Mandy Brown:

Documents and whatnot are all mechanisms for communicating between humans—a communication that is always lossy, because creating a shared understanding between people is, and always will be, one of the hardest things we’ll ever do. Workslop dramatically increases that lossiness, with what we mean to say drifting further and further away from us, mediated through machines that smooth out the tone and blur the intent until we are saying nothing at all.

Absolutely spot on.

Workslop is bullshit work at scale. This will get framed as a morale problem, which is true enough. But I promise you the technocrats pushing the slop machines do not give the slightest of fucks about your morale. This isn’t their problem; it’s yours.

Mandy Brown

Documents and whatnot are all mechanisms for communicating between humans—a communication that is always lossy, because creating a shared understanding between people is, and always will be, one of the hardest things we’ll ever do. Workslop dramatically increases that lossiness, with what we mean to say drifting further and further away from us, mediated through machines that smooth out the tone and blur the intent until we are saying nothing at all.

Just absolutely nails it 🎯

Workslop is bullshit work at scale. This will get framed as a morale problem, which is true enough. But I promise you the technocrats pushing the slop machines do not give the slightest of fucks about your morale. This isn’t their problem; it’s yours.

Mandy Brown:

for most corporate investors, long term means something like next Tuesday

When we tell ourselves “I have to…” the reality is usually always “I choose to…because…”. For example:

“I have to stick to my lane,” vs “I choose to stay silent because I don’t want to risk my promotion”

There’s always a choice.

The “have to” narrative positions us as repositories of instructions made elsewhere, as if we were just programs following the code we’ve been given. It conditions us to accept more and more instructions over time, as we become accustomed to that programming.

It leads to:

what happens when you refuse to acknowledge your own choices is you eventually forget who you are: you become accustomed to having so much decided for you that you forget what it means to decide for yourself. You have a hard time knowing what it is that you want, because it isn’t presented to you as an available option.

Whereas in contrast:

The “choose to” narrative has no illusions about our power and recognizes that we are small players in a bigger, and certainly unjust, world. But we are not machines. And maybe we don’t like the choices available to us, maybe we wish there were others within reach. But once we accept that there are choices to make, we may notice where we have some room to maneuver, some space to play with, some opportunity or avenue or loophole we can exploit.

As you build your craft…you develop ever more ideas about what’s possible in your work. As your skill grows, so too do your ambitions, such that your taste always and forever outstrips your abilities.

Also love this:

The work of creativity... [is] not what you create, but who you become in the act of creation.

Making a personal website is not about what you make, but who you discover while making it personal.

Applicants are applying for jobs with LLM-generated representations of themselves. Recruiters are combing through applications with LLM-assisted tools. They’re passing each other like ships in the night.

the hiring process has become entirely too much and far too inhumane. Treat people like machines, and they will behave like them.

We’re desperately seeking humans with dehumanized tools and processes.

at the end of the day, you’re not trying to fill a job quota; you’re trying to find future colleagues. A dehumanized and dehumanizing hiring process is not going to generate a productive collaboration at the other end.

Love this idea of “making kin” over networking, contributing to your communal environment over seeking quid pro quo.

Jettisoning networking in favor of kinworking means taking a more ecological approach, one oriented towards nurturing the soil, planting seeds, providing water and sunlight—and then accepting that you have no control over what grows. This is as opposed to the strip mining orientation so common to much traditional networking, the expectation of a trade in value, of a return on the investment. The difference is between the act of contributing to the ground on which you and others stand versus negotiating an exchange that leaves the earth barren and dry. Which is not to say that kinworking doesn’t deliver, but rather that what it delivers isn’t capital but life—that connected, abundant, joyful experience of living among people and working, together, for a better world.

Love this change in how we frame of accountability from “the one who gets the blame” to “the one who tells the story of where and why things went wrong”.

our knee-jerk response to the question of “what does it mean to be accountable?” is too often “the person who gets fired when things go wrong.” This is a measure of accountability that equates accountability and punishment: to borrow from Sidney Dekker, it makes accountability something you settle, a debt you have to pay. When you’re accountable for a car accident, you pay the fine; when you’re accountable for not hitting the annual target, you lose your job.

In contrast:

Fortunately, that’s not the only model for accountability we have. Webster’s 1913 defines accountability as being “called on to render an account.” To render an account is to tell a story. In this way, an account becomes something you give—something you observe, come to understand, and then narrate. Being accountable in this model means being the storyteller rather than the fall guy.

But if you’re not quite ready to become VP, you can start with yourself:

So to get started, you can refrain from the demeaning self-talk the next time you do something that, in hindsight, looks like an error. Instead, you can practice asking questions like, what was I thinking and noticing when this happened? How did I respond to what I saw happening? What did I expect? How did I see myself at that moment? The point here isn’t to figure out what went wrong so you can avoid making the same mistake again. The point is to understand how the choices, decisions, and actions made sense at that time.

It all comes back to blogging:

you have a story to tell—a story full of fuckups and hard times and achievements unlocked and enough lessons for several lifetimes. Don’t keep it all to yourself.

when you are in the thick of it...You’ll feel like you’re flailing about and you’ll want to scream or cry or both at the same time. Your boots will stick in the mud and your ropes will fray and you’ll lose your flint on the coldest night. It will be chaos. But it was chaos that birthed the universe. It is from chaos that many great stories begin. You’ll tell yours in time. First, you have to live it.

a goal cuts off avenues for exploration. It welds you to what past-you wanted, effectively disenfranchising present- and future-you. That is, in fact, the point: by committing to a goal, you commit to not wandering off your chosen path. But that means that when things show up along that path—new opportunities or new knowledge, or simply changing conditions—you lack the license to veer off or head in another direction.

That’s me. I don’t go where I planned, because I didn’t plan anywhere, but I do get somewhere.

I like to talk about intentions rather than goals. An intention, as I’m using it here, is a kind of bending of the self towards something, a commitment not to a specific path but to a scope of attention or way of being...Instead of something you might achieve, it becomes something you do; instead of someone you could be, it becomes someone you are.

As a non-goal oriented person, I approve of this message.

You don’t have to take my word for it though. Accept it as a hypothesis, and give it a shot.

I want those words to preface everything I publish.

Talkers need to recognize that not everyone loves to think out loud, and that giving space for writing is part of what it means to make use of the best brains around you. Writers need to remember that writing isn‘t some perfected ideal of thinking and that making space for the messy, chaotic, and improvisational work of talking things out is often exactly what a team needs to create change.

Everything in this piece is spot on to me.

the efficiency of communication isn‘t solely a measure of the time it takes to move information from one head to another; it‘s also the time and energy required to build and sustain collective understanding.

Knowing which [time management] trick you need now—and which one you’ll need next time—comes with experience and the kind of situational awareness that can be cultivated with (wait for iiiiit…) time.

Ha, pun intended!

It turns out, not doing [what they enjoyed] was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do [what they enjoyed], because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back.

I like this idea: by spending time doing what you enjoy, you are sort-of earning more time — kind of like an investment I suppose. In other words, you don’t need to make time for what you enjoy, you need to do what you enjoy and that makes more time.

How does spending time on something make more time? Doing what you need to, what you enjoy, can help give you the energy to do everything else you need to.