Direction
28 Days of Asking: Day 26 & Day 27
First, an acknowledgment and a repair. I set myself up perfectly for this: just two days ago, I wrote about responsibility and making amends, and then yesterday, I failed to post my question. There are no excuses; I simply didn't prioritize it, only realizing the oversight as I lay in bed at 11 p.m. I figured I’d better practice what I preach for Day 27! My apologies.
On to it…
We were building a one-pager today for referral partners. Ping me if you want to see it 😉
That’s how an interesting conversation started. Three people on a Zoom call, talking about referral partners and positioning, and the right language to describe what we do.
Normal work stuff. Productive, even. Then we steered it to the latest news on layoffs.
And the conversation became something else, fast.
My colleague said:
“You can’t just swap out leadership for an algorithm. At the end of the day, you still need people who have the judgment to make the hard calls and the skill to actually steer the AI.”
I pondered the idea for the following 15 minutes. It sounds right, comforting, even until you start looking at the space underneath it.
What about everyone else? What about the people in the middle who did everything “right,” only to find the bridge they were building has been dismantled by a change in the math? Block laid off a significant chunk of its workforce this week (4k), and it wasn’t due to performance. It was a shift in the equation.
The proximity of that conversation to the “growth document” we were building felt uncomfortable. But I’m learning to stay with that kind of discomfort rather than move through it. I’m looking up at the base of a much bigger question about what we are normalizing, what we are accepting, and where we are choosing to remain numb because it’s easier than being present.
I don’t have a clean answer yet. I just have the practice. Staying engaged when the ground shifts, and finding words my boys can actually hold onto when the world feels abstract.
Day 26: Where am I quietly accepting a “change in the math” because of my privilege?
Day 27: What is one honest action I can take today (not someday) to choose presence over the comfort of numbness?
Sometimes awareness is a heavy thing to carry, but it’s also what keeps us real. Thank you for being in this space with me as I try to figure out what it looks like to be truly present in a world that is constantly offering us a way to check out.
