December 2, 2025 @ 12:03pm – Burnley, Victoria, Australia
Will AI take my job?
This is a question that has been hanging over many of us this year. Will AI replace me? Will I no longer be needed? What will I do?
Many of us have been thinking about these questions. They make us anxious about the future because now the future looks different.
For some of us, it’s easier not to think about it. We quickly change the topic or fill our heads with distractions. Others might shout and complain and point fingers, hoping that it helps.
Crying, screaming, hiding, shrieking, and cursing are all options available to us. But they don’t really change anything about the situation. In fact, they usually make it worse.
AI, like any other technology like concrete or wireless networks, exists.
Popular self-help authors encourage us to do what’s in our control to make the situation better. “If you’re scared about it, lean into it.”1 Use your agency and “slurp up all those problems and knowledge, and leave nothing for anyone else to do”2 and “push through (your) own excuses… even when (you) didn’t feel like it.”3 Even if there are layoffs or other acts of fate, you will be in a better position.
This is a helpful way to look at problems, but the reality is, of course our jobs could no longer exist.
Here are some more hard “could be truths”:
You didn’t do a good enough job (for this company at this time). True.
What you were getting paid for can now be done by someone with less training, or for less money.
Someone can do what you do but better, faster. TRUE.
It’s hard to look at these directly.
But of course it could be true.
I think it’s hard to look because there is such a slippery slope from “I’m not actually needed” to “I’m not good.” It’s scattered with guilt and shame and beliefs and all sorts of things. They feel connected.
But I didn’t say, “You are a loser,” “You are a failure,” “You should have done something,” “You won’t be happy again” or “It’s all downhill from here.” No judgements.
If you look closely, you’ll see that there is space between. Of course there’s space. It’s possible to separate these things.
Admitting that ‘I’m no longer needed here’ doesn’t take away your agency or say anything “bad” about you.
It’s difficult and painful but we must be able to recognize that it could be, and might be, one day, true.
“The one thing that our unconscious will not tolerate is evasion of responsibility.” – Robert A. Johnson
To-do lists are a simple tool, invented to get stuff done. You write down the item that needs to be completed and then you tick it off when it’s done.
You can do all sorts of things with your list. You can order the items in priority. You can create sub-tasks. You can set due-dates. But all these things and features are working toward the same goal, getting stuff done. I believe there’s been some books written about this.
Some of us rely on to-do lists because they hold us accountable. Without them, a task might land on someone else’s plate, or somewhere in our own nagging conscience before we realize we’re late or forgotten something.
But like any tool, they can be misused. Just like we can buy excellent, well-constructed gym equipment and leave it to collect dust in the garage. We can misuse a to-do list too.
Misusing a to-do list is when we write down something but we don’t do it. It’s good that you’ve written it down, but then the due-date slips by and it’s still sitting there. You’ll get to it later right? Maybe it got less important or something. That’s fine.
You could also remove it, delete it. This is a bit more subtle. Maybe it’s not important anymore. And now, with a bit of helpful forgetting, or reasoning, your list is looking pretty good. You’ve cherry picked items that are pleasing, easy to complete and there’s only a handful of those left to do.
I call this particular move drawer shoving.
What I’m talking about has nothing to do with a to-do list, or some specific app or workflow. I’m talking about this process of acknowledging something and then hiding it or destroying it. Avoidance. Shoving it away into some drawer.
And what makes this tricky to get a handle on is that so much of it happens outside our awareness. The hypnotist Milton Erickson once pointed out that if someone has been skipping check-ups, they’ll actually speed up when walking past a dental clinic. Or if you’re hungry you’ll automatically slow down when passing a restaurant. You can see a similar phenomenon in body language. Some people will instinctively cover or rub their eyes when they don’t want to look at someone or something.
But we shouldn’t look away.
It’s one thing to be caught off guard by something you couldn’t have known about. You did the regular services on your car, but something weird still happened and now it’s busted. That sucks. It happens to all of us. But it’s another thing entirely to know about a problem and shove it into a drawer. You see that the edge needs taping before you paint, you skip it, and a few days later you’re standing there thinking: Why did I do that?
Excuses don’t help either. I’ve used them all before. I can’t be bothered. No one will notice. It’s good enough. I don’t have time. I talk myself out of it. I’m scared. It’s not my job. Surely it’s unimportant.
No matter what, these shortcuts, hacks, and avoided stuff all tends to come back. Chekhov’s gun is real. Not immediately, not all at once and not always in the ways I expect.
When my junk drawer was getting emptied out on me at work, I’d blame co-workers as overly detail oriented. Or I’d think certain people were out to get me, to specifically point out my flaws and make me look bad. But if I was honest with myself, I already knew what they were going to point out, because I was the one who had consciously avoided it first!
It comes back. It catches my attention somehow and reminds me for the millionth time, that I might be able to wiggle, obfuscate or lie my way out of some things, but it’s never possible to lie to myself.
And even if it doesn’t come back. Even if you get away with it. Why not just assume that it will. Live like it will. Assume that it will bite you. Not in a paranoid, ‘prepper’ frame of mind, just in the spirit of intellectual honesty and the fact that you are always stuck with you.
Assume anything that you know about, has at least the chance to be known by others. And when that inevitably happens, what’s going to be your excuse then?
I first wrote something about to-do lists in March 2014
I’ve tried lots of things to make my presentations better. I’ve read countless books and articles about narrative, storytelling and communication. I’ve learned about frameworks like The Pyramid Principle and I’ve attended Dale Carnegie courses to improve my public speaking. I’ve even spent hours poring over famous keynote speeches frame by frame, trying to figure out what made them great.
But nothing really helped. Even when I thought I got things right, my presentations still weren’t explaining, informing or persuading anyone.
More recently I’ve come to realize the problem wasn’t the advice, feedback, frameworks or PowerPoint templates. It was how I was using them.
For example, I’ve often received feedback that I speak too fast. I need to speak slowly. Good advice. But I’d misunderstand it. I’d speak slowly because I thought that’s what would sound good, or would make me look good or simply because that’s what other good speakers did.
I’d also try out things that I saw in other presentations that looked good. I’d create a slide with only one sentence on it. It looked bold and dramatic. But there was no thinking or intent. I did it because I’d seen others do it. With every decision I made like this, I’d wind up with a series of slides that didn’t really make sense together.
I was putting together presentations like cooking without ever stopping to taste or question a particular method or ingredient. I’d remind myself to add salt without learning or understanding that one adds it to food to balance and bring out the flavor.
Rather than figuring out the perfect font size, I’d have been better off asking myself what my audience were actually interested in, or why my slide-deck was even needed in the first place. Even though just thinking about your audience can increase anxiety, they are the reason for your presentation and it helps to bring them into sharper focus.
This focus helps you when you are deciding on both the content and style. It’s not to say that craft and polish don’t matter. They do. But before I start nudging around rectangles, I have to keep reminding myself to ask ‘why?’. Am I making myself more clear? Does this benefit my audience? And 99% of the time it doesn’t.
When we edit, we consciously shape what others will hear, see and hopefully understand. Here’s actor/director Jesse Eisenberg answering a question about how he edited his film A Real Pain.
I feel the tone is created by the characters, and Kieran’s character is this relentless character. He’s driving the whole movie, and he’s a guy who doesn’t give you a break. I just wanted that feeling to be part of the movie. So when we were cutting the movie, it felt like: What are the characters doing in this scene? How are they driving the movie? It was 99% driven by Kieran, except one scene where Kieran’s not in — at the dinner table in the restaurant — where the camera suddenly slows down, and now the scene’s about David. But for the most part, it’s just: how are the characters driving this?
I recognize the irony in me sharing advice about presentations. I’m living proof that reading stuff like this won’t help. More information won’t make you question, reflect and recognize what’s getting in the way of clear communication.
For me, my concern over looking good excluded more important inputs like how the audience was feeling and what they were interested in. I’d forgotten the reason why I was presenting what I was presenting.
Until we can answer those sorts of questions, or admit that we aren’t asking them and just trying to look good, we will struggle to bridge the gap between what we say and what people actually hear.
September 4, 2025 @ 11:47am – Melbourne, Australia
“A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” — David Foster Wallace
Whether you are making shoes, advertisements about shoes or shoe-making software, it’s likely the work is getting done in a group or a team.
Since 2020, this way of working has become especially important. Engineers and designers can no longer reliably chat at a desk or gather around a whiteboard. Those conversations have migrated online to collaborative software, like Miro and Figma.
If you’re used to working alone, it can be overwhelming to see all this work in progress. Miro boards filled with sticky notes, spaghetti diagrams, screenshots and other design detritus. What used to be private thinking is now facilitated in real-time workshops, with dozens of stakeholders calling in, watching, listening and co-designing together.
I resisted this type of collaboration for a long time.
I was critical of workshops and dismissed them as “UX theatre”. I thought they were inefficient and believed there was better ways to use my time. I didn’t think stakeholder management was my job. I was wary of politics, group think and other barriers to creativity. And when I had no other choice, I turned my criticism inward, lamenting my own facilitation skills or introversion. I thought, maybe I’d like collaboration if I was actually good at it.
There might have been some truth to these concerns. But what if it was less about collaboration being a mess, and more about my own need to be perfect?
Anti-teamwork
A perfectionist is usually defined as someone who has set high standards for themselves or others. At their core, they need to look good and be right. And at first glance, a perfectionist in the team will look like and sound like a normal person. They’ll bring their skills, help out and try to work together. But because of this strong, often unconscious need, they tend to prevent, rather than encourage healthy collaboration.
Firstly, a perfectionist cares more about how they look, rather than the shared goal of the team. They’ll often lose sight of the overall goal, and instead tend to focus on little things that don’t really make much difference.
The perfectionist is usually driven by a harsh ‘inner critic’ that nags and nitpicks them hundreds of times before they critique or blame another person. But when they do, harsh criticism will make their team feel judged, shamed and less likely to share ideas. Hypocritically, a perfectionist can’t bear to be criticized.
A perfectionist thinks they are right. This rigid conviction comes at the cost of creativity, listening and general respect for others. If you believe you are right about something, why listen to someone else? Conviction taken to extremes is behind every totalitarian regime and fundamentalist religion. Due to their predictable righteousness, a perfectionist will struggle to sit with uncertainty, ambiguity without an “irritable reaching for facts and reason.”1
A perfectionist can’t handle being ordinary. They think in black and white terms; their output is trash that needs to be exceptional. They live in a fantasy world and need to return to reality, where the rest of their team is waiting. Marie-Louise Von Franz connects this attitude with a “sudden-fall” dream, which she says “generally coincide with outer, deep disappointment when one is suddenly faced with naked reality as it is.”2
Lastly, a perfectionist doesn’t know how to fail. If something doesn’t turn out how they planned, they blame or find ways to avoid responsibility. Without owning (and learning) from these mistakes, they have failed to fail, or what I’m coining inauthentic failing. They’d be better off to “get back up… to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.”3
It’s easy to wave off perfectionist tendencies if you’ve got them. I’d filed most of mine under positive sounding interview answers like attention to detail, working too hard or caring a bit too much.
Collaboration can be chaotic. For a perfectionist, this collaborative world can feel like hell and they naturally want to defend against it viciously. That’s where all the ranting, blaming and burning the midnight oil comes from.
But rather than blame brainstorming or lame ice-breakers, I would have been better off noticing my own perfectionism – and how it makes collaboration nearly impossible.
To truly collaborate, and to actually get things done, one must accept the messy Miro board, the antithesis of perfection, the ordinary, imperfect nature of life itself.
Last August I posted a note to Substack that outlined my criteria for publishing writing. It should be:
Interesting (to me)
Communicated as clearly as I can
Useful to the reader
I mostly still agree with these but wanted to include my general ethical attitude/approach toward my writing. Here it is, in no particular order.
I think what I’m writing about is valuable in some way. I wouldn’t share it otherwise.
My intent therefore is to share that with the reader. That’s basically it. I don’t want to inflame emotions, get you to buy something, troll or make you feel bad.
I’m not writing for a specific audience.
Writing is both a means and an end for me.
I only write what I’d also be comfortable saying, or defending if need be, in person.
I’ll try to write as clearly as I can. I might use certain words or techniques but my intent is never to manipulate. This is obviously a balancing act, but I’d rather someone be bored and leave than to be tricked.
I won’t lie or make things up.
I’m mostly interested in things that you can point to or that seem intuitively right. I don’t make metaphysical claims.
I want to write as truthfully as I can, but don’t expect exactitudes. That’s not the point of my writing. I might say something like: “we’d be better off drinking water instead of Fanta or whiskey.” One could pick apart that sentence endlessly, but you get what I’m trying to say. This is why I use a lot of words like ‘might’ or ‘probably’. I don’t ever want something I write to be misconstrued or misunderstood as an absolute claim.
I have opinions but I won’t ever try to force them on you. I try not to write moralistically or judgmentally. For example, although I don’t think it’s a good idea to lie, I will never say that people who lie are evil or that you should never lie. If you want to read what I write, great! If you don’t, great!
I write about topics I feel confident enough to explore and perhaps offer something valuable to the reader. That said, writing about something doesn’t ever mean I know what I’m talking about.
Aside from minor tweaks, I don’t dramatically rewrite articles once they’ve been published. If I do seriously change my mind, I might remove the post.
I occasionally use LLMs for writing support.
I’m often thinking or relating to real people, places and things that happen in my life, but in almost all cases I won’t use names or details of real people.
I’ll occasionally quote books or articles, and if I do I’ll make a footnote. But I’m not a good fact-checker. For example, if I quote Socrates or a Wikipedia article, I’m not doing deep research to make sure it’s correct. I go by intuition, and if I feel unsure about the source, I won’t quote it.
Buddha Bike 