What work could be

We are curious.

We are born explorers. From the moment a newborn opens its eyes, it encounters a foreign universe—light and color and depth and motion and texture unlike anything it has ever seen or imagined.

The journey from infancy to adulthood is largely defined by an insatiable fascination with the new, a fascination that expands our minds. Literally, the process of neurogenesis—our minds growing—depends on identifying and connecting new ideas.

Something new enters our environment, and the attention system in the right hemisphere of our brains is exquisitely attuned to notice it quickly. We zoom in. We assess its value, purpose, and uniqueness. Then, once we understand enough, we set it down and keep moving forward toward the next frontier—the next unknown territory.

This is how innovation occurs. It is how invention takes place, how problems are identified, and how solutions are created. Historically, we see something limited—or something wrong—and connect it with something seemingly unrelated. When we bring those ideas together, something new becomes possible.

We imagine what is not yet here. Then we build it. Then we share it with others, who use it to make their lives better—and, in turn, create things that improve ours.

And this curiosity does not stop with things or objects. It is the same curiosity that forms the foundation of relationships. It allows us to see ourselves more clearly, to see other people as they are, and to recognize that what makes us different can also make us valuable.

But when we are overwhelmed, we stop exploring. When there is too much coming at us, we shrink the sandbox. We retreat to safe territory. We become reactive and defensive. The ping becomes king.

I want work to leave room for wonder and fascination. Too often, someone else’s story about their weekend can feel like an assault on my attention, my value, or my productivity—rather than an invitation to discover something I know nothing about.

And that unfamiliar story might be the spark I never saw coming: the insight that helps me solve a problem I did not yet realize existed.

Of course, exploration, curiosity, and wonder are not efficient. None of this is efficient. There is no guarantee of a return. You might follow an idea or a conversation or a question somewhere and get nothing from it.

But there is one thing I do know: if we choose perfect efficiency, we lose not only the joy of discovery but the spark of innovation and creation. We get faster at doing what we know and worse at seeing what we don’t. Eventually, all we have is yesterday’s answers to tomorrow’s problems, many of which we deny until they become too big to solve.

For the possibility that someone following their curiosity will discover something the rest of us didn’t know to look for.

We are finite.

We exist in a particular place at a particular time. All of our thinking, feeling, imagining, acting, dreaming, and attending is done in the here and now.

The people we love, the work we undertake, the places we belong—all ask us to give some of our limited time to them. Giving that time means accepting that something else will go unattended.

Trying to keep up with the infinite access we carry in our pockets fractures our attention. We are here, thinking about there. We are with these people, answering those people. We finish one thing already feeling behind on the next.

We have to live this one life. I want to be able to give myself to the life in front of me, and to sit at a table without feeling that my real life is happening somewhere else.

We are social.

Where I look, you follow. Someone starts laughing, and before long the whole table has joined in.

Your attention was never entirely your own. We are shaped by our people, and we learn what matters by learning it together. We learn what deserves celebration, what calls for concern, what is worth the trouble. We come to see possibilities because someone we trust sees them first. In the first year of life, a baby learns what matters by following the gaze of its caregiver. Developmental psychologists call this joint attention. It doesn’t stop when we grow up.

Historically, our relationships were multiplex. The person who worked next to you was your neighbor and sat behind you at church. If I kept you from fishing, neither of us ate. If I stole your attention, I lost. These relationships maintained themselves. Geography kept us contained. This wasn’t all good—communities enforced their own brutal norms—but it matched our biology.

Now, our relationships are uniplex. The people we work with are not the people we see on the weekends. The people we go to church with aren’t the people we live next to, who aren’t the people we work with, who aren’t the people we call when we need someone in a pinch. We sit at the center of these loosely connected circles, and keeping them alive is our job.

The biggest lie we have been sold is that you win through individual optimization. Run your relationships that way, keeping the useful ones and dropping the rest, and they become commodities. A commodity is a simple deal: I want to spend as little as possible to get as much as possible. A company treats me as a commodity if it can pay as little as possible to get as much as possible. Now we are all disposable and replaceable, all numbers, and then we wonder why people leave. Being in a community is hard. But the only other option is that you don’t have communities. You have commodities.

And the first to go are the relationships that were never useful to anyone. Nobody decides to drop them. They don’t make the cut.

C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

I got married and, brand new to it, I walked out of the bathroom one morning brushing my teeth and my wife was standing there pointing at the floor. “Curt, what’s that?” I learned that day that obvious questions don’t have to be answered, because marriage is grand and divorce is a hundred grand. She was pointing at my jeans on the floor. It turns out that’s not where they go. And I didn’t know. For most of my life, I didn’t even see them. They had disappeared because they weren’t new and interesting. For her, it was all she could see. We need other people to point us toward the things we miss.

That is the joke version. The serious version is what happens to anyone in charge. If you found out you could read everyone’s private chat logs, would you do it? Even if it were 76 pages of them making fun of you, it might be the best information you will ever get. Nobody around a leader is lying. They have reasons. The people who report to you want you to think well of them, and your reaction to bad news teaches them what to bring you next time. And you can’t tell from the inside. Confidence feels identical whether you’re seeing clearly or living in a distorted reality.

The unnecessary friends are the ones that check your reality. They make sure it isn’t being manipulated and that you’re not missing something. And they are also what makes all of reality worth anything. That is what Lewis meant. People of influence need a peer circle that runs with them for decades, people who don’t need anything from you but celebrate everything with you, and who have known you long enough to know what you sound like when you’re right.

Decades is the hard part. Technology has been our solution to all friction, and the very things we’ve eliminated are the things that create meaning, purpose, and connection. We are living at the most abundant moment in history, and nearly every metric shows we’re unhappier than ever. A friend who has met your kids a dozen times and still can’t produce their names is friction. So is showing up when there’s nothing in it for you. We keep engineering that out, and then we wonder why we’re lonely.

We do not have to have the same past. We have to be on the same page. Work is one of the last places that still puts people on the same page for years with people they didn’t pick, and most of the enduring friendships I know of started there and outlived the job.

I want to hold tightly to a group of peers who don’t need anything from me, who celebrate everything with me, and who will tell me when I’m wrong.

We are storytellers.

We make things. We turn sticks into tools. We make meals, tell stories, build businesses, invent games. And we make sense of the making with a story. Humans think in story. I am a person, in this place, at this moment, doing this work, for this purpose, for these people.

Who likes to book hotels? Nobody. It’s the worst. Except when the reason for the hotel is a weekend with people you love, and then it isn’t booking a hotel anymore. It’s remembering what happened last time, and the dinner you’re going to have, and the catching up. The task didn’t change. Booking a hotel is only hard when it’s just a task on a list.

A friend of mine was a Green Beret for years. I am also very athletic, so it’s basically the same. I caught him whistling one morning while he made eggs for a group of us and asked him what the tune was. The Ballad of the Green Berets, he said, and he didn’t notice he was doing it. Apparently if you’re around a Green Beret you will hear that tune any time they do chores. People think of the Green Berets as Special Forces in war-torn countries, and he has done all of that. But most of what it means to be a Green Beret is changing batteries, sweeping floors, setting things up. Nobody likes doing those. They do them, and whistle, because the team matters more, and somebody told them that story until it was theirs.

That is what a story does. Infinite information creates confusion. A story creates a cohesive narrative, a chain of what caused what, told by someone who was there. A story is made of the particular experiences someone has had that make their view of the world distinct, and telling it well is what creates coherence, meaning, and a group of people who belong to one another. Most of what reaches us now comes from a context we’re not in, from people who don’t know ours, who live in a different world. You have to find a destination and a path in the middle of all that.

The only way to build anything hard is to have people come alongside you because they believe your story. And you have to be very careful guarding the stories you tell yourself, because they become the reality you live in and the reality your team creates. Under pressure, leaders live in their own story, and usually one they inherited from social media, from fear. We start to tell the most negative version of it, the version that makes the team the enemy. And because the people around a leader learn what matters by watching where he looks, that version doesn’t stay in his head. It becomes the one they work inside of.

The story in the first part of this essay, the one where a person is measured by their output, is a story somebody handed us. I want to make things worth someone else’s attention, with people who care about what we are bringing into existence and who can enjoy the making. And I want the story we tell about it to be a truer one, which most of the time means the one that was true all along.