Most teams do not have a meeting problem, we have a clarity problem that produces meetings. Meetings are often the interest payment on decisions we did not structure, documents we did not write, and expectations we did not make visible early. When clarity is missing, we compensate by gathering people in real time to sort it out. AI can help us reduce meeting hours, but not by “summarizing meetings better.” The bigger time win is preventing unnecessary meetings in the first place by making work clearer before we sync. When we do that, we shrink time-to-decision, reduce follow-up loops, and protect deep work. ------------- How Meeting Debt Builds ------------- Meeting debt is like technical debt. We take a shortcut today, “Let’s just talk it through,” and we pay for it later with compounding costs. Each meeting spawns another: a pre-meeting to align, the meeting itself, and a follow-up to clarify what we decided. Add in context switching and the time it takes to regain focus, and the true cost is much larger than the calendar block. We often schedule meetings because we are trying to resolve ambiguity live. The agenda is vague, the goal is unclear, and the decision criteria are not defined. People show up with different assumptions and different levels of context. Then we spend half the meeting getting everyone to the same starting line. Here is the common micro-scenario. A stakeholder asks, “Where are we on this?” The team has progress, but it is scattered across Slack, email, and someone’s head. Instead of writing a crisp update, we schedule a meeting. The meeting produces more discussion than clarity, and now we need another meeting to finalize a decision. The work did not move forward, it just moved around. AI does not remove the need for human conversation. It reduces the time we spend using conversation to compensate for missing artifacts. When we bring clarity into the work earlier, meetings become shorter, fewer, and more decisive. ------------- Insight 1: Meetings Expand to Fill Uncertainty -------------

In this video, I go over the various updates and releases from Google and Anthropic, discusses the upcoming AI hardware releases from Apple and OpenAI, tests out a frankly creepy demo of a live interactive AI avatar, and more. Enjoy!

You failed. Okay. Take a breath. First, let’s just acknowledge something. You were in the arena. You put something out there. You risked looking stupid. You risked it not working. That already puts you ahead of the majority of people who are still “thinking about it” or “getting ready.” Failure has a way of messing with your head. It makes you question yourself. It makes you wonder if maybe you’re not cut out for this. But almost every time, it’s not about who you are. It’s about what you did. There’s a big difference. When something doesn’t work, it’s usually a strategy issue, a clarity issue, a focus issue, or just not enough reps. It’s rarely an identity issue. But if you make it about your identity, you’ll shrink. If you make it about the approach, you’ll grow. So instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” ask, “What can I learn from this?” What broke? What did I assume that wasn’t true? Where did I hesitate? Where did I rush? If you paid the emotional price of the failure, at least get the lesson out of it. That’s where the value is. The only real danger isn’t failing. It’s quitting. It’s deciding that this one outcome defines you. It doesn’t. It defines a moment. And moments can be adjusted. Sometimes you don’t need more effort. You need a different angle. Sometimes you don’t need a new dream. You need more reps. Sometimes you just need to stay in the game longer than the discomfort. Failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s the path to it. And once you stop being afraid of it, once you realize it can’t actually hurt you unless you let it stop you, you start playing differently. You start playing to win instead of playing not to lose. That’s the shift. So let me ask you this...What did your last setback teach you and what are you going to adjust because of it?