Everything flows from the strategic decisions we make early in the process:

Choose your landlord. The rent is due every month. The place we set up (whether it’s a retail storefront, a social media platform or a warehouse) determines our cost structure, our deal flow and the space we have to work with.

Choose your investors. They decide the scale of the resources we have to invest, the timeframe and the decision-making rubrics.

Choose your customers. This either flows from the first two choices, or, if you’re smart, this is the one you make first. Your customers decide whether or not to spread the word, to be loyal, and to push you to raise or lower your standards… Your customers are the engine of your growth and also the architect of how you spend your day.

It’s easy to back into all three of these choices. To do what others are doing, to find yourself with a mortgage or SEO strategy or payment schedule that pushes you to run your project in ways you never would have chosen.

It’s your project. And then you choose.

Choose your landlord, choose your future.

“If it breaks, we’ll know how to fix it.”

Old cars had an oil light, and that was about it.

Often, we build things hoping they’ll work. But complex systems are more resilient when we build in the diagnostics for failure from the start.

A multi-unit retail chain, a medical practice, a school–they need a dashboard and process for finding and fixing things before the entire enterprise fails. A personal finance plan and a career probably need one too. It’s easier to do that well if we plan for it.

They don’t use canaries in coal mines any more, but you might need a few.

PS if you’re already doing this, you know. If you’re not, this is the moment to begin.

Freedom, liberty and independence are human rights.

But they depend on responsibility. Responsibility to others, to our future, to the community. Responsibility for our actions and our choices.

The only way to earn our independence is to keep the promises we’ve made. Can we become the present that the future will thank us for?

As many of my readers get ready for a long weekend, here are two of my books now on discount at Amazon–for another few days.

This is Strategy is 90% off on the Kindle. $3!

And This is Marketing is discounted as well.

If you’ve read or listened to either one, here’s a new AI tool I just built as a free bonus.

A friend sorts his records in an interesting way: not by name or genre, but by which musicians are friends with each other. That means some shelves are very crowded, and I’m imagining a few notorious artists have plenty of room all to themselves.

It’s possible that we sort the folks in our lives this way as well. The people who can be counted on, who are part of a larger circle, who are dynamic or interesting or selfish… lots of shelves, available to anyone willing to put in the work (or not).

Typesetters did not like the laser printer. Wedding photographers still hate the iphone. And some musicians are outraged that AI is now making mediocre pop music.

One group of esteemed authors is demanding that book publishers refuse to use AI in designing book covers, recording audiobooks or a range of other tasks.

As always, this isn’t going to work very well.

Plato was sure that the invention of handwriting would destroy memory, and I’m confident there were scribes who thought that the Gutenberg press was the end of civilization. Yet, all around us, there are writers who use spell check, guitarists who use electronic pitch tuners and photographers who use digital cameras.

Productivity wins out.

Productivity is outcome focused. When we create more value in less time, the consumer comes out ahead (that’s why it’s called “value.”)

And so people don’t mind driving on streets that were paved by machine instead of by hand, or driving instead of walking. They eat in fancy restaurants that have freezers and write on paper with a pen, not a quill.

As AI expands, the real opportunity is to find a way to use human effort to create more value.

When we bring humanity to the work in a way that others demand, labor is honored and valued.

The irony here is rich: the industrial age indoctrinated us and pushed us to be less human, to be cogs in the machine. School brainwashed us into asking if it will be on the test–the test itself is an artifact of quality control, and human resources was invented to make factories more efficient.

So it comes around. Now that we’ve got a tireless computer ready to do the jobs we trained to be pretty good at, it’s human work that matters.

In the 150 years since the dawn of photography, the jobs of most painters disappeared. If you need a way to remember someone’s face, take a photo. But at the same time, the profession of original, trendsetting painter has grown remarkably. It turns out that there’s a market for paintings that are powerful, memorable and inefficient.

Systems are powerful and persistent. Often, they evolve to serve those that seek value from those systems.

It’s easy to imagine that we have a say in whether or not AI will take over the basic elements of our work as radiologists, writers or musicians. We don’t.

What we do have is agency over how we’ll thrive in a world where human work is being redefined.

Either you work for an AI or AI works for you.

A sea slug sees far more colors than you do, and you probably see more than a profoundly color-blind person.

Who’s right?

We each carry our own version of reality, our own story about what happened, what’s around us and how things work.

Our chosen reality serves two useful purposes:

First, it binds us to the others in our circle. If you seek to communicate, speaking Esperanto in Nashville isn’t going to help very much–you do better assuming, as others do, that English is standard. On the other hand, going to a Flat Earth convention and insisting on the truth of our planet’s shape won’t earn you the sort of camaraderie you were hoping for.

[Cults are cults because they demand a shared story that doesn’t align with a useful, generative, positive version of reality, and so they harm the members and eventually hit the wall.]

Second, and more important, it’s a useful way to get what we want. When reality cooperates with our narrative and our goals, we’re more likely to get to where we’re going. Wishful thinking doesn’t lead to successful skydiving, a working parachute does.

[There are lots of benefits, short and long term, for creating a particular story. It might make us feel powerful, or like a victim. It might let us off the hook or it might offer us energy and drama. Some stories amplify status, others are fuel. “How’s that working out for you?” is a great question when exploring a version of reality.]

So, how is your narrative working out? Is your story about the past and the way the world works amplifying your connections and progress? Because reality doesn’t mind showing up when we least want it to. Gravity isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law.

We invent stories, that’s the only way they occur. And most of our stories are about what happened and why.

If your story serves you and those you care about, that’s great. If it persists, it’s probably close to what really happened. But if it’s not working for you, or continues to surprise you when it bumps into the rest of the world, hold it lightly enough to change it.

The best way to get to a more accurate version of reality is to share your assumptions, show your work and change the story based on useful feedback. When we reject narratives that are counter to our story before we even bother to consider them, our story is getting in the way of our path to better.

Spend enough time inventing possible futures in your head and you won’t have any time to build the future we will all share.

Time to get to work.

Game theory has a lousy name.

When most people think of games, they think of commercial stuff for kids, like Chutes and Ladders or possibly Monopoly.

But a game is simply a system where humans, facing scarcity, make choices. Scarcity leads to choices and to competition.

It turns out that our culture, our commerce and our lives are simply the result of billions of people making billions of choices. Choices that have costs and rewards, and choices that effect other people.

If you want your idea to spread…

If you want your product to sell…

If you want to change a system…

Then beginning by understanding the game theory involved is essential.

Your job is not to “get the word out.” Nor are you likely to be able to get others to know what you know, see what you see and admit that they were wrong.

Instead, the best we can do is create great work that fits into a system where voluntary choices, made by diverse individuals, leads to the change we seek to make.

What’s the game theory of lobbying the city council? The game theory of launching a new jazz record?

It starts by acknowledging that different people have different lenses, different desires, different stories they tell themselves about what they want and how the world works.

The geeks and the nerds and the early adopters have self selected as the people who like to go first. So if you bring them something new, they might choose to be curious.

Then… what do they tell the others? Why would telling other people about your new thing help them win the game they’re playing? What’s in it for them…

And then, those people, the ones that heard about it from the first group, did they take action? How does the change or opportunity or threat you offer interact with the strategy they have about how they will spend their precious time and resources?

And on and on it goes.

That’s a complete reversal of how it used to be.

Colleges used to be measured by how many books they had in the library. Access to courses was restricted. If knowledge was power, controlling access was essential.

They even call it the ‘admissions office.’

Part of the status that comes from higher education is that they controlled who could find the information and who was left behind.

Today, of course, all of the information is there, a click away. Billions of people have a smartphone with access to everything ever recorded and written, but also to a trillion dollar AI system that can offer informed guidance.

So why hesitate? Why do we get stuck or avoid even acknowledging that it’s possible?

Because learning is hard. It creates tension. It takes time. Most of all, it requires a commitment to becoming someone else, a bet we’re making that might not turn out the way we hope.

The system has called our bluff. If you want to learn, learn.

But we pay for it with effort.