⛸️ Friction

Book of TREE 1.65

ChatGPT will write anything for me in seconds.

Midjourney takes only a few more seconds to create amazing images from a simple text prompt.

Google gives me instant access to the humanity’s knowledge and easy email and great fonts – oh! have you seen their new AI notebook?

I’ve never paid (in money) for any of those things.

Amazon lets me read any book. Right now. It will deliver anything I want tomorrow. And they throw in a bunch of films and shows as part of the deal.

Apple lets me copy something on my computer and paste it on my phone (!!!) plus a hundred other things that make my work easier and more pleasant.

These are hard things.
They require millions of line of code,
hundreds of thousands of people,
hoovering up the world’s creative output (usually without permission),
a vast worldwide energy-sucking infrastructure.

But for you and me, all it takes is a little typing and tapping. These corporate beasts remove friction from our lives by handling and hiding the complexity. That why we keep using them even though we know about the employee abuse, tax avoidance and carbon cost. The removal of friction is incredibly valuable.

How can you use your skills to handle complexity and remove friction from people’s lives?

(Just remember to do it responsibly.)

I was in Gloucester on Sunday and enjoyed some absolutely delightful mangling of the English language (plus a great beer at Gloucester Brewery and a lovely walk along the canal with Christine).

I celebrate stuff like this because these are people who didn’t wait around until they were perfect. They started by focussing on what they do best and doing the best they could with everything else. Do you know what you need to be focussed on? In my job, I’ve got to get the apostrophes right. For the boy and his two men, good haircuts matter far more than punctuation.

Grow slowly
Jeff