Silicon and Soul: Be the Most Human Person in the Room
As I close in on the 300th edition of this thought letter (this is #296) I am introducing two new initiatives:
Guest posts: An occasional guest post by someone who I know well who shared a thought or idea that I wish I had come up with and who is willing to write about it on this platform. Today’s guest post is by a long time friend David Armano who I first came to know when he was a senior executive at Edelman. David is a true pioneer including in digital and social media. Recently, David has been writing and thinking a lot about how to thrive as a human in the Age of AI.
One single thing: Time is the only thing we have. Today we are overwhelmed with content. I never take for granted the 32,000 plus readers of this Substack who take 3 to 5 minutes of their time every week to read my writing. Starting today at the end of every post I will suggest and link to one single thing that I came across the previous week which I believe might leave the reader or viewer changed.
Today I feature a seven minute twenty second video called Retirement Plan which might just change the way you live your life.
And now here is David Armano:
Silicon and Soul: Being the Most Human Person in the Room
“Once upon a time, I was considered one of the smartest people in the room. At least in some rooms, some of the time. This is no longer my goal. But I know I am in good company. One of my mentors, Neil Clemmons, who worked for companies like Apple before we crossed paths professionally, was also considered one of the smartest people in the room. In fact, our former Critical Mass colleagues nicknamed him “Google” because of the wealth of knowledge he wielded at his fingertips.
Today, Neil remains in my orbit—and the orbit of other professional peers, not because he’s exceptionally intelligent (he is) but because he also takes a genuine interest in people’s lives. The same can be said for our host, Rishad, who so graciously is sharing his platform here.
It is with great intention that I start my own thought sharing here by highlighting the influence of mentors, because in this age of AI, where access to vast amounts of knowledge, expertise, and even capability lives on the other end of a simple chat—our remit as both leaders, employees and even grey collar polyworkers needs to shift, from being the smartest person in the room, to the most human person in the room.
The Most Human Person In The Room
These days, I strive to be the most human person in the room (or Zoom). The reason is obvious—I don’t need to tell you that knowledge and knowledge work are rapidly becoming a commodity. In tech circles, there’s something of an ongoing inside joke—yesterday’s NFT enthusiasts are today’s AI evangelists, AKA “Tech Bros”; tech-optimistic Silicon Valley insiders who are sufficiently read up on the latest AI essays. Tech Bros are now being referred to as “Taste Bros” because of their embrace of the popular philosophy that when AI makes knowledge and knowledge work more of a commodity, what’s left for us humans are things like taste, judgment, discernment, etc.
But the “Taste Bros” are presenting a facsimile of what it is to be human. They treat “taste” as another asset to be optimized—a curated shell of preferences that still feels like a performance. Being the most human person in the room isn’t about having the most refined aesthetic or the right “takes” on the latest LLM; it’s about the things a machine has no interest in: empathy, vulnerability, and genuine generosity.
Knowledge Work vs. Relationship Work
For decades, the “Knowledge Worker” was the hero of the information economy. Success was defined by the ability to acquire, process, and deploy information. However, we are entering a “post-knowledge” era. When an LLM can synthesize a 100-page strategy document in seconds, the act of processing information is no longer a human value-add—it’s a utility.
The new frontier is Relationship Work. This isn’t just “networking”; it is the high-stakes labor of building trust, navigating office politics with empathy, and managing the irrational, beautiful complexities of human emotion. The data suggests that while “hard” knowledge is being automated, the “human” element is becoming a premium.
According to my professional alma mater at Edelman, the folks behind the Edelman Trust Barometer, as people become more skeptical of AI-generated content and “faceless” corporations, the value of a trusted, human relationship increases. We don’t want to be “managed” by an algorithm; we want to be led by a person.
In this age of abundant intelligence, there’s something to be said for social skills becoming a premium. Research by Harvard education economist David Deming shows that since the 1980s, nearly all job growth in the U.S. has occurred in occupations that require high levels of social skills. Jobs that require high analytical skills but low social skills have actually seen a decline in the share of the labor force. We’ve been on this trajectory for a while—the AI Age is simply adding rocket fuel to it.
Magician vs. Expert
True story: Another former colleague once said something to me that stuck. We were having a working session, and something I regularly do is take to the whiteboard to synthesize thoughts, strategies, and plans. After a few hours, my former colleague looked up at the marker-filled whiteboard, then looked over at me, and said: “I love watching you work—it’s like watching a magician”. To be transparent, at the time, I did not see it as a net positive. I was always self-conscious as a highly visible executive, and I would have preferred that my efforts be described as something other than magic.
Today, I feel very different. I am often the first person to step up to the whiteboard in the boardroom, and I practice a form of active listening that captures the signal amid the noise as executives debate ideas. They, too, pause to look at my output on the whiteboard and express wonder. They see it as magical, special, and unexpected.
I see it as human.
I was sharing the above story with Mike Rohde recently, who leads a community of “sketch note” artists in his spare time. He asked me for advice that I could give to practitioners of this craft, and I shared two things:
1. Use today’s AI tools to do remote sketch noting faster, better, and more efficiently.
2. Dial up your presence when you are in a physical room. Be remarkable, be memorable, and be more than what you put up on the whiteboard/panels.
In other words, be the most human person in the room—to the fullest extent possible.
AI can give you the notes, but it can’t feel the music. It can fill a whiteboard with data, but it can’t create the “wonder” that occurs when a human captures a shared truth in real-time. But here is the secret: being the most human person in the room is not a solo performance, and it cannot exist in a silo. It is an act of human orchestration. I was recently reminded of this while having coffee with Sameer Kamat, who has served as a CEO and is currently a senior leader at a venture equity firm. He reinforced with me that human orchestration will remain the most impactful way to get executives in a room to align and coalesce around common goals and ideas.
In short, on a good day, AI informs and enables. Humans persuade, inspire, and lead.
When you lead with vulnerability, insight, orchestration, and radical generosity, it becomes contagious. Your humanity grants others permission to lead with their own humanity. This is how you move a team from a collection of “efficient processors” to a symphony of inspired contributors. The experts are worried about being replaced by the machine. The magicians are too busy connecting people, building relationships, and doing what humans do best.
Choose the magic, choose the orchestration, and be the human who makes the room (or Zoom) more human.”
David Armano
One Single Thing.
What make us human is that unlike machines we are finite and are aware of our temporary nature.
While Silicon and Soul may live for ever we will not.
Franz Kafka wrote “the meaning of life is that it ends”
If there is one single thing I would recommend this week that will leave you seeing the world and your work differently is this seven minute video which was a short film Oscar nominee called “Retirement Day”.
Even if you are three decades away from retirement watch it.
It not about retiring.
It is about living.
It might change you.
Unbossing: Reed Hastings from the Mountaintop!
Reed Hastings
We have entered the age of Debossification.
An age where zones of control are being replaced by zones of influence.
Where the future does not fit in mindsets of the past.
An era of where smart leaders acknowledge that every career has a midnight hour and one should exit at five to 12.
It is a time not just of learning but unlearning.
Announcing a new podcast Unbossing, a series of conversations where amazing leaders share the key insights about modern leadership in tectonic times.
Unbossing is hosted by Drew Ianni and myself who are co-founders of The Athena Project which helps seasoned leaders increase their intelligence, enhance their influence and deepen their impact via relevance, resilience and relationships. Athena is wide spectrum and human first versus title or company or budget obsessed. Our partners include BCG (Boston Consulting Group), SAP, The University of Chicago Graham School, QA, Northwestern’s Medill School and many others.
Unbossing is produced by Gayle Troberman and David Alberts the co-founders of Bubbler Media in partnership with iHeart Media. Ryan Martz is our incredible engineer and editor.
Our upcoming guests are extra-ordinary leaders from a range of companies include David Kenny the Chairman and former CEO of Nielsen and Chairman of Best Buy, Ann Mukherjee who was the Chairman and CEO of Pernod Ricard North America and President of Global Snacks at Pepsico, Tariq Hassan most recently the Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer of McDonalds US, Sarah Personette the CEO of Puck and former Chief Customer Officer of Twitter and Jim Lesser who was the Creative Chairman and CEO of BBDO SF and is now the Chief Brand Officer of Service Now among many many amazing leaders.
Our first guest is Reed Hastings the Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Netflix! Reed today is the majority owner of Powder Mountain and on the board of the AI pioneer Anthropic.
Unbossing is available on every podcast platform around the world:
10 learnings from Reed on Unbossing:
1. Team not Family.
Companies are teams and not families.
Similar to sports every employee needs to be skilled to retain their position. To stay in a team one must be at top of one’s game and competitive. Players can be asked to leave a team but one cannot be cast out of families.
2. “Best Selves” not “Whole Selves”.
Nobody is looking for employees to bring their whole self to work, warts and all. People should bring their best selves.
3.”Radical Candor” should not mean just radical .
Reed believes that Netflix may have come off as too competitive a culture from the outside in the early days. Radical by itself is just plain mean. Today at Powder Mountain the internal mantra is “Big Hearted Champions”.
4. Fear is a double edged sword: Fine in moderation but bad in excess.
The fear of being beaten by Blockbuster or falling behind on streaming to Hulu or not understanding the nuances of local cultures kept Netflix perpetually improving. But this did not stop them from taking big risks of original programming and global expansion.
5. Market product fit is a combination of competitive strategy, timing and trends.
Netflix rode the growth of e-commerce but kept away from Amazon categories, while benefitting from DVD’s which were easy to mail replacing VHS. Find a trend, keep away from a big competitor and align with a technology shift.
6. Sometime one can be too early.
One of the big mistakes that led to a 70 percent stock price drop was the Netflix decision to focus on streaming by spinning off the DVD business. It was the right idea but 3 years too early. It is better though to be too early than too late.
7. Maniacal focus while adjusting to environment are key.
Netflix focussed on every aspect of operational excellence on mailing DVD’s from reducing error rates to postage rates. Then they switched their focus to streaming (so much so that they tried to spin of their dvd business) and then to globalization which required fine nuances and understanding of cultures.
8. AI is bigger, broader and faster than all that has come before and its real impact is still to be understood.
As a board member of Anthropic and one who has seen previous technology shifts, Reed believes that AI is going to be much more impactful than the technologies that have come before and will have a far broader impact on humanity than just the current productivity tools. AI will also move much faster than most people assume. Therefore it is important that companies and leaders think far wider and deeper to prepare themselves, their teams and companies.
9. Luck is far more central to people’s success than it appears.
Reed believes a great deal of his success was due to luck. The fact that no one bought Netflix in its early days, or that competitors were late to understand streaming or that DVD’s rather than other formats such as DIVX (which Netflix did not carry) succeeded. While things worked out very well financially for Reed he recommends that people should focus on what they like doing and what they believe gives them joy vs defining themselves or fixating on financial outcomes.
10. No Rules.
Reed suggests that we are in a world of reinvention and it is time for no rules.
Reed has taken his best thinking and co-written a book called No Rules Rules where he shares advice such as:
Hard work is irrelevant.
Be radically honest.
And never, ever try to please your boss. (The ultimate Unbossing move!)
Take charge of your future by listening to the entire conversation with Reed and subscribe (free) to hear from amazing leaders every two weeks as they discuss Unbossing!
Here is the Spotify Link and here is the Apple Link and here is the iHeart Link .
Jobs are a phase work is going through.
This past week I had the opportunity to keynote at Transform the big ADP ( a global multi-billion dollar of Human Capital Management Solutions) in Las Vegas and then the ANA ( Association of National Advertisers) Media Conference in Nashville.
While the subject and content of both talks were almost completely different given the audiences of senior HR and Talent leadership at one event and Media and Marketing Leadership at the other, I did repeat one statement between the two talks which resonated with both audiences.
“Jobs are a silly phase that work is going through”
The Human Resource function has historically focused on jobs so clearly they were interested. Given the opportunities for full time jobs in marketing and media are shrinking and many media conferences are career networking opportunities, jobs were also top of mind with this audience.
I do not mean that jobs are silly. In fact jobs are very important and provide people with not just income, but also identity, community, purpose and growth. It is just that we are seeing the acceleration of a trend I first wrote about in my book Rethinking Work…
Work and Jobs are uncoupling…
As the chart above shows until the Industrial revolution people had work without jobs and even today 70 million people in the US are free-lancing while 60 percent of people globally work and have an income without holding a job.
In many parts of the world, 2025 will have marked the peak of full-time human jobs.
Individuals have discovered that work can be done and incomes can be earned without holding a full time job. Companies continue to expand use of contractor or part-time workforces, or even avoid hiring a human worker and adopt use of agentic employees (AI-powered workers).
During the recent earnings call at Meta which continues to eliminate thousands of employees every quarter despite stellar results…
“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta CFO Susan Li said since the start of 2025, “output per engineer has risen 30%, driven largely by adopting AI coding agents, and “power users” have increased output 80% year over year.
Meta did increase employment by 6 percent over the past before the most recent round of cutsbut that pales in comparison to a nearly 24 percent rise in revenue. Most companies from Amazon to EY to Walmart have telegraphed keeping the same number of employees or reducing them despite increased revenue.
The implications of this shift are significant both for society but also for companies which have tended to be organized around filling and managing jobs versus getting work done. As work can get done with fewer full time humans we will see today’s full time jobs being replaced by a mix of a smaller number of full time jobs and an explosion of freelance and fractionalized jobs plus agentic workers.
Just like how people compile playlists to customize music for mood and occasion rather than buying full compact discs or vinyl records, companies are going to compile and access skills and expertise to get work done. Hiring human workers for specific skills to use on term-fixed projects, instead of full-time employment.
This model is widely prevalent in fields such as entertainment where talent gets together around a project whether it be a play, a movie or a tv show and then move on to the next opportunity.
We will all feel the societal impact of the loss of so many full time jobs. In the US, the linkage between full-time employment and health care access will become a key election issue by 2028, if not earlier.
Fewer full time jobs does not necessarily mean less work or opportunity.
The biggest fallacy is equating jobs to work.
We are moving to a world where there will be fewer full-time jobs but more and more work to be done.
Rather than job descriptions the key is to understand the skills needed and how to train for the expertise.
To be work focussed versus job besotted.
Too many companies are architected around jobs versus work.
Many professional platforms like LinkedIn will soon reimagine themselves around helping people find and grow skills for work versus finding and announcing jobs.
AI First and Talent Everywhere Models are eating the competition.
Once upon a time the number of employees had in a firm was a vanity metric.
Now it may be a sign of bloat.
The new metric is revenue per employee.
Above is a chart from Leanleaderboard.com (see above) showing that the revenue per employee for AI focused firms which is just under 2.5 million dollars per employee
For context in the US the average revenue per employee for marketing services companies are around $125,000 or 5 percent of these companies.
A world of far fewer managers and full time employees
As the world moves from vertical to matrix to a networked eco-system where work is increasingly done asynchronously by distributed workforces, the need for old style managers who allocate, delegate, monitor, measure and check-in is in free fall. Companies want people who create, build, sell, mentor, make, inspire.
Small companies were already doing this as the chart above shows and now large companies are.
The Great Flattening is real.
At the start of this decade most companies’ employees were a mix of full-time employees, contract employees and free-lance employees. Well before the end of this decade the majority of most companies’ employees will be agentic employees and fractionalized employees (individuals with the equity and health benefits of full-time employees, but work for, and are compensated for, 50 to 80 percent of a full-time employee as AI requires less of them and aging populations causes people to work fewer hours).
McKinsey the consulting company today has 40,000 humans and 25,000 AI agents.
Fusing agentic and human work forces is going to be a significant challenge creating challenges when managing and aligning a combination of five types of employees (full time, free-lance, contract, fractionalized and agentic).
Leaders and companies will have to re-imagine themselves when they have fewer full time employees than free-lance, agentic and fractionalized who will have far fewer managers.
The real challenge to AI is less the technology but the re-organization and re-skilling needed around human talent.
How to Prepare
Jobs will still be the main way most people work but increasingly they may not be full time and will require much more effort to retain.
For companies there are three actions that are necessary:
a) Human Resources and Talent Upgrade: HR and Talent need to work very closely with the board level because the re-design of the firm around work versus jobs will be critical to strategy, capital allocation and financial competitiveness. At the same stage HR and Talent need to re-imagine how and what they do for this AI first, Talent Everywhere, Work vs Job focused world.
b) Enabling Fractionalized Employees: Too many companies are failing to realize that there is a way between retaining employees and lay-offs which are creating fractionalized employees. These give people the security and guarantee of monthly income, full time health care and potential equity and bonus upside but pay them 20 or 40 percent less than a full time job for 3 to 4 days of work. This enables companies to retain the range of talent they might require, not have to deal with the corrosive morale and reputational impact of lay-offs and even attract and retain talent who would like to have more time to care for loved ones or do a non-competitive side gig while the company significantly reduces costs.
c) Leadership Retraining: We have entered an age of debossification where managers are being replaced by doers and leaders, overseers by orchestrators, overseers by builders. Often the challenge in the company is less technology and hardware but more leadership and human software.
For Talent there are three actions to prepare for work vs jobs.
a) Embrace Learning and Unlearning : We need to embrace the new tools and learn new skills but also learn to let go of some of our old mindsets as the architecture of world of employment re-organizes around work to be done versus jobs to be filled.
b) Be one’s own HR department: While Talent and HR teams are important they will be focused on reinventing their own careers and dealing with the demands of management to cut costs or reimagine the new world. This is time for every individual to be clear eyed about their career and grab the wheel with both hands and adopt a mindset to maximize career optionality with and without the help of HR.
c) A Company of One: The best way to retain our job and to stay for decades in a big company is to think like a company of one. A company of one is not about being focused on oneself but on constantly honing skills and keeping them up to tomorrow so people will call us for our expertise, on being deeply collaborative in a world where teamwork will grow important and finally building a reputation and network long before one needs it. Too many people confuse their power and fame with the budgets they control or the brand name of their company only to realize that it is the personal skills, reputation and network that really matter and are truly portable.
To learn how to maximize your optionality read A Company of One Series and Career Architecting . In less than an hour you will gain agency over your future.
They will help you soar in a world where work replaces jobs.
Spicy Thinking.
Image by Gemini
Charles’s conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone’s ideas filed along it in their ordinary clothes, exciting no emotion, no laughter, no reverie”
―Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Today there is a surfeit of data and reports and white papers and podcasts and…
AI is enabling the creation of content, video, presentations, graphics at exponential scale.
Presentations are getting longer, more beautiful to look at, filled with charts and numbers and screeching statistics.
But watch people in presentations and their eyes glaze over.
Read the posts on LinkedIn and you wonder whether the person writing it is alive or if they have ever had an original thought.
Everywhere a bland soup of buzz-word bingo.
A damp stew of retreaded ideas.
A mumbo jumbo of cocktail puffery and regurgitated goo.
I recall a third grade teacher advising our elder daughter on something she had written:
“Spicy words. Use spicy words. Make it special”
Today we need spicy thinking.
Thoughts and ideas with zest, verve and elan.
Thinking that makes one see, think and feel differently versus a diarrhea of diction or a warmed over plate of common bunk.
In a world filled with increasing amounts of data, computational power and advances in AI, talent will matter even more if we a) focus on what is unique to humans and b) do so in a way that leverages the power of technology.
After the math does its stuff it will be time for us to add the meaning.
Today the two most common words in earnings calls and in lay-off announcements are the words AI and uncertainty.
AI will not be a differentiator and uncertainty is not an acceptable excuse.
AI is like electricity.
No business or leader will be able to survive without it.
But just as no company differentiates itself through its use of electricity, AI alone will rarely differentiate a company or leader.
True leaders do not hide behind numbers and say things like “there is too much uncertainty.”
Life is uncertain.
If things were certain, a machine could do our jobs.
So let us be glad the future cannot be lived forward with only backward-looking databases.
What do we bring to the data and next generation tools when we bring the data and tools to our management, clients or to meetings?
What matters is not the data and technology and the reality that we cannot predict the future but the perspectives, points of view, provocations, and plan of action we bring.
Our unique spices that turn data to insights, observations to ideas, the seen to the imagined.
The 4P’s of Spicy Thinking.
Perspective: How is what we are recommending today or what is happening today look from different vantage points? For instance, the vantage point of a longer time horizon or the vantage point of a different person. This is often what machines or less experienced people do not have.
One way to ensure thinking from different perspectives is to build a case for the exact opposite of what we believe or are recommending. This allows one to stress test one’s thinking and also defend against competitors who might target the weakness in an argument.
Points of View: We often bring well documented cases and facts to buttress our arguments. These are essential. But the documentation and facts will never differentiate us versus others or machines since most people will bring the same facts. It is the point of view which matters. What do we believe this means versus what others say or what the facts state. What do we believe especially when we believe differently. Points of view matter.
Many years ago when I worked for Jim Jenness the Chief Operating Officer of Leo Burnett ( Jim eventually became CEO and Chairman of The Kellogg Company) he would ask me a question after I reviewed a deck that I was going to take to a Client that went something like this:
“Forget this deck. If this was Jim’s Garage and I asked you for some advice what would you tell me. What is the right thing to do? What do you believe?”
Jim wanted my point of view. What was the right thing to do for the Client? He was clear that he wanted what I thought rather than all the data and charts one might hide behind.
Provocations: The best organizations and teams find ways to balance, unify and integrate different and diverse points of view including those that challenge the status quo, speak up to power and question accepted thinking. It is when the internal challenges go missing does a company and leader begin to miss delivering results.
Thinking provocatively is often key.
Here is a provocation if you are in marketing and advertising. Could it be that in the future with the deep interactions (multiple questions that reveal a persons true needs and state of mind at that time not in the past) and increasing length of time that people are spending with conversation engines ( even with the right answer people are spending more time in conversations than when they were searching ) such as Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini mean that first party data will be less important than mindset relevance ?
When everybody believes the competitive edge is going to be first party data what if that is no longer true in world of conversation engines and agentic commerce?
Plans of Action: While perspectives, points of view and provocations help determine what needs to be done, we do eventually have to “make happen”, “to do” and to take ideas and convert them to reality.
Machines will often suggest potential actions and we may calibrate different paths with probabilities of success but sooner or later true leaders and successful individuals suggest a clear-cut plan of action.
A plan of action that may be revised once data suggests otherwise but it is key to commit to action.
To succeed in an age where data is plentiful, pattern matching cheap, and machines are becoming smarter we should all begin lots of valid data and the best of technology including AI.
But to add true value to a company and our careers it will be key to ask ourselves all the time what we offer as a) a perspective, b) a point of view, c) a provocation and/or d) a plan of action on everything we have imbibed versus just reporting facts and process.
If we do, we will forever grow and succeed.
If we do not, we will be undifferentiated and will be automated away…
The Ritual of Writing.
Every year I try to read 52 books.
One of the best books I read last year was “ The Book of Alchemy” by Suleika Jaouad.
“The Book of Alchemy” is a unique compilation of essays on essential human concerns such as memory, love, fear, and rebuilding, by the book’s author, interspersed by short pieces on the topic by a range of artists, scientists, business leaders and more. Each short piece ends with a prompt encouraging the reader to think about and ideally write down their answers to the prompt.
Here are three prompts as an example:
What would you write if you were not afraid?
Today everywhere one senses fear. People are frozen doing jobs they dislike, working for people they do not respect, doing things they do not want to, all because of the very human emotion of fear. This prompt gets one thinking on the topic.
“You just have to be one percent more curious than afraid” Suleika Jaouad
“You don’t have to be particularly brave. You just have to be a tiny, tiny bit more interested in something than you are frightened of it” Elizabeth Gilbert.
Goodbyes make room for something new.
And
“And as an artist, it was my biggest epiphany-that the most civilized thing we can do as a human is to change the story. We can always, always, change the story.”
Think of an inherited story that needs your changing-in your own life, in your family, in your hometown, in your country. How was it told to you? How will you tell it differently?”
This is a prompt that reminds us that we all have agency. That we can determine how our stories are written and not let others take the wheel of our life’s journey. That the histories and traditions handed down over the centuries can be interrogated, questioned and changed.
We can change our own stories.
And
“How are you really?”
Next time when we ask someone how they are and they say they are fine, we might consider following up with the question above.
Or write down the answer on how we are feeling internally despite the external brave face and our answer that everything is okay.
The book is ostensibly one that encourages journalling. The ritual of writing every day on a topic or topics of our choice. The prompts help one overcome writers block and provide stimulus for writing.
It helps us create rituals and in the ritual often is the meaning.
“Writing is how I translate my life to myself. And I have given my life a voice by writing it down.” Ann Parsons Story.
But this book is about much more than writing or journaling.
It is about paying attention to life as it passes by. Of taking time to think and feel and consider versus respond. About seeing, noticing and observing.
One of the prompts asks us to remember the ten images that defined the day. If at the end of every day we knew we had to make such a list, would we not pay more attention?
For it is between the stimulus and the response that we are uniquely us.
‘Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom” Victor Frankl.
And here is another reason to get the book. You can ask your favorite Alien Intelligence to respond to each prompt. And the response makes you also think.
Here is one prompt in the book that I asked Claude 4.6 to respond to.
Write about a time when you had a pressing question and nature provided the answer?
Claude’s answer below also came with a title “What the River Knew.”
What the River Knew
There was a summer when I couldn’t stop asking the same question: Is it better to hold on, or to let go?
It sounds abstract now, stripped of context. But at the time it had weight and edges. I carried it the way you carry a stone in your pocket — always aware of it, fingers returning to it without thinking.
I had driven to a river without any particular intention. Just the vague instinct that moving water might unstick something in me. I sat on a flat rock at the bank and watched.
The river, I noticed, didn’t deliberate. It didn’t choose to release the leaf that had fallen onto its surface. It simply moved, and the leaf moved with it. But the rock I was sitting on — the river moved around that, reshaping itself, carving new paths, neither surrendering to the obstacle nor pretending it wasn’t there.
I watched this for a long time. Probably longer than anyone should sit watching a river, looking slightly unhinged from the bank’s perspective.
And something clarified: the question I’d been asking was wrong. It wasn’t hold on or let go — as if those were the only two dignified options. The river suggested a third way. You could be changed by what you meet. You could route around it. You could, over enormous time, wear it down entirely. But you didn’t have to resolve it into a single clean act of grasping or releasing.
I drove home still carrying the stone. But it felt different in my pocket — more like a keepsake than a burden. The river hadn’t answered my question. It had quietly replaced it with a better one.
Nature has a way of doing that — not solving our problems so much as reframing them until the original urgency loosens its grip.
A compelling answer from Claude 4.6
But now a little extract from a human, the late John Binkley who after losing his wife Sherrie after 46 years of marriage began writing letters to her after she had succumbed to a 3 year fight with cancer.
One of the pieces in Suleika’s book is an extract from a letter in a piece called “Across the Gulf of Space Time”.
He speaks about how they worked together over three years to fight together against her cancer…
“Damn the skeptics. Crush the fences. Transcend the static, whatever the interferences, to enable us to carry on the teamwork. The oneness. I don’t need to understand it to embrace it. To live by it. To profit from it. There are no rules. No tracks on the snow on this one.
Be patient, Sherrie, with my learning how to do this. Show me once more the tolerance that has marked our 46 years together, from the beginning.
I love you.
Pook.”