Begin By Surrendering
When we fight the facts and resist change, we delay our own successes.
For some, scaling a proverbial mountain of change seems impossible. Mountain: Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.
The idea that we can wake up and everything changes is not a new concept. A loved one passes, a job is lost, that special person in our lives leaves us, we are involved in a car accident, etc.
Sometimes we fight these moments and suffer for it. Depression, anger, sickness, and all sorts of repercussions can ensue. When we surrender to the moment’s reality and accept the situation for exactly what it is, we can begin to process it. Perhaps we can take the necessary actions to fix whatever issues are created, or simply adjust our mindset and lives accordingly so that we may go on.
But we do not expect our digital tools to be the source of such disruptions.
Unfortunately, the expectation that our laptop or smartphone will function as a simple device for building and consuming media is no longer valid. The boundaries between the physical and the virtual continue to blur and meld with each passing year.
We have seen how dependent society has become on Internet-related tools during major outages. If cloud provider AWS goes down, cascades of traditional and AI-infused software platforms, websites, and customer service operations are simply unable to serve customers. Airlines are disrupted, cash registers may not work, and even government traffic systems can go down.
The physical world and we humans living in it have become dependent on the Internet.
This infrastructure dependency is particularly true of more developed countries. But even when I visited Kenya 10 years ago, the proliferation of smartphones in a rural village surprised me.
Yet we refuse to extend this wisdom to our digital tools. Why? What is it about our minds that continues to associate digital tools infused throughout our lives as separate and controllable?
Fighting Change Is Pointless
A surfer surveys the elements.
One challenge is that we, as Westerners, and particularly as Americans, think we have enough power over our lives that we can change and control them. Others have discussed this American exceptionalism well, but if we accept it as part of cultural DNA, then we can see how, in some situations, it is a liability. That is particularly true when it comes to unwelcome change.
Needless to say, though it can provide a DiY moxy that fuels someone through solutioning, with the immediate arrival of change, it can prevent acceptance and surrender. It can become a barrier from that moment of acceptance that we have to adapt; instead, we try to stop moments from happening, resisting with all our will in an attempt to revert them back to the way things were.
How often have attempts to turn things back to the way they were worked out well? It reminds me of the old Zen proverb that you can never swim in the same river twice. The river's waters, shape, and flow constantly change over time, as do the swimmer and their body.
When I was almost 27 years old, I took a vacation from my cushy .com startup job in Irvine, California, to return to the Washington, DC area. I rented a red Mercury Cougar and was hotdogging with my friends, basically showing all my buddies (and my frail, insecure ego) how great my life was.
I received a phone call from the CEO of the company on the GW Parkway (it’s true, we had 3G smartphones in 1999, albeit they were primitive), and I was fired in under two minutes flat with no severance. The entire sales and marketing department had been fired. The CEO justified my firing with my trip, saying it was clear I had returned to DC to find a new job and move home.
It took me the better part of the year to get over this moment. How I fought, both with the company, only to secure two weeks ’ severance, and with reality. Four months later, after a half-hearted job search, I ended up driving back from California with my computer and clothes in the trunk and just a few hundred dollars in my bank account. I slept on a friend’s couch in Northwest DC for two months until I got a job and a new apartment in Arlington, VA.
A year later, I finished my graduate degree from Georgetown, which I had abandoned to go get rich in California, and was enjoying a series of adventures in the agency world promoting .com companies. Perhaps the CEO, while wrong about my actions, was right in my direction.
If only I hadn’t fought reality so hard. If only I had accepted things as they were and looked at them as an opportunity. If only I had worked on healing and envisioning my next steps instead of fueling my resentment. I might have enjoyed my last few months living just a half-block from the ocean in beautiful Huntington Beach even more. A new opportunity may have revealed itself much sooner.
But no, I resisted, and I was miserable for it. It was only when my back was against the wall that I surrendered.
All of my resistance was pointless. Yet, it took several more big moments in my life to understand that there are so many things greater than me that impact life, and there’s nothing I can do about it. That is true of life, and it is true of technology and its impacts on everyday living, too.
ChatGPT Illustrates How Little Control We Have
An image I created in Adobe Firefly.
Force majeure, good and bad, it all changed my life dramatically and suddenly. Call it higher power, call it God, call it Zen, call it what you like. There are greater forces at play.
I have seen this over and over in the form of finding out a love was married, my life partner taking a seven-month assignment abroad and our resulting separation, the sale of my company, the birth of my daughter, a second firing, COVID-19, my daughter becoming a boy, the launch of ChatGPT and its sudden destabilization of my last job, Trumpism’s impact on Washington, DC, and my parents’ deaths.
All that I had accepted as finite was gone. Fortunately, as I have gotten older, I have come to accept my reality: I have too little influence over life’s events. I can’t even control my own feelings about things at times. The only aspect of my life that I can influence is selecting the actions I choose to take. That is my surrender, that is my ethos about life.
My personal ChatGPT story is a great example.
At my last real corporate job, our CMO arrived at our first team meeting of 2023 and lit into the entire team for not embracing ChatGPT, which had been released several weeks earlier. He said if we didn’t adopt and use ChatGPT we would all lose our jobs, and that we needed to lead the organization and company. His opinion was informed by news reports he had read in the Wall Street Journal and other national media outlets.
When I raised some of my own experimentation with image generators Dall-E and Midjourney, and articles I had written on marketing AI adoption, the comments were dismissed. Some of the CMO’s more favored lieutenants were charged with leading the adoption effort. No formal training was provided to the team. It was sink or swim.
I am sure many people reading this have had similar experiences over the past few years. There were many disappointing aspects of this management and the adopt-or-else approach, symptomatic of a broader toxicity.
There was little I could do about this use of ChatGPT or else decision. In fact, the only thing I could do was look at my part. What had I done to cause this outcome?
The first was a decision to work for this person, though I had been warned and detected that they were toxic and abusive. So I signed up for it. The second was that I chose to resist and subvert this person’s leadership over the 18 prior months. I would still do it today, as I know I protected my team from some of his worst behavior.
What I could do was surrender, accept the charge and the arrival of this zeitgeist, and do my best. So I ended up using Writer and Jasper a bit for writing, as I found ChatGPT wanting. My Midjourney skills have strengthened to the point that I was asked to train the team on using the generator.
Still, the toxicity continued, and it became clear that the CMO was experiencing downward pressure to make cuts. As much as I hate saying it, the writing was on the wall: In tight environments, older, experienced rivals that are also lieutenants tend to get cut. The resulting attempts to pressure and find weak links were unacceptable to me, so I resigned to start my AI consultancy to help marketers adopt AI.
The Results of My Surrender
Looking out over a Kenyan valley during sunrise.
I accepted the moment and surrendered. What was accepted as marketing best practices had passed, and change had arrived. Now was gone.
Moving forward, the new AI startup opportunity excited me. If I were experiencing these pressures, others must be, too. I ended up expanding that scope to help professionals across a wide variety of departments, from operations and finance to sales and marketing.
What did my surrender accomplish?
Though my three-year journey has had more twists and turns than I'd like, I’ve helped hundreds of people incorporate AI into their workflow. If they have managed to stay employable in an increasingly difficult job market, then I know my experiences and attempts to help them were worthwhile.
This outcome provides me a sense of personal fulfillment and reward that hustling someone else’s product and services cannot. For that, I am grateful.
The very relevant zeitgeist of now, AI, catalyzed this change. In the past, it could have been the rise of the World Wide Web or social media. Tomorrow, it could be some other technology. Or it can be a broader societal issue, like war, or a significant personal matter.
Regardless of the cause, the practice of surrender remains the same. It is only through surrendering to the facts of any given moment that I can put myself into a position to act and find new paths and potential solutions.