A couple weeks ago, Sam published an inspiring article on his website called The Intelligence Age. There are a number of intriguing statements throughout, including:

• “I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now”
• “Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems.”
• “Astounding triumphs — fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics — will eventually become commonplace”

I especially appreciated his warning:

If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.

Frankly, I found the whole piece quite compelling… until the last paragraph.

There Sam says:

Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.

If you read the rest of the article (and I hope you do), you’ll see Sam spends a lot of time lauding prosperity and its benefits — especially, of course, the prosperity that will soon be birthed via the magic of AI.

But that first sentence of the last paragraph is terribly out of touch… and it’s also hiding a dangerous mindset about the future.

I don’t know of any specific research on today’s workers saying they’d rather be lamplighters, but what we do have is frankly an insane amount of data on just how many people are miserable at work.

Spoiler: it’s almost everyone.

The reports use different language to describe this crisis — disengagement, stress, or my favorite, a Deloitte study from 2014 (which I cite in my TEDx) which declares that 87.7% of people do not have passion for their work — but it’s all describing the same phenomenon.

Nearly every study you could reference over the past 20 years will tell you the same thing: people mostly hate work.

And then we have Bullshit Jobs.

David Graeber’s astonishingly-thorough anthropological treatise estimates that somewhere between 40-50% of people exist in some sort of purgatorial job-hell, where they are paid quite well to do jobs they know in their souls do not provide value to society.

In other words: if Graeber is to be believed, an absurdly huge number of today’s jobs ARE “trifling wastes of time.”

I can’t prove this, of course, but I would personally place a hefty bet that at least a few of the people self-identifying into the “disengaged,” “stressed,” or “I have a bullshit job” categories would actually VERY much prefer to be lamplighters.

Today’s workers are mostly under-appreciated and under-represented. They’re also grossly underpaid — in a study published by the Associated Press in June 2024, in half of the companies they surveyed it would take a middle-level worker nearly 200 years to make the amount of money their CEO made in 1.

So this is the scary part of Sam’s piece — and maybe his thinking in a larger sense, too.

A hundred years ago, our leading economists were also predicting greater prosperity on the horizon. In an essay written in 1930, John Maynard Keynes foretold that his grandchildren would only work 15 hours a week due to innovative new technologies.

But new technologies do not necessarily produce a better life. Sam seems to understand this, to a point — he says he understands that prosperity doesn’t automatically equate to happiness, and “there are plenty of miserable rich people” — but to my ears still ends up mostly blind to the size and scope of the real danger.

Right now, across the world, with AI we are playing a very familiar zero-sum game — a multipolar trap that is, at its core, an arms race. Sam seems to believe that the magical prosperity produced by AI will itself be enough to somehow flip our current trajectory on its head so we can “again focus on playing positive-sum games.”

But if history has anything to teach us, this will not be how it works. Sam’s narrative on this point is terribly shallow, full of magical thinking of the most insidious kind.

By glossing over the realities of the arms race at hand he’s sowing the seeds of a dangerous false hope, because this magical “flip” doesn’t happen in the real world. Instead, as we have seen with most other technological advances, with AI we will almost certainly run into a Jevons Paradox — where increases in AI won’t somehow magically reduce our demand for it, but simply increase our desire for it even further.

Put another way: an increase in “prosperity” will not be the thing that curbs our desire for “more.”

A new organizing story must come first.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

I vividly remember the moment years ago when my mentor Terry shared the idea of “gradually then suddenly” with me. Terry is one of my absolute favorite humans. He’s also one of those people where you need to come to the conversation prepared with a notepad, ready to furiously scribble down the amazing things that fall out of his mouth every couple minutes.

This idea — “gradually, then suddenly” — felt like some kind of emotional “slap” when he shared it. It was immediately poignant, like the idea itself had some kind of natural resonance with the universe, like it’s somehow playing at the same frequency as reality.

So not surprisingly, this idea has had a lot of staying power in my mind over the years. 

And the older I get, the more it seems to describe additional parts of life. 

Originally, I connected “gradually, then suddenly” to things like illness and finances. There’s a point when our older loved ones go from “having an illness” to “they are ill.” There’s a point at which people have to declare bankruptcy. In the past, I’ve mostly thought about this idea in these more negative ways — when sickness turns nasty or when someone experiences great financial loss.

For whatever reason, I never applied this concept to something like success or wellness. But it now seems obvious that this same phenomenon clearly happens on the more “positive” side of life, too. 

Consider the moment when a social movement goes from embers to a conflagration, allowing society to suddenly make real changes. Or when the revolutionaries gather and the dictator finally gets overthrown. 

Or how about the “10-Year Overnight Success?” This is a more realistic version of the more popular “Overnight Success” (in which we pretend that someone can actually become successful in something overnight). A “10-Year Overnight Success” is much more akin to what actually happens; Malcolm Gladwell of course did a great treatise on this in The Tipping Point, introducing us all to the concept of 10,000 hours, like the Beatles playing a thousand crappy gigs before “bursting onto the scene.”

Until recently, I never connected that idea with the concept of “gradually, than suddenly,” even though they’re clearly the same thing…!

So my curiosity about the “gradually, then suddenly” phenomenon endures, and these days I find myself thinking about it in the “social constructivist” sense.

As in, what kind of things should we be doing “gradually” right now to create the kind of “suddenly” we want later? 

Isn’t all preventative health care built on this notion? 

The formation of all good habits?

Also probably compound interest? 

And hopefully a work revolution??

So here are my questions for us all…

What are the little things that we can do today — slowly, deliberately, gradually — trusting someday we’ll see that those seemingly small actions were actually deposits into the account of our collective future? 

How might you use this idea to create the kind of future you want to live in?

If you’re a leader in an organization, how could you gradually create the future that your team, colleagues, and customers want and need? 

What kind of seeds will you plant today that will sprout at some unknown point down the road, suddenly bursting forth from the ground, making the world a little bit more green, and a little bit better…?

Your suddenly is coming. 

So right now, do intentional things gradually.

Like, obsession-level amounts.

I don’t do this because I’m obsessed about “work,” though — quite the opposite, in fact.

I think about work all the time because what I ACTUALLY care about is improving the quality of human lives at scale, and work (I am using this word synonymously with “business” in this case) is the current organizing story of life.

Think about it — more than any other single factor, where you work determines…

1. Where you live (especially if CEOs get their way)
2. The people you will see the most
3. The kind of shelter you can afford
4. The quality of food you can afford
5. The amount of discretionary income you will have
6. The amount of free time you’ll have
7. In the U.S., whether you have health care or not

This thing we call “work” is the single determining factor for the quality of your entire life.

I will say: this might not actually be bad IF we had a more healthy organizing story that governed the way we work.

But right now, the governing story of work is one of consumption, profit, and consumerism. It’s an endless race to “more” — more money, more stuff, more money, more extraction of resources, more money, more externalization of costs, more… did I say money?

Yeah, mostly it’s “more money.”

As far as I can tell, “more money” is not positively correlated with things like wisdom, contentment, or happiness. And before you leave me comments about needing “enough to survive,” I agree, and please note — you’re talking about “enough” not “more.”

“More” is insatiable. It, by definition, will never get enough.

So we are left with an organizing story of life that is fundamentally ignominious, not to mention misaligned with some pretty basic biological principles (which strive for homeostasis and balance within the system).

And when the story is corrupted in this way, it rots the system all the way down.

If you will, imagine for a moment with me that the story was something else. “Like what?” you might ask. I think there are quite a few things that would serve as a better organizing story than “more money.”

Consider if the “point of it all” was more…

• Exploration
• Learning
• Beautification
• Connection
• Love

Pick your favorite!

Doesn’t that just feel better?

Like deeply, morally, spiritually better?

My friends, we are in a moment in history where we are shifting from old systems to new. We have the opportunity to reimagine and to rebuild. The old (i.e. current) ways of business will continue to break, because they are fundamentally misaligned with much-older universal laws.

What will emerge in place of these old systems?

Well, that depends on the new story we choose.

If you’re not familiar, DisruptHR bills itself as “The Rebellious Future Of HR” and takes place in cities all over the world. The events bring together 14 speakers in one night. They can do this because the talks are just 5 minutes long. Also, the slides advance automatically: you get exactly 20 slides and they move every 15 seconds… whether you like it or not. (Yeah, that part is as intense as it sounds.)

In Denver at least, this event is kind of a big deal. It almost always sells out at around 500 attendees, with HR and business leaders packing a beautiful old brick building near downtown called Mile High Station.

My topic was “The Future Of Work Is Human Energy” so, naturally, I talked about (energy) vampires. 😉 I’ll share the video with you as soon as they release it… usually takes a few weeks.

Until then, I wanted to share the top 3 things I learned from doing this HUGE tiny talk.

Even if you’re not getting on a Disrupt stage anytime soon, I’m guessing you have to present ideas: to your team leader, to your colleagues, or maybe to your spouse or partner…! If you want those ideas to have maximum impact, remember these 3 things:

1) Short is more difficult than long.

Mark Twain reportedly said, “I wanted to write a short letter but didn’t have time, so I wrote a long one instead.” This adage applies to presentations as well.

The most important thing to remember on this point is if you have only a short time to communicate something, you will need more prep time, not less.

Communicating with power and clarity is incredibly difficult, especially if you don’t have a lot of time to explain or elaborate. You’ll have to make cogent points that “hit” quickly, and this will take time to craft.

Give yourself the space you’ll need to test it and tweak it to make it better and better.

2) Focus on the 1 THING you want them to remember.

If you can get people to remember 1 powerful new thing from any presentation you do, I tend to think that’s a win. And if you only have 5 minutes to share an idea, it’s really difficult to do anything more than that, period. So, get super clear on the 1 thing you want to communicate, and go back to this core idea over and over and over.

My idea was: humans need more energy at work, but there are “vampires” that suck it out.

In my talk I said the phrase “human energy” basically every other slide, 9 times in 5 minutes. I said the word “vampire” 14 times. This worked because I framed these 2 ideas as naturally-opposing forces within the first 30 seconds, so they reinforced my core concept again and again.

3) If you’re using visuals, get as close to 0 words as possible.

Over the course of 20 slides, I put a total of just 41 words on them. Only 8 of my slides had words for people to read. When I did use words, they looked like this:

People really can’t read and listen to you at the same time. So ideally, when you use words on slides, you should use them to exactly reinforce the point you are speaking about at that exact moment. (NOTE: This is additionally challenging when you have to perfectly align verbal statements with slides that are auto-advancing, but hopefully you won’t have to deliver with quite this precision!)

I love it when a speaker is able to line up their timing of “spoken word” with “visual word” — it just feels so “pro”… like watching amazing dance choreography or a something that was filmed and edited to perfection.

That’s all for now, my friends. I hope these tips help you elevate your ideas to the next level of impact!

Sorry about that.

If you’ll allow me, I’d like to explain what happened.

I will also ask you for a little extra grace, as the complete story probably deserves a full book (which I intend to write in the next year or two)… for today, though, let’s start with failure.

What do you think of when you hear the word “failure?”

To me, even the word itself feels like a big bummer. A let down. A big ‘ol ‘womp womp’ noise. It’s almost like an emotion… and not a nice one.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been contending with something that could be considered a HUGE failure:

I had to close the business I’ve been working on for the last 5 years.

This wasn’t a quick, painless death, either. It was slow and grueling, often gruesome to watch and heart-wrenching to bear.

At our height, our team was around 20 people from all over the world, kicking proverbial ass and building a seriously cool product. We had crafted a unique solution to a problem that costs global businesses $400B/year. We had a beautiful and diverse self-managing team with tremendous psychological safety, we created all our own content in-house, we had very little outside investment, our tech stack was ready for massive scale, and I truly believed we were building a billion dollar company.

But now it’s dead.

Like most things, this closure happened gradually and then suddenly. A few Fridays ago I found myself on a crappy government website paying $10 to file company dissolution paperwork with the Secretary of State.

It was an utterly underwhelming, bland, wholly unclimactic end to the dramatic roller coaster saga that consumed the last five years of my life.

I should also tell you: I’m quite scared to publish this.

I badly want you to see me as a “successful” entrepreneur, a leader who’s always “killin’ it,” a businessperson “crushing it,” yada yada.

I find myself wishing I would’ve just raised a pile of money (because for some reason that alone is considered ”a success” but that’s a topic for another day).

I catch myself thinking about all the things I could’ve done differently.

I feel an intense impulse to skip past these gory details and talk about a brighter future.

But I really think we first have to talk about failure.

Was this closure a failure??

It makes me think of my marriage. I was in a committed relationship with an amazing human for almost 20 years and in 2020 we decided to uncouple. People often talk about ended relationships like mine as “failed marriages,” but I am, frankly, insulted at the very thought. To me, my marriage was the opposite of a failure — it produced nearly two full decades of deep friendship, quite a few fabulous adventures, and two incredible kiddos. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

As I look at this business closure, I find myself with similar reflections.

Because as painful as it is to admit, I already know I could not have learned a fraction of what I have if there had been a “successful” outcome for this project. As annoying as it is (and it IS annoying, because parts of me would greatly prefer the trappings of success), I am unquestionably a better CEO, entrepreneur, and leader — not in spite of this massive “failure,” but because of it.

So… is it really a failure at all, then?

Maybe whatever this is is something else entirely… something we don’t have a good word for.

I think the closest I can get might be a phrase: “Sometimes you win; sometimes you learn.”

Since we’re in confession time, I’ll share one more.

I started speaking around 2011, just before my book came out. I was 30 years old, and though I really did know some things (mostly about leadership and an assessment then-called StrengthsFinder) I mostly felt like I was making it all up, constantly.

I was in hardcore “fake it ’til you make it” territory for YEARS. I leaned heavily on my intuition (which tends to be solid) and probably more than a little on the fact that pre-beard me looked even younger than I was, which I suspect gave me some kind of bonus “wunderkind” shine.

But now… now I’ve been beaten up a bit. By my divorce, by a pandemic, by being a parent for the last decade+, by running a tech startup, on and on. As my middle-schooler will happily tell you, these days there’s quite a lot of gray appearing in my beard.

Now I know many, many things I simply didn’t know before. I have “experience.” But as Little Red says in Into The Woods: “Isn’t it nice to know a lot? And a little bit not.”

Or… maybe it’s actually all nice?

I like to think the adage “nowhere to go but up” will apply to whatever comes next, but then again, I’m starting to see that, in many ways, maybe I’m already “up.”

Like failure, I’m learning it all depends on how we look at it.

Obviously tech is becoming more prominent in our lives, not less.

But SO much of the tech we’ve built to this point is to help me buy more things I don’t need.

Think of Instagram’s (seriously brilliant) algorithm — it’s VERY good at showing me the EXACT things I would want but didn’t even know existed… and now that I’ve seen them I NEED them…!

It’s fun… I guess.

Sometimes it’s helpful!

But can’t we do better than this?

What if we took that kind of technology and pointed it at improving the human experience??

Technology should not be a DISTRACTION to making my life better. It should be a fundamental assistant in MAKING my life better.

(This is even more important now as we’re starting to realize what GPTs will do.)

Technology can and should be used to make our lives fundamentally better.

We CAN increase the quality of the human experience through technology. But if we want this, we have to be intentional about building the technology in THAT way and not just creating it to increase the output of dollars into other people’s wallets.

This is an excerpt from my great conversation with Ashutosh Garg on The Brand Called You podcast! Check out the full episode…

🎙️PODCAST: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tbcy/episodes/Exploring-the-Future-of-Work-and-Habits–Josh-Allan-Dykstra–CEO-of-lovework-lovework-team-e27s6mh

📺 YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nChoN2Abds

In many of our organizations, we are completely misunderstanding the way great performance actually happens.

You see, performance is usually more about the dirt than the plant.

Let me explain…

The other day I was talking to a friend about the various trials and tribulations that often befall practitioners in our line of people-related organizational work. She told me a quick story, mentioning one of her friends from New Zealand who was completely flabbergasted by how much push-back we receive from buyers “over here” — that the questions we get about the “ROI” of people-work here in the U.S. would actually be considered nonsense in places like New Zealand, Australia, and parts of Europe.

The friend then said something to the effect of:

“Honestly… the premise that you wouldn’t water your plants…!!”

Honestly, indeed.

But this IS often our premise, isn’t it?

It’s far too easy for organizations to fall into a trap that expects our “human plants” to generate amazing results, somehow — magically, I guess? — without the right kinds of “dirt,” “water,” or “sunshine.” And I suppose it’s true that humans can, if pushed, toil heartily, well beyond healthy limits, into the danger zones of our bodies and minds and emotions and spirits.

But why is this the kind of thing we expect from each other?

And why on earth would we ever think this approach would create something like “GREAT performance?”

How can we honestly work the way we do and then look at each other and say, dumbfounded, with sincerity: “Why are these plants dying?!”

Alexander Den Heijer puts this very well: “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”

My favorite nuclear submarine captain David Marquet says something very similar:

Things work best when we work in flow with how the universe already functions.

Are you creating the kind of environment where people naturally create greatness? Next time you think about “performance” in your organization, think about the dirt instead of the plant.

I’m so excited to announce a brand new website at joshallan.com!

If you’re not already reading this there, I hope you’ll go check it out — it’s got a super fresh layout, dark theme vibes, bold colors, and a really fun new background speaking video at the top. Despite being one of the quickest website redesigns I’ve ever done, it’s also one of my favorites; it simplified everything dramatically and added a clear sense of focus to my work that feels really good with the tagline:

The Future Of Work Is Human Energy™

If my time at Impact Eleven’s Bootcamp in Detroit last month taught me anything, it was how essential differentiation is for, well, most things probably, but especially for speakers.

So, what makes me different from all the other Future Of Work speakers out there?

In a phrase, it’s the topic of Human Energy™.

And it’s not just a cool phrase; this has been my deep area of study for the last 15 years. (Here’s an article I did on this very topic for HuffPost almost 10 years ago!)

My obsession with Human Energy™ started way back when Invisible Tribe‘s subtitle became Designing An Organization That Doesn’t Suck. Of course, being an Enneagram 8 I have always loved telling people the subtitle because it invariably gets a reaction, but more than that I’ve always meant it quite literally. Organizations have largely failed their humans because of all their sucking — sucking joy from people, sucking time from calendars, sucking resources from the planet, and so on — and because of their treasonous lack of giving.

But what they suck most is our ENERGY.

Our work too often leaves us feeling battered and bruised, drained and exhausted… left with virtually nothing in our tank at the end of our workday.

And one of the worst parts is we’ve come to accept this as normal.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Organizations CAN (and should) be designed to NOT suck. They can and should be designed to give humans more energy than they take.

The future, as we should make it, should be one where we finally rid ourselves of energy-sucking jobs so we can get to work on the stuff that actually makes life worth living.

I didn’t have a clue what was happening. I was traveling for work, and woke up in my hotel room around 2am Paris time with shallow, rapid breathing and tightness around my upper chest and throat.

I honestly thought I was dying.

I didn’t have a clue what to do, either. My thoughts were racing…

“Do I go to the doctor? Where would I even go? How would I get there? I don’t speak a bit of French… that would definitely be problematic. What about health insurance? Would my garbage U.S. plan somehow cover this? If it even mattered, because I was probably a goner…”

I was terrified.

I called my wife in Denver, and thankfully she was awake (hooray for time zones!) and able to help me understand what was likely happening to me.

I didn’t put all the pieces together until much later — after many more panic attacks, frequent trips to the doctor, some very helpful medication, lots of talk therapy, and an amazing EMDR app — that my panic attacks seemed to be caused by my impending divorce (which finalized the following year) and the fracture that caused in my envisioned future.

These days, I am medication-free but every once in awhile I still pull out the EMDR app — I now know the signals of what anxiety feels like inside my body, and I can preempt it before it becomes an attack.

And while most days my anxiety isn’t present, I know it’s not gone completely.

But it is manageable.

It’s Mental Health Awareness Month.

And you are not alone.

If you know of any associations, companies, or podcasts looking for a Future Of Work speaker with specialty expertise in Mental Health, Change & Transformation, Leadership, and Company Culture please let me know.

My speaking page is HERE and you can download my Speaker Kit HERE.

And you can watch my brand new Speaker Demo right here… volume UP and get ready, it’s pretty epic. 😎

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For the full update, keep reading below the video…

My Road To Speaking (Again) In 2024

I have this story I tell myself that when most professional speakers deliver a TEDx Talk, they grow their speaking career after the talk goes live.

Well, this is exactly what I didn’t do.

I had some pretty good reasons, though.

In 2018, the year I did TEDx, I had recently moved across the country from Los Angeles to Denver with two very small kiddos (when we arrived: a 2-year-old and a 4-month-old baby). Technically we had lived here before, but enough had changed in our decade away that it felt like we’d moved to a completely unfamiliar city.

We were definitely starting over, we just knew a few of the streets.

In addition to the natural stresses of dadhood with young kids, my business was also undergoing tectonic changes, rebranding to Helios with new business partners and refocusing on a completely new core business model of certifying coaches, consultants, and HR people.

I was also a bit burned out on work travel, having been stuck on a near-constant setting of “airplane mode” for the past decade. I wanted to stop living in airports and be home with the kiddos more. For whatever reason — probably good advice from enough wise people — I had a lot of clarity that there’s something fleeting and precious about the baby years, and I refused to be the “Cat’s In The Cradle business guy” who missed them.

So I started speaking less, not more. I focused my energy on our Helios training events, which were largely in Denver. I didn’t put any kind of real promotional juice or effort behind sharing my TEDx — it wouldn’t actually surprise me if some of you reading this might be just now learning, or remembering, I did one!

I considered writing another business book, but felt more compelled to build a tech product (the thing we now call #lovework). I began having meetings with tech founders and doing lots of research, convinced that A) we needed to build and own our own product instead of just offering someone else’s and B) it needed to be tech in order to be scalable enough to meet the size of The Problem.

Reminder — The Problem: most everyone doesn’t like work but then spends the majority of their waking lives doing it.

And then, of course, came a little global pandemic. As well as my divorce. The relatively stable Helios training business we’d built was very negatively impacted by COVID, so we accelerated our efforts to pivot to #lovework. It felt like a scramble, an extended “all hands on deck” crisis moment that would last for literally years.

I got consumed by the building of this “tech thing.” I stopped speaking, stopped doing workshops, and stopped writing anything that wasn’t content for the app. With the constant undulating challenges of fundraising, ever-evolving go to market strategies, delivering paid pilots to customers, problems with developers, forever being on the cusp of running out of money, and even a major defection in our leadership team, it took all my energy to just keep this thing on the rails.

In the time after the pandemic, #lovework rode the waves, kept afloat by the tailwinds of “The Great Resignation” and a solid labor market where workers could make demands of employers and have them heard… but then the winds changed.

2023 brought a meltdown of capital markets and a flurry of “return to office” mandates, along with a constriction of HR Tech and SaaS products (of which #lovework is both).

It seemed our buyers were largely burned out on helping their people deal with burnout.

But as happens in entrepreneurship, challenges in one area often open a new door of opportunity somewhere else…

I started noticing that I really missed being with people. I missed being on stages. I missed writing things everyone could read. I missed sharing ideas and helping people think a little different about the world. I missed encouraging us all to think a little bigger, and brighter, about the future.

I also realized that the “speaking” part of my career felt quite incomplete — that I hadn’t yet accomplished what I set out to do in that space.

I’m so incredibly proud of what I and the #lovework team built over the last 5 years. #lovework is the coolest thing I have ever helped create, and hopefully it’ll continue to help lots and lots people (my goal is to get it to millions)!

AND it’s time for me to re-spread my wings as a speaker and thought leader.

I’ve learned a LOT in the last 5 years… about how to be a tech founder, how to grow a team, how to raise money, how to scale culture, how to optimize work for mental health, how to build products, how to create a better future, and yes, SO much more about how work can heal the world.

So, hello stages — I’m back!

I can’t wait to share with you all some of the things I’ve been learning. Got something you want to chat about? Please don’t hesitate to hit me up. I hope I get to see you soon!