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Philip
In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking about a rough formula I derived to help nonprofits think about how to use AI ethically and responsibly to strengthen an organization, which is:
AI → Time → Trust
Smart technology can help us reclaim our time, and we should reinvest a portion of that time in building trust and relationships. While I continue to believe this is a helpful and correct equation, I am also beginning to understand how our culture impinges heavily on the decisions we make about how we spend our time.
My mother once told me a story about a time when she was a young girl playing in a lake, and as she kept pouring buckets of water into the center hole of an inner tube, she wondered why the lake was not emptying, nor was she making any progress filling her inner tube. This reminds me of how many of us spend the time we “save” these days. Uses tool to save time, pours time into more work…
If AI tools allow us to perform a task in one fifth of the time, will we truly save the other four fifths, or will we simply do five times as much work? In my experience, the brunt of social and cultural pressure encourages the latter, and like an inner tube with no bottom, our system does little to help us to know when enough is enough. Without the ability to reach such a threshold, it will be extremely challenging to change our behavior in order to allocate more time to trust building, no matter how urgently we need it.
Enoughness, my new word, is all around us and we innately recognize its goodness. In sports, for instance, the crowd goes wild when a golfer uses precisely enough force in just the right direction to cause a hole-in-one. The most delicious recipes combine the right ingredients, in particular proportions, in the right way. In our bodies, we are healthy when cells replicate and die at a precisely balanced rate, and we experience disease when cells proliferate in excess. Achieving enoughness, reaching equilibrium, is often an exquisite and beautiful experience.
And yet, despite innumerable natural examples of specific constraints yielding incredible value, we’ve somehow come to construct our entire economic system based upon the opposite concept — more, more, always more. In work and in life, many of us, myself included, often feel that what we have, what we do, even who we are simply isn’t enough. We must do more, have more, and be more.
In the wise words of Tim Rice, ideally backed by the music of Elton John and singing by Lebo M and Carmen Twillie,
From the day we arrive on the planet
And, blinking, step into the sun
There's more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There's far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found
But the sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round
It's the circle of life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
'Til we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the circle
The circle of life
For all of us, there really is more to do than can ever be done. Acknowledging this truth can be the beginning of finding our way back to the circle of enough. This is not permission to lower our ambitions, it is a call to make them more precise. Instead of an unfocused pursuit of quantity, let us aspire to a focused pursuit of quality and balance.
This will require us to be somewhat countercultural. People and organizations that succeed in defining for themselves what it means to do enough will be rejecting what our culture at large may support. There’s so much work to do, so much suffering to alleviate, so many people to save — how can you stop?
My answer is I believe many of the problems we’re working so hard to solve originate substantially from our inattentiveness to how much of a thing is enough. On an individual level, the kinds of decisions we make from a place of exhaustion and scarcity can have consequences that reverberate in much larger ways. In the same way on an organizational level, the drive to do more (or do the most) can sometimes erode core values and even come into direct conflict with the mission, itself.
AI will make it much easier to blow past the exit, the off ramp to enough. If we do, and we push ourselves and our teams to achieve even greater levels of AI-augmented productivity, it will become that much harder to slow down later on. Using AI assistance in this way could result in faster burnout if the machines set the pace instead of the other way around.
The pivotal moment comes when using a smart tool has saved us a bit of time and energy, and before we’ve poured those savings into another task. How can we gain inspiration from the endless examples of enoughness all around to help us embrace our own version of satiation? A note held just long enough to make the song. A game winner at the buzzer from half court. A fruit picked and enjoyed on the day of its peak ripeness. A poem pristine to the final stanza.
Correct conditions allow for flourishing, this is the natural way of things. Ignoring constraints is an unnatural and contrived way of being. I’m aware of many levels of irony as I write these words from the waiting room of an auto repair shop trying to “stay productive” and to hit my weekly newsletter posting goal, all while getting my brakes fixed so I can slow down. This note has taken me longer than usual to write, much of the effort spent seeking a topic I felt was good enough. I’ve now decided, it is.
2023 Fundraising.AI Virtual Global Summit
Please check out the upcoming 2023 Fundraising.AI Virtual Global Summit taking place on October 23 and 24, 2023, which is free to register and I hope many readers will participate.
The Summit will virtually bring together more than 30 speakers to facilitate numerous tracks of thoughtful discussion, and for all of us to build this community as a force for good. Please join us!
Thanks for reading this edition of The Process. Please share and comment or you can email me at philip.deng@grantable.co
Philip Deng is the CEO of Grantable, a company building AI-powered grant writing software to empower mission-driven organizations to access grant funding they deserve.