Once upon a time, Instagram was a place filled with nice pictures and artsy filters.

Now? It’s a non-stop visual bombardment that would make the most seasoned Las Vegas hustler blush.

If we want to stand out there, we need to speak quickly and loudly, and make sure we promise fast cash or instant health within the first second of our video—why else would someone care?

This is no place for selling the wisdom of stillness, calm, and inner peace!

But in reality? Warren Buffett, arguably the greatest investor of all time, preached the kind of restraint and educated slow reasoning that would get him skewered on social media if he weren’t already a billionaire.

Being sober and sensible doesn’t sell. But it does pay, if we can drown out the noise.

From a low-level employee to the janitor, to the cashier at the grocery store…

How do we talk to the people who can’t possibly help our careers?

There’s a well-known trick in Hollywood: If you want to make a character likable, show them being loved by dogs and children.

Want to make a character instantly hate-able? Show them being mean to dogs and children.

Simple, right? But it works.

Powerful people (and reality TV stars, while we’re at it) are great at “turning on the charm." At schmoozing with people who are important to them.

But the minute the cameras are off, their more abusive natures reveal themselves.

As leaders, it’s not how we talk to investors that matters. It’s how we talk to all the little people along the way who don’t hold our future in their hands.

If you see a leader who is kind to “important” people but different to everyone else? Run. Run far, far away.

To the Americans in the crowd: Happy 250th! May the grand experiment continue.

For a utilitarian government building, a blank concrete wall is a finished product.

But for St. Peter’s Basilica in Italy? “Finished” included painstakingly carving stone so it resembled twisted rope and other intricate textures—even in places so high overhead that most visitors couldn’t possibly notice them.

Two different contractors worked on two different buildings. And both had extremely different ideas of what “done” looks like.

So when someone charges you a cheap rate for “a website”, that’s the same as someone charging you a cheap rate for “a building.”

Generally speaking, we tend to get the level of craftsmanship we’re willing to pay for.

In the age of AI, this is more true than ever.

For a great TED Talk on the societal damage caused by people who make ugly buildings, check this out.

Linus Torvalds, legendary coder and creator of the operating system Linux, recently spoke out about the dangers of coding with AI.

The upshot? AI is a tremendous tool for coder productivity, but used without understanding of the code it’s writing is dangerous/bad.

It’s hard to argue with that logic.

It’s like asking a room full of people: “Do you believe children should be safe?” Not one person in a million is going to answer no to that question.

But black boxes (things we use but don’t understand how they work) are all around us daily.

If we take an airplane to a conference, do we know all the systems keeping us in the air?

When we drive a car, do we know the intricacies of the internal combustion engine?

When a teenager grows a following on TikTok, do they have any clue how the algorithm works or how their data is being used?

When any of us signs the terms & conditions of any app, do we really know what we’re agreeing to?

Our whole society runs on black boxes. And the thought of coding “blindly trusting AI” is scary. But the reality is, the kind of security issues AI presents were already present in many other forms. Even coding by hand, we have to trust that our compiler isn’t taking our human code and injecting something malicious when it translates our work into machine language, something even the most skilled real programmer doesn’t understand.

I get it. It’s terrifying.

But the reality is? This ship sailed the first time our ancestors used a tool.

It’s what we do. We invent things, and we become completely, hopelessly reliant on them. How else do you think we got into this mess?

To Steve Jobs in 1980, it was obvious that the personal computer was going to be a ”bicycle for the mind.”

But it wasn’t obvious to the people listening to his keynote, or the millions of people who didn’t believe him at the time.

The point: What is obvious to you isn’t obvious to everyone else.

You see things from a unique vantage point. No one else has your perspective.

Instead of looking for something clever to say to your audience, consider stating what is obvious to you.

You might be surprised how not obvious it is to everyone else.