The 365 Commitment

A fascinating book to read, if you can find a copy of it, was a book created by Studs Terkel in 1974 called 'Working.' This book was developed through several questions from this Chicago radio host, who moonlighted as an oral historian. He interviewed over 100 people in a wide variety of occupations and just let them speak for themselves. He did not ask them the typical types of things, like, "What do you do for a living?" He instead asked them, "What does working here do for you?"

What Terkel discovered was that people are doing a lot more than exchanging time for money in these settings. They are actually searching, searching for things like meaning, dignity, recognition, autonomy, usefulness, and connection. When those things are deprived, even well-paid work can become absolutely miserable.

I have first-hand experience here. I voluntarily walked away from a high-paying job simply because the work had become miserable and I no longer felt that what I was doing mattered. As a company, we just kept repeating the same failed experiments over and over again, and the improvements and growth that we had accomplished kept getting unraveled, so you started seeing anything that you built just fall to pieces around you.

Terkel discovered that people really want to establish evidence that they actually existed. Take that away, and they will just not talk highly about their jobs. A top-level executive for a big company would talk far less enthusiastically than a stonemason or a carpenter, or even a teacher. Why? Well, it was simple. The stonemason who builds a wall can point to that wall for decades, saying that he had built that. He had contributed to the world, and that was a monument to his work. Same thing with a carpenter who works on a house or a teacher who helps develop a young mind. They can point to something that lasts.

Terkel did not take this on as an economic problem; he approached it as a human problem. There is absolutely a psychological relationship with our work. To boil it all down to something that can be replaced by machines seems like we are missing the point of work entirely. Interestingly, Terkel's work is arguably becoming relevant again because of AI and automation. We are once again asking a very Terkel-like question:

If technology can perform more and more of the tasks we call "work," what part of work were humans actually valuing in the first place?

I think that is the question of the day, not "What are we going to do when AI takes over everything?" Wrong question. The right question is, how are we going to build anything that matters?

An interesting exercise to go through next time that you are feeling out of sorts is to ask yourself, "What exactly am I feeling?" Surprisingly, many of us are not capable of making any distinction between feeling ashamed versus feeling anxious. We simply lack the vocabulary; we just simply call it "not feeling good." I am not sure why this is the case; in raising three children, I noticed when they were growing up, they would sometimes just not be in a good mood. So we would quiz them and slowly go through the range of emotions until we identified the culprit. My wife has been particularly good at that, but not me. I started to recognize that, growing up, I could not really identify which emotion belonged to which category.

I recently saw an article online referencing some research by Katie Hoemann and Lisa Barrett called "The Simple Trick that Can Help You Understand Your Emotions." One of their examples caught my attention. I have always suffered from some color blindness. Distinguishing between certain shades of red is almost impossible for me. It was once explained to me that I was probably missing or had a reduced number of red receptor rods that receive light at the back of my retinas. Anyway, the researchers compared the lack of ability to identify emotion to that of color vision.

One person may only see red (like me), and other people will see crimson, scarlet, burgundy, pink, etc. The label is not the point; what is identified here is that with a working definition of the color spectrum, you can identify what you are seeing. That same thing happens with emotions. If you clearly identify your emotion as guilt instead of just bad, then you can actually do something positive about it. This is identity and resilience work at the granular level. Discomfort you can name is discomfort you can act on, which has long been my observation that awareness must precede change.

The important point that I think the researchers were making is that the ability to name a particular feeling is a skill. This emotional granularity can be learned, practiced, and improved over time. This means you actually can get better at facing any negative emotions that you experience in your life.

This journey of understanding and shaping our emotional landscape is not about eradicating discomfort, but about cultivating a more nuanced relationship with it. It's an invitation to explore the rich tapestry of our inner world, recognizing that each feeling, once acknowledged and understood, offers a unique opportunity for growth and self-direction. By embracing this ongoing process, we discover a profound capacity to navigate life's currents with greater intention and a deeper sense of personal agency.

This discussion is a nod to the work by Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman.

In their 1993 paper, Duration Neglect in Retrospective Evaluations of Affective Episodes, Fredrickson and Kahneman contrasted two ways the mind might evaluate an experience.

One possibility is that memory works something like a movie: we mentally integrate the experience over time. If an unpleasant experience lasts twice as long, it should generally be remembered as worse because there was more total suffering.

Their alternative was essentially a snapshot model. Memory preserves selected moments rather than integrating every second equally. Some moments receive much more weight than others.

Essentially, the point of this research was to figure out why our memory of events is not always accurate. Some people will see the same experience as good and others will see it as bad. Why is this? I have had personal experience with this. Years ago, I took a group of young people on a backpacking expedition in Wyoming. When we were done, they were making exclamations like, "This was the worst experience of my life," and "I will never, never ever do this again." Yet two years later, they were enthusiastic about their next crazy adventure. They were saying things like, "I love backpacking; it is so awesome; I cannot wait to go again," and "the last trip we went on was epic."

They seemed to forget the pain and anguish. They forgot all the troubles, the challenges, and the problems. They remembered the moment of triumph; they remembered the time we got to the top of the mountain, and they remembered the finish. The happy ending where we all got into our cars and headed toward a nice restaurant and a hotel with running water.

Speaking of water, this was one of the experiments that the researchers did. They had people hold their hand under cold water, cold enough to where it was uncomfortable. They held their hand there for a minute. They did two things. In one group, they just kept the water the same temperature; in the other group, they added 15 seconds at the end where the water temperature was raised slightly. This caused a feeling of relief at the end. Consequently, the people who participated in that experiment chose to prefer the experiment with the slight warmth at the end rather than the shorter, colder version.

Which goes to prove that humans like happy endings. However, they also like peak moments of triumph equally as well. In essence:

A better ending changed the memory of the entire experience enough that people voluntarily chose more total pain.

And so I took the kids on an even tougher trip this time. A brutal hike through some of the most rugged country imaginable. It was brutal; one of them even got a free ride in an emergency helicopter. However, they ended big. They got out of the wilderness by fording rivers, and we ended up eating a great meal at a downtown restaurant. Although they were all complaining and muttering at the end, my bet is that, in a few years from now, they will remember this as one of the greatest experiences of their lives.

The interesting concept to capture here is that experienced life and remembered life are not identical. If you are intentionally designing an experience, whether a vacation, a customer relationship, a course, a meeting, a challenge, or even a year-long commitment, you should think not only about making the overall experience good, but about deliberately creating memorable peaks and meaningful endings.

A few years ago, I set a goal to achieve an ultra marathon before my 50th birthday. My goal was to run a 100-miler, but I did not quite hit that objective. Instead, I went for the "50 before 50" target. I would run a 50-mile marathon before my 50th birthday. I was successful, and one of the techniques that I used during the run was to mentally focus on areas in my body where I felt pain. I would essentially cycle through my body, starting at my feet and working up toward my head, asking the question, "Am I feeling pain here?" If the answer was yes, I would focus on it. Why was it painful? How bad was it? Could I manage it? I would focus on it until I felt that I could tolerate the pain in that area and then move on to the next.

The technique proved to be surprisingly effective. I was able to push through knee pain, ankle pain, calf and quad tenderness, and even a small rock in my shoe that was causing me no small amount of distress. I had read many stories of runners who had willed through pain and had learned to focus their minds on resolving issues as if they could somehow control the internal workings of their bodies to repair areas that were in trouble. This all felt a bit far-fetched to me, but I have met some meditation practitioners who swore that they could control things like excessive inflammation, swelling, and joint pain by using concentration.

When you are running for 10 hours straight, you will do just about anything to get through it. So, I started trying this method to aid me in my journey. It worked, and I have always kept an eye open for research or people who have experience with this phenomenon. Yesterday, I came across a new study released: Mizrachi et al., "Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans," Nature Human Behaviour (2026). This study seems to indicate that turning toward a physical discomfort, rather than distracting yourself from it, actually regulates your body's inflammatory response. The concept is that leaning in is not just a mindset; it shows up in your biology.

This is fascinating and direct proof that there may be some truth to this idea that I learned while running long distances. Across three experiments in healthy volunteers, researchers gave people an identical immune challenge and then had them either attend to the sensations at the inflammation site or distract away from it. Attending to the body measurably changed both the size and the time-course of the inflammatory response, an effect present in roughly 90 percent of participants across two independent groups.

This would indicate that it is better to focus on the problem area than to ignore it. So, I suppose this means Goggins' concept of "Embrace the Suck" has some scientific merit behind it! If this study is accurate, then that means that potentially discomfort met with attention rather than avoidance produces a different, more regulated response inside the body itself. Now, I see the limits of the study. I am not sure that really draws a sweeping conclusion, but it is interesting. I have also seen this happen in the course of my running "through the pain."

So, what can I conclude from this? It seems that focused mental energy on the trouble spots in your body and perhaps your life is a worthy practice. So, apparently, we should lean into our pain.

I have three children, two of whom are now adults. When we started having kids, we made a conscious decision not to let them have unfettered access to the Internet and, therefore, social media by handing them phones to keep with them at all times. We let them have old-school devices, but not mini-computers they could carry around with them everywhere they went.

This was not a popular decision. My children were often ridiculed for their retro 1990's technology, but we held fast. Today, it has gotten much better, as we can buy purpose-built devices that eliminate or completely prevent social media on smartphones. So you can still have the useful things like navigation, camera, and music, but not the soul-sucking, brain-leaching clickbait apps.

I have been selling technology to large corporations for most of my life, and I distinctly remember being in a meeting at one of the large social platforms when I found out that the chief executive there also did not let his children have access to their app. I thought, that is interesting. Even they know how destructive this can be to the soul of our younger people. Now people have laughed at me for saying this, mostly pointing out that "everyone is doing it."

However, the research is starting to pour in. Psychologists and behavioral scientists have been conducting multi-year longitudinal studies, and the phenomena of likes and swipes have existed long enough to begin generating real data demonstrating what many of us have suspected. This is not good. It does have a negative impact on people. It can have a similar effect to strong narcotics in influencing people's behavior and motivation. In the next several years, more and more of these studies will start to release their findings. I will get some t-shirts that say, "I told you so."

Anyway, one study caught my attention this morning. You can find that study here. This group in Germany was not focused on social media but rather on frequent, habitual hair pulling, which is commonly described as a nervous tic caused by stress. This may still be true; the study did not disprove that concept, but it did indicate that boredom was the strongest predictor of a hair-pulling episode. This habit, which the participants do not want to do and are trying to avoid, is mostly caused by periods of boredom.

I find this fascinating because the number-one excuse I hear people give when they are in a long period of doomscrolling is that they are "trying to relieve stress." They blame stress for their need to decompress by watching endless streams of cat videos on TikTok, or by watching people record popular musical tracks over their mundane lives on short-form video. It is our way of 'relieving stress.' That is the excuse.

I have often questioned this excuse. I also fall victim to bouts of senseless doomscrolling, and when I start to feel bad about it, I use that as an excuse. However, that did not ring true to me as I said it, which is why this study caught my eye. The real reason is potentially boredom. We are falling back on this habit, a habit we know is destructive, not because we are dealing with stress, but because we have nothing better to do. We could sleep. We could exercise. We could do a project around the house. We could call loved ones, or perhaps talk to loved ones, but instead we glue ourselves to our social platform of choice.

It is really hard to admit to ourselves that we find the lives we live boring. What we worked so hard to obtain is not fulfilling enough, and now, after all is said and done, we sit on the couch endlessly triggering tiny dopamine hits. So we avoid the real issue and claim stress as our excuse. Perhaps we should ask ourselves: why am I feeling bored right now? What is missing? What could I do to get myself engaged back with my life? Sorry, I am not sure I have the answer here. I just found this research study compelling because I've caught myself using this fake-stress excuse more than a few times.

I woke up this morning with the walking blues. A feeling that can only be resolved by walking around. You wake up, feel around for your shoes, and just start walking. You let all the things that have been tumbling around in your head move around with you for a while.

When I finished my walk, I came home and played some blues music. I sat there feeling melancholy but, at the same time, rejuvenated. What struck me was that the conflict inside me had not really been resolved. The tension was still there. Nothing had been fixed. Yet somehow it had been clarified, and because it had been clarified, I felt better.

That made me wonder: what makes the blues, the blues?

I suppose the technical definition is some combination of harmony, phrasing, rhythm, repetition, and emotional tension that makes something sound like the blues.

That definition does not work for me at all.

At a musical level, there are several recognizable elements. There is the common repeating structure known as the 12-bar blues, usually built around three chords. There are also certain notes associated with the blues—the flattened third, fifth, and seventh—but blues musicians rarely treat those notes as fixed points. A singer or guitarist bends into them, out of them, and sometimes somewhere in between.

The notes seem to live between major and minor.

That is part of what makes the blues instantly recognizable. There is uncertainty built right into the melody. So although many blues songs operate within a familiar and highly structured musical pattern, the melody itself can feel wonderfully ambiguous.

So is that the blues?

Structured ambiguity?

Not quite.

A good blues song is more than its structure. It often has a conversational quality, and somewhere inside it there is usually a story being told. A phrase is stated, repeated, and then answered or concluded.

I once heard a historian lecturing on the musical history of Louisiana describe the tradition of call and response. A voice calls and another voice answers. A singer delivers a line and the guitar responds. One instrument speaks and another comments. You can hear this pattern throughout blues music.

Say something.

Say it again.

Then tell us what it means.

The first statement gives us the information. The repetition gives us time to feel it. The response moves the thought somewhere else.

So is that the blues?

A deep emotional connection to a phrase that is repeated and then answered?

Perhaps.

Yet that does not quite capture it either, because rhythm matters.

Blues lives in the pocket somewhere between the repeating musical structure and the rhythm underneath it. Shuffle, swing, slight delay, deliberate deviation—all of it resting in the pauses.

Someone could play every correct note and every correct chord in perfect synchronization and still not sound anything like the blues.

There has to be something else mixed in.

The bend.

The riff.

The hesitation.

The improvisation.

The space between the notes.

The feeling.

But even that does not quite explain it.

Because when the singer and the guitar player make their call, and then repeat the call, they do not always want or need an answer.

The blues is not about solving the problem.

It is about giving the tension somewhere to live.

That may be the most important thing about it. The music itself is always living in opposition. Major against minor. Sadness against humor. Hardship against resilience. Precision against chaos. Structure against improvisation.

The blues is contradiction.

Ambiguity and contradiction are its language.

Perhaps that is why blues became such a powerful way of representing lived experience. Heartbreak, poverty, love, injustice, desire, humor, loneliness, disappointment, and everyday trouble all found a medium for expression through the music.

These things did not have to be resolved before they could be expressed.

A person could simply say:

This happened to me.

Then say it again.

Then tell us what it felt like.

And something personal became communal.

Someone else's heartbreak could suddenly remind you of your own. Someone else's struggle could sound familiar. Someone else's longing could become a melody you understood even if their life looked nothing like yours.

The blues took private trouble and gave it a public language.

Maybe that is as good a definition as any:

The blues is the sound of tension being expressed rather than eliminated.

And maybe that is why the walk this morning helped.

I did not solve anything while I was walking. I did not come home with answers to everything that had been tumbling around in my head. I simply gave those thoughts somewhere to move.

The tension was still there when I returned.

But it was clearer.

And somehow I felt better.

Perhaps the blues does the same thing.

It does not necessarily resolve what troubles us. It gives the trouble rhythm. It gives it language. It gives it somewhere to go.

I still do not know exactly what makes the blues, the blues. I am not sure it can be reduced to twelve bars, three chords, bent notes, rhythm, or call and response.

I only know how it feels.

And the music seems to capture that feeling better than almost anything else.

If you have never really experienced the blues, I carefully picked three songs for you to listen to. I chose them for different reasons, but each carries something that helps explain what I am trying to describe.

I recommend shutting everything else down and finding a quiet place where you can really listen.

Do not just play them in the background.

Listen to the repetition.

Listen to the pauses.

Listen to the guitar answering the singer.

Listen to the notes that seem to bend between major and minor.

Listen to the tension that never completely disappears.

You will recognize the patterns. You will understand the stories. And you may begin to hear how much of the music we listen to today still carries pieces of this same old story, retold again and again.

Together, these three songs show the blues changing across generations while its underlying language remains remarkably recognizable.

Robert Johnson — “Sweet Home Chicago”

Muddy Waters — “Got My Mojo Working”

B.B. King — “The Thrill Is Gone”

My wife and her friends are having a summit today. To help one of their dear friends figure out a way to improve her prospects of finding a partner to date and hopefully get married to. I was casually listening in on the conversation every once in a while when I went into steal snacks from the spread my wife put out for everyone. Although there were many opinions being expressed, the one universal theme that got my attention was this:

If you want to meet someone who could fundamentally change your life, you may first have to change the environments in which you live your life.

Why? Because dating is partly a relationship problem, but before a relationship exists, it is a probability problem. What occurred to me is that this same problem exists when attempting to build any new relationship. New investors, new friends, new customers, and new and inspiring people who could change your life.

If you go to work, interact with the same professional circle, go home, spend time with the same friends, and stay glued to your phone, interacting with superficial connections on social media all the time, then you are largely drawing from the same social universe over and over again. Nothing is necessarily wrong with that universe. It just has a limited supply of new people.

Changing the environment changes several things simultaneously.

First, it changes who is available to meet. Every environment has its own population. A conference attracts a different group of people than your office. A volunteer organization exposes you to people you would probably never encounter at your neighborhood restaurant. A running club, church group, professional association, class, chess club, or community event each creates a different pool of potential relationships. When you intentionally enter new environments, you are not simply hoping to meet someone new. You are mathematically increasing the number and variety of people who can enter your life.

Second, repeated exposure matters. Most meaningful relationships do not begin with some spectacular first encounter. They develop through familiarity. You see someone once. Then again. Eventually you have a conversation. Later you discover a shared interest. Trust begins to form almost invisibly through a series of small interactions. This is why environments that you participate in consistently can be so powerful. The goal is not simply to go somewhere new once. It is to become part of new places where the same people have an opportunity to see you, know you, and eventually trust you.

Third, the environment creates many new weak ties. Weak ties are the people we know casually—the person from the running club, someone we met at a conference, a friend of a friend, the parent we see at an event, or the person we occasionally talk with at a coffee shop. These relationships may seem insignificant, but they dramatically expand our social universe. Every new person potentially connects us to dozens or hundreds of people we do not yet know. Your next customer may not be the person you meet at the event. It may be someone they introduce you to. Your next investor may be two introductions away. Your future spouse may be the friend of someone you barely know today. Weak ties create bridges into entirely new networks.

And that may be the larger lesson hidden inside my wife's summit.

Sometimes we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to improve the outcome while leaving the environment that produces it completely unchanged. We work harder at networking with the same people. We scroll through more profiles. We send more messages. We hope that somehow something different will emerge from essentially the same inputs. But occasionally the most powerful move is much simpler.

Change the inputs.

Go somewhere you normally wouldn't go. Join something. Volunteer. Take a class. Attend the conference. Accept the invitation. Sit at a different table. Talk to someone you don't already know. Become a regular somewhere new. You cannot control whether the next person you meet becomes a spouse, a friend, an investor, a mentor, or a customer. But you can dramatically influence the likelihood of meeting someone new.

And sometimes changing your life begins with something as simple as changing where you spend it.

I actually love opera. I like the music, the drama, the history, and the sheer theatrical excess of it. I like that a story can take three hours to tell and that nobody seems particularly concerned about efficiency. Yet for some reason, saying “I love opera” can feel slightly more revealing than saying I like a particular restaurant or football team.

That feeling interests me because opera itself is not the issue. The issue is what we imagine other people might conclude from the information. Someone might hear “opera” and think pretentious, old-fashioned, intellectual, or wealthy. The label may be completely inaccurate, but once we know that labels exist, we begin anticipating them.

We do this with much more consequential parts of our lives as well. Someone may hesitate to mention a religious affiliation because they know others may immediately assume a long list of beliefs. Someone who has been diagnosed with a mental health disorder may worry that people will begin interpreting ordinary behavior through that diagnosis. Even harmless interests, from professional wrestling to poetry, can be quietly omitted when they do not seem to fit the image we think others have of us.

Over time, this can turn into a subtle form of self-editing. We become selective about which pieces of ourselves we reveal, not because those things are private, but because we are trying to manage how other people categorize us.

There is an important difference between privacy and concealment. Privacy is the decision that some things simply do not need to be shared. Concealment is different because it is driven by the fear that knowing something about us might change how others see us. One is a boundary; the other can become a burden.

Psychologists have long studied self-disclosure because revealing personal information is one of the ways relationships deepen and people develop a more coherent sense of themselves. That does not mean everyone should announce every belief, diagnosis, hobby, or preference. It does suggest that constantly hiding ordinary parts of ourselves because of anticipated judgment has a cost.

Perhaps a useful question is not, “Should everyone know this about me?” but, “Why am I afraid of them knowing?”

Sometimes there will be a perfectly good reason to keep something private. Other times the answer may simply be that we have spent years trying to avoid a label.

That is why I have come to like the simple statement: I actually love opera.

It is not really about opera. It is a small reminder that other people are free to form whatever conclusions they want about us, but we do not have to organize our lives around preventing them.

There is a certain freedom in becoming a little less concerned with being easily categorized and a little more comfortable allowing people to discover that we are more complicated than the labels they might give us.

So yes, I actually love opera.

I am beginning to think there are probably a few more things worth saying out loud.

We are rapidly heading into a world where it is getting easier and cheaper to automate things. I will provide an example. One day I got a notice from Google that my entire investment in their Nest architecture was going away. They made a decision to get out of this business after they bought it and started deprioritizing this whole Google Home initiative. Now, I know they are pretending to still do all of that, but seriously, it is really falling behind, and their abandonment of Nest really left a lot of us consumers hanging out to dry.

Well, of course, ADT was willing to come to the rescue. They could support these devices and all that, for only a small subscription fee. Well, come to find out, the subscription was not that small, and the device support limited, and the transferability really painful. So, in a fit of rage, I decided to build my own system. That was stupid.

I bought everything: locks, motion detectors, alarm stuff, keypads, door and window contacts, and a bunch of other items. I dove into Zigbee, Thread, and a hundred other protocols that I had never heard of. I started to try to get it all to work, running into one problem after the next. After I got it to work, I then had to constantly maintain and fix things that broke. I tried to make some home automation routines work, but other than my automatic Christmas light thing, I never got around to anything else. Instead, I just go in there and tweak things now and then. Most of my work is the maintenance of all the various components and all the compatibility issues.

Then, I fell off and ignored it. I had a Home Assistant implementation that worked, but would fall into disrepair, and I got busy, and so I never returned to it. I would just deal with it as it came up, and I dismissed any further automation due to the cost. Not necessarily the cost in money and time to set it up, but the economic life of the automation was just not worth it to me.

Two years later, I can now use AI to systematically help me resolve all of this. The price of automation dropped considerably, and the ability for me to build automations is significantly improved, and that makes the question of the automation needing renewal less of a burden.

We always think of automation as a traditional calculation:

Automation Payback = Upfront Automation Cost ÷ Monthly Manual Cost Avoided

However, as my example demonstrates, this is not why we elect to avoid the cost of an automation. The real reason is the missing concept of economic life. The question is...

Not:

“How much money will this automation save?”

But:

“How much money is this automation likely to save before something changes enough to make it obsolete?”

Staying power is the real factor here. AI has significantly dropped not only the cost of automation, but also the cost of renewing things when the automation has exceeded its staying power.

This is the idea behind “The Price Tag of Automation.” The counterintuitive argument would be:

We tend to compare the cost of automation against the cost of today's manual labor. But the real comparison is between the accumulating cost of manual work and the depreciating value of automation.

One goes up with time. The other often goes down with time.

The investment decision sits at the intersection. And that leads to a very useful rule:

Don't just calculate an automation's payback period. Calculate whether its expected useful life comfortably exceeds its payback period.

To conclude my example, last night I was able to add some new lights, add them to Home Assistant, and then configure a routine that executed on motion, all in about 5 minutes. Then, I replaced a few components with new, upgraded ones, and the resetting of those three devices took less than 1 minute each. So, I am now much more likely to deploy future automations because the price tag for doing so significantly dropped.

In my life experience, speed usually wins. There seems to be two general approaches in life, whether it be business, technology, or even sporting events. You can be careful and steady or you can be fast and more reckless. This is note a fast beats slow observation, but I can certainly say with absolutely certainty that speed usually wins. The question is why?

The system that can act, receive feedback, correct errors, and act again faster tends to outperform the system that tries to avoid errors in the first place.

I think there are several reasons. One of which concerns the speed of the feedback loop for errors. John Boyd, a military strategist, created his own feedback loop mechanism called Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, and then Observe Again (OODA). I learned about this in a leadership training series at West Point a few years ago. The key point he made was less about the loop itself and more about how quickly an organization learns to do it. Boyd argued that competitive advantage comes from cycling through this loop faster than an opponent. It isn't necessarily the side with the best original decision that wins. It's the side that can Decide → Act → Learn → Adjust faster.

This pattern repeats everywhere and whenever you have a loop. In my world (Building AI Systems), the concept is Train → Evaluate → Adjust → Train. Same concept, the structure is the same, and the outcome is predictable. The faster you can do this, the more likely you are to get better results.

There is a well-known speed–accuracy tradeoff: moving faster generally increases the number of mistakes. The slower competitor initially looks superior because they make fewer errors. But this becomes misleading when errors are recoverable. When I was young, I was in college studying contention algorithms for communication systems. Essentially, how do machines negotiate for a shared medium? Well, there were many methods, but ultimately Ethernet won because, even though it made more mistakes, it was faster and other protocols could easily recover from them. Thus, the marriage of TCP/IP and Ethernet became the standard for modern business networks. Interesting that only a few decades ago, computer scientists thought the opposite.

Having said all of this, the single contributing and crowning factor in speed's favor is that of compunded learning. Speed creates more learning cycles per unit of time. Suppose two organizations start at roughly the same level.

Company A improves 10% every year.

Company B improves only 3% each iteration but runs an iteration every month.

The individual improvement might be smaller and messier, but the repeated learning begins to compound.

Iteration speed overwhelms initial precision.

So, while the allure of the perfectly crafted, meticulously planned approach is strong, there's a compelling argument for embracing the iterative, slightly imperfect, but undeniably swift path. It's not about recklessness, but about recognizing that in many endeavors, the ability to move, learn, and adapt quickly often creates a more robust and ultimately more successful outcome. Perhaps the real art lies in discerning when to lean into that speed, trusting that the compounding effect of rapid learning will, in time, refine the journey.