The Brutal Honest Truth About What "Team" Means Now That AI Has Rewritten the Playbook I told that to a team of thirty people on my weekly hangout call back in the summer of 2023. I can remember it exactly. We were rapidly growing as a business. Things were expanding quickly, the kind of quickly where you stop sleeping right because your brain won’t shut off, where every morning feels like you’re already behind before your feet hit the floor. And I loved it. Now I’d rather not think of myself as a boss or a CEO or some sort of position that comes with a title on a door. I just always thought of myself as someone who decided to stick their proverbial neck out and start doing stuff that others wouldn’t do. That’s really all it was. I wasn’t smarter. I wasn’t more connected. I just kept moving when other people paused. We were bringing on about twenty or thirty new accounts a month. One per day, basically. And I knew we could go faster. At one point I even said out loud, I think we could do a hundred accounts a month if we really put our minds to it. I could feel the room shift when I said that. The energy changed. We were strained enough as it was, so I pulled that thought back a little. But I knew it was doable. I could see how we could get there, the same way you can see a city skyline from fifty miles out on a clear day. You’re not there yet, but you know the road leads right to it. And we did go faster. Fifty accounts a month became attainable. We surpassed the two hundred and twenty thousand dollar a month level, and three hundred thousand was in shooting range. The team was doing the work and I was piloting us through the seas to reach the next island. Much like a captain of a ship is only as good as the crew, a business is only as good as its team. Because if you’re running a business, it’s really not you at all. At least it shouldn’t be. That’s how real businesses operate. And there came a point in time where pretty much everything was working on its own. If you’ve ever reached that pinnacle, that moment when you’ve built something and it’s able to breathe and move and function without your hands on every lever, you know the feeling. It’s the strangest mix of pride and terror you’ll ever experience. Pride because it works. Terror because you realize it doesn’t need you the way it used to.

We have to create our own enjoyment. Nobody is coming to build that for us. “You know this one,” I said, and before anybody had a chance to think about it I was already bashing out the opening chords to that ZZ Top song, Tush, at full volume in the middle of a sunny sixty degree afternoon at our local motorcycle rally, spring bike blessing bash. We play this rally every year at the same time. It’s one of those gigs that just lives on the calendar like a birthmark. Ben, our guitar player, caught it immediately. He gave me that slight chuckle he does when he knows exactly where I’m going, nodded once, and fell right in behind me with that trademark thumping rhythm of his. A few seconds later the rest of the band lit up and we pushed the song forward into the daylight like we were trying to shake the winter off the whole crowd at once. Still Googling your marketing problems? Just ask me. Get Help A guy at the show had been shooting video for us, which was a gift because over twenty years of playing together we have an almost embarrassingly thin library of footage. We only tend to record maybe once a year, if that, so any new tape is a small event in our world. I got the footage back and sat down to watch it last night. Now they say the camera adds ten pounds. In my case I think it was closer to thirty. The music was fine. The band sounded good. But there I was, carrying what I’ll generously call my winter coat, the product of a long cold stretch and probably an inexcusable amount of inactivity that had crept in without me even naming it. When you see yourself on video instead of in a still photo, there’s no angle to hide behind. And compared to the footage from the same time a year ago, the difference was hard to ignore. It made me think about something I’ve started calling benevolent abandonment. But let’s be honest about what it really is. It’s self sabotage. I’ve been reading a lot about self sabotage lately and the thing that strikes me most is how common it is to give up on yourself without ever realizing you’ve given up. Your habits just quietly redefine you based on what you find comfortable, and one morning you look up and the person in the mirror isn’t quite who you thought you were sending out into the world.

Why the People Who Seem Lucky Are Really Just Tuned Into a Frequency You Keep Ignoring It’s a black car. No, it’s a black truck. I can see it. I was waiting patiently, the way any husband learns to wait, as my wife needed just ten more minutes to get out the door for dinner. What is this prep time they need? I will never understand it. I gave up trying to understand it years ago. But finally I got the signal. The “let’s go.” And we jumped in the car and pulled onto the main road heading out for dinner. Still Googling your marketing problems? Just ask me. Get Help About half a mile from the restaurant, I’m doing what I always do. I’m mentally scanning the parking lot ahead of us before we can even see it. And this quick flash hits me. It’s not a thought. It’s not a guess. It’s something from some third dimension that just washes over me in a wave, and in that wave I see a black truck. I tell my wife. It’s black. It’s a black truck. The space is right next to it. She nods because she’s been through this before. She knows the drill. As we get closer to the restaurant, we see another car pulling into the parking lot a couple hundred yards ahead of us. I go, “They better not be taking that spot.” And sure enough, we pull in and the only available space in the entire lot is behind a black Ram truck, and the person who just jumped in ahead of us is sliding right into it. If she hadn’t needed that extra prep time, we’d be parked and walking in already. But that’s life, and that’s not the point. The point is that this kind of thing happens to me all the time. These moments are almost common now. I can literally see things ahead of time. Not as some grand cinematic vision. Just a flash. Quick and sharp. But it’s there. And it happens so often that my wife has started asking me to find other things, including picking the lotto numbers. I told her that’s not what this is for. It’s not something I can control. It’s not something I can aim like a flashlight at whatever I want. I can’t just say, “Oh, let me predict the future real quick.” But it has happened so many times with so many different things that it goes beyond discussion at this point. It’s not even a debate about whether it’s real or not. It just is. I can just do it. I get this particular wave that quickly rushes over me with a vision, and I can see into the future just enough to know something before it happens.

Journal Entry And now I’m running out of time, trying to outlive life, just when I’ve got it figured out how to make it shine, the hands of time have cut up, and I’m still running, staying in the fight. Those are lyrics from one of our new songs called Wasting No More Time, set to release in just a few weeks. I wrote those words from a place most people don’t like to visit. That quiet room in the back of your mind where you sit down with yourself and ask the only question that actually matters. Have I done what I came here to do. Still Googling your marketing problems? Just ask me. Get Help Every year around this time I’m reminded of my father’s birthday. This year would have put him at 89. He passed away ten years ago, but my thoughts are always circular to this part of the year. His birthday passes by like another orbiting celestial being around my world, predictable and gravitational, pulling me back into the same reflection whether I want to go there or not. His influence on my life was significant, although the memories themselves only capture a few wisps of remembrance. Fleeting images. A voice I can almost hear. Moments that feel more like impressions than photographs. And yet those wisps carry more weight than anything concrete ever could. Here is what happens when you go looking for a man who lived a full life before the internet existed. If you Google my father, only one thing comes up. His minor league baseball stats from 1956. He was a pitcher in the New York Giants farm system, played for both the Muskogee and St. Cloud franchises. Forty three strikeouts on the season. A three and three record. That is it. That is the entire digital footprint of a man who raised a family, loved people, failed at things, succeeded at others, and eventually left this earth the same way we all will. One obituary notice and a line in a box score from a league most people have never heard of. There are no pictures. No video. No diary. No historical reference. Not even a family tree written on the back of an envelope somewhere. The man literally does not exist in any searchable, findable, retrievable way. He exists only in the minds of the people who can still recall the faintest details, both good and bad, that made up the full texture of someone’s life. And those minds are aging. Those memories are fading. And one day they will be gone too.