Be-Good. Get-Better.
Getting more shots on the (AI CLI) goal
The knowledge worker playbook is by and large:
Show Competence, Add Value, Get Rewarded.
Heidi Grant Halvorson refers to these as “Be Good” goals: demonstrate you are smart, talented, and capable (a Millennial generational anthem).
“Get Better” goals on the other hand (intuitively) have to do with developing skills, often slowly over time (hello compounding).1
Get Better goals often take a back seat to Be Good goals; we often (intend to) chase after them on Fridays, evenings, or weekends, and they usually get crowded out by things like family and friends, staring into the void, and cruises on YouTube highways.
Which is seemingly OK.
Be Good mode keeps us performing which we hope helps us keep our jobs.
But Be Good mode can also suspend us from experimenting, which means we don’t learn.
For knowledge workers and AI right now, these Be Good and Get Better modes are tighter than they’ve maybe ever been.
People genuinely want to get better at AI.
But the Be Good box is getting ticked while the Get Better odometer doesn’t move.
In our jobs, AI adoption is largely a Get Better goal. It’s work that needs to be put in over and above our Status Quo Striving.
Pseudo-dangerously, I think that when we feel as though we might not be able to deliver on Be Good goals using AI, we fall into narratives that pit the tool against ourselves (”It’s not that good“) instead of acknowledging, à la Get Better, that we don’t know how to use it well (yet).
So how do we find the activation energy to Press Go even when we don’t know (or when we’re too tired to continue staring at our screens while horizontal on our sofas)?
Lower the effort.
For individuals, check out the AI Snack Club or Hilary Gridley’s Couch-to-5K for AI. For both, the general ethos is bite-sized ideas, real applications, quick feedback loops.
For organizations, this is psychological safety, which has been studied to death and ignored almost as often. Concretely, orgs should allow for explicit Get Better time on the calendar that isn’t graded; time blocks don’t need to be long but they need to be consistent so there’s compounding over time.
As Tim Pychyl noted, procrastination is not a time management problem, it’s an emotional management problem. Companies need to create space and time to be Less Good (in this economy? I know, I know. But I’m convinced those that consider it a corporate slingshot will win).
And, to plug shamelessly, this is part of why I’m building a conversational diagnostic that lowers the activation energy of finding (exciting! valuable!) AI use cases by working backward from your actual work and life.
The first step into AI is too often a blank-box, blinking cursor gap. The cheaper the first conversation, the more likely the Get Better odometer actually moves.
Even with all of this scaffolding, though, the hardest part remains the willingness to look like a beginner where people can see you.
Giving yourself permission to be in Get Better mode in public is a lot harder than it sounds.
Maybe it’s a Millennial thing (hi).
Maybe it’s an everyone thing. I do not know.
I sat down to write this morning and immediately started worrying about whether this was going to be good.
The post you are reading was written in Get Better mode.
It might not be good. That’s the point.