupiter (archetype for the genie of legend), he accidentally blurts out that he'd like sausage for dinner. One wish, gone.

In October, the apples in New England are some of the best in the world. Alas, the apples in this bowl are nine months old and from 3000 miles away. I found them sitting in a forlorn corner of a hotel gym in Cape Cod. Why source lousy apples? Because they're not being hired to be good apples. Instead, they're chosen to be convenient, reliable and a bit of decoration.

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Rock and roll came from the transistor radio. When Sony launched its cheap portable radio more than sixty years ago, it came with a headphone. For the first time in history, teenagers could listen to music without their parents eavesdropping. This opened the door to Chuck Berry and then the Beatles. AM radio needed hits, the top 40, mass music, and the Beatles made it work.

"Vanity" has the same root as "in vain." Emptiness. Staring at the mirror, focusing on our appearance. It's an empty pursuit of a not-very-worthwhile goal. But modern vanity is amplified. Culture hooked the toxic emotion of shame to vanity. Now, instead of a chance to be seen and admired, vanity is mostly about avoiding the risk of being shamed for not being enough, not successful enough, or, worse, of failing.

The problem is with the "and." (Often a 'but' in disguise.) I want to make the art I have in my head, and I want the market to love it. I want to have the wedding of my dreams, and I don't want to worry about money, and I want my cousins and friends to enjoy every bit of it.

I don't believe we're each born with a purpose. We have more freedom than that, the freedom to choose the impact we'll make. Our work, though, does have a purpose. The change we seek to make. The people we're here to make it for. When we commit to work with purpose, it transforms us as well as the people we're engaging with.

Our world is shaped by contagious and competitive games. Along the way, we invent scoreboards that change the culture, and badges that we award to various players. An example: How did we end up with weddings that cost $200,000? It's a great example of a runway cultural dynamic, a system within a system, a game that rewards the players who keep it going.

Sometimes we make poor choices. And, unrelated to that, sometimes bad luck happens. The real problem kicks in after that. One bad decision after another. Choices that compound the problem instead of solving it. Digging a deeper hole, amplifying the damage and spreading the effects through space and time. We often try to justify previous errors by making them again.

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Maps are easy to sell. If you know where you are and where you'd like to go, the map solves your problem. Maps are all around us: how-to, what-to, step-by-step. The compass is more resilient but less descriptive. It shines a light, gives us clarity, but the next steps are up to us. In an age of ubiquitous AI, answers are no longer in short supply.

One kind of school is about culture, compliance and community. We indoctrinate kids, for better or worse, in what it means to be in this world we've built, and how to do it together. We teach them how to be kids, how to be citizens and hopefully, how to be adults. And the other kind of school is about the content.

The opposite of "I don't know" isn't "I'm certain." No, the opposite is, "I'm not sure, but..." "I don't know" is a conversation ender. It is almost never followed by a useful question. Instead, it's a form of surrender. Teach me! Show me answer! Don't make me figure it out. Most of all, let me off the hook. Traditional education is built around the helplessness of "I don't know." It gives the teacher and the system all of the authority, and requires the student to memorize, obey and regurgitate.

If you have a phone, you can call anyone you like. The recipient doesn't have to answer, but the network is an open API, available to anyone. The Bell System began as an actual networked system--many companies, using the same protocol, shared calls with each other. When Bell got greedy and stopped interconnecting, phone use became annoying--several phones on your desk, or there were simply people you couldn't call.

We have no idea. Of course, there's plenty of behavioral data. Say this phrase, or offer that treat, and this particular dog is likely to act in a certain way. But our inclinations about what it's actually like to be a dog are all inventions, reverse-engineered to give us a clue about what they might do next. "If I were you," is a pretty useless sentence, particularly for dogs.

"Why are you taking this class?" That seems like a fair question. After tenth grade or so, it's a choice, after all. One honest answer is, "I have to get a good grade to get to where I want to go." That means certification, compliance, regurgitation. It means enrollment in the outcome, not the process. When this happens, we're seeing a failure of the system we call education.

Apophenia is the uniquely human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns or connections in random or unrelated data, events, or objects. Humans are story telling machines. And one thing we do is turn co-incident events into more than coincidences. When we see faces and shapes in clouds, apophenia wastes our time in the form of pareidolia. There isn't actually a teddy bear in that cloud, or a face in that grilled cheese sandwich.

Frederick Taylor taught Henry Ford how to do mass production. Deming brought quality, systems understanding and respect for the worker. And operations research brought insight. If you have a repeated production process, the method for improving it is almost always the same, regardless of what you and your team produce: 1. Measure before you change. You can't improve what you haven't observed.

The first day of classes, some students slouch in the back row, unprepared and uninterested. Some are up front, eager and ready. But it's only the morning of the first day--these attitudes aren't related to the teacher. It's a pattern, one that is the result of culture, systems and personality. Many of these students have been let down before, and it's easier to be skeptical than to make a commitment, only to be disappointed later.

For fifteen or twenty years, this question is relentlessly answered, whether or not we ask it. After we learn fractions, the teacher moves on to decimals. After we read O'Connor, we're handed Faulkner. In music history, Debussy follows Brahms. Chemistry after biology. It persists in some places after school... the museum hangs Picasso in the next room after Braque. And in the old days, the newspaper editors spent a lot of time organizing their stories and their pages.

Peter Drucker argued that the purpose of a corporation is to serve the customer. It turns out that organizations that focus on this do well. Milton Friedman argued (mistakenly, in my view) that the corporation doesn't need to care about customers, unless this helps increase the value of the company to shareholders. Corporations are a cultural fiction, something we created and permit to exist because it serves the community.

It's possible that you were undermined, endangered, cut off or disrespected. But if we begin with that, then the relationship gets shaky. Perhaps the other person simply didn't understand. It might be that they are focused on their issues, not yours. It could be that they're dealing with something you don't see. And most likely, they simply might not know what you're expecting or hoping for.

Here's a simple hack/reminder: If you buy something that has a filter or other part that needs replacing, create a recurring event in your calendar. Also mention where you store the extra filters, and include a link on where to buy more of them. Works for monthly dog meds, too. And... If you paint a room in your home, write the type of paint you used on the back of the switchplates.

After doing an autopsy at the morgue, it's a good idea for doctors to wash their hands before delivering babies. A few hundred years ago, Ignaz Semmelweis proved this now-obvious insight about hygiene. Doctors don't scrub because it's fun or convenient, they do it because it's a powerful way to create better outcomes. When I was growing up, my family would sometimes go to Fantasy Island, a low-rent amusement park not far from my home.

You're not a crow, neither is your project. To get from a village in rural France to Los Angeles, the trip to London might be a tiny fraction of the distance from London to LA, but it takes more than half the time. It's easy to imagine that every step in our journey proceeds at the same velocity, but it rarely does. And just because the destination is in sight doesn't mean you're almost there... PS Here is a fifteen-year-old addendum to yesterday's post.

Is this where books go to die? There are about 7500 public libraries in the US, and until recently, more than a third of their transactions were for DVDs. What's a library for? The media has changed, our needs have changed, but the dynamics of funding, architecture and expectation have largely remained the same. The modern library is about community, education and access to tools. It creates an aura of possibility and engages with what's really scarce--possibility, not data.

They're often out of whack. A Hard Day's Night took less than 15 hours from idea to finished record. More Than a Feeling, from Tom Scholz and Boston, took five years. Each pleased their audiences. One is not 1,500 times more valuable than the other. Sometimes, work that requires effort leads to scarcity, and that scarcity can increase its value.

"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.

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.

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.

Use AI in the reading classroom to create audio, quizzes, visuals, and activities that support readers across content areas.

When new creation technologies arrive, they make the best a little worse and the bad a lot better. Desktop publishing made every local garage sale sign a lot more legible, but can't quite replace the hand-kerned and tweaked typography of the era before. A smartphone in your pocket takes far better video of the family cookout than a super 8 camera ever could, but it's no match for Hitchcock shooting in 35mm.

For generations, the rules of Lego were simple: many pieces, all able to connect in many ways, led to many outcomes. That almost drove the company into bankruptcy, though. Lego kits saved the business. Each kit has just one way to do the work, follow the instructions carefully. Industrial indoctrination in a box. While it made Lego plenty of money, it didn't create a generation of creative thinkers.

The folks at TryAI put Fable to the test in directing a music video. The AI glitches show up from the start and continue. But it's even more unsettling than this. When AI tries to create and direct joyous human dancing, it fails. The dancers look like retired accountants at a wedding. The stiff awkwardness jumps out at us...