As is often the case, nanoseconds after you decide to focus on something, its exact opposite jumps out in front of you.
This often feels like a cosmic jump scare — the real-life equivalent of the horror movie technique guaranteed to frighten the viewer.
For example, someone innocent opens a medicine cabinet and when they shut it, the killer’s right there in the mirror standing right behind them.
My own surprises this week were less dramatic — and considerably less life-threatening — but nonetheless as jolting.
All of this because I decided on Possibility as the theme for this month (new meditation HERE).
Part of my choice was that my friend Jim Curtis’ new work, The Book of Possibility, was just released, and I’ve chosen it for this month’s Transformation Book Club.
(You can join us for $50 or $5 a month HERE.)
Beyond that, though, I have to share that impossibility became a strange lens through which I viewed the final days of my Harvard Business School experience.
Most of the evaluations are conducted by AI clones of famous professors.
They’ve done a good job of nailing their speaking voices down, but you’re basically speaking to a frozen Zoom screen of a person.
The trippy thing is that a simulated human face creates an expectation of normal human interaction, yet none of our normal feedback mechanisms exist.
The AI clones have no microexpressions and they aren’t able to read yours.
Unlike any real-life interaction in which you are presenting something, there’s no possibility of warming up to each other.
Although I’ve been to her website and seen her smiling family photos on Instagram, the professor clone you speak to for your two-minute elevator pitch seems programmed to be particularly cold.
Despite the miracle of this technology, there’s no way to connect with her, much less make her laugh or even smile.
In fact, it’s utterly impossible.
It’s funny how enormously restrictive that can feel.
Years ago, a creative mentor of mine held workshops for performers to help them determine their type, transforming typecasting into an empowering identification with one’s innate strengths.
The key was pinpointing where they really shone — whether that was humor, charm, vulnerability, sexiness, or even danger or quirkiness — and maximizing that.
Not having that reminded me of another time when my touchstone strengths — ones I took for granted — were suddenly erased.
A year or two after college, I received an urgent phone call from a friend early one morning.
They had a production job on an edgy independent film and were desperately in need of a few more background extras.
Free and happy to help out, I showed up on set, where my freshly scrubbed 24-year-old self was transformed into a crack addict.
After the hair and make-up teams and costumers had finished with me, the director — a well-known auteur — took one look at me and declared:
“He still looks too goddamn healthy!”
I eventually got scuffed up enough to pass muster, stood in the background for an arrest scene, enjoyed craft services, and then was wrapped for the day before sundown.
The crew had blackened out a few teeth and made the others look decayed, gunked up my hair, and added some grime to my face.
Initially amused by the novelty of it all, I was amazed by how differently the world treated “crack addict” me as I took the subway home still in costume and make-up.
When I smiled to buy a token, the attendant didn’t really smile back.
No one was eager to sit near me either.
In some ways, it was the inverse of the Harvard AI experience.
Language had no power in those moments.
No matter how well-spoken I was, only visible social assets mattered.
Oddly, the unreachable quality of the two-minute elevator pitch clone can be quite amusing, even liberating.
I wanted to show some colleagues how the process worked in a Zoom call, and so I pitched an absolutely absurd business notion I improvised on the spot.
The clone’s expressions were exactly the same as when I shared the wellness platform we’ve been working on for several years.
Nothing I say — no matter how brilliant or how ridiculous — can alter her programming.
That implacability definitely reminds me of several people I know.
One of my favorite (admittedly very far out there) spiritual guides is Bashar.
One of his most brilliant ideas is this:
Trying to manipulate the outside world to give you the response you want is like waiting for your reflection in the mirror to smile first.
“You cannot make it conditional: ‘I’ll smile when the reflection smiles.’ Physical reality is literally nothing but a mirror. It cannot smile before you do.”
My AI experience is almost a literal version of this: I can keep trying, but the “person” opposite me will never give me the external reassurance I want.
As in most of life, the only available shift is internal.
Segueing back to Possibility, however, the obvious literary choice from Emily Dickinsonalways delights me.
She’s speaking about poetry versus prose, of course, but she gives wing to so many more expansive ideas, too.
I dwell in Possibility
A fairer house than Prose,
More numerous of windows,
Superior of doors.Of chambers, as the cedars —
Impregnable of eye;
And for an everlasting roof
The gables of the sky.Of visitors — the fairest —
For occupation — this —
The spreading wide my narrow hands
To gather Paradise.
And now, for the plot twist —
This week I not only finished the Harvard bootcamp program — and I kid you not, there was a brief moment of digital confetti when I hit the final “submit” — but also completed the application for their Catalyst program, the next phase.
Throughout, Harvard had stressed that the application deadline for Catalyst was a hard endpoint.
The moment I hit submit on the application, however, they revealed completely new information.
Only then did a screen appear saying that the most important parts (like the pitch deck itself) could be updated … through February 1st!
What was presented as a fixed line carved in stone suddenly became a permeable membrane.
Moments after I submitted my plans, it was almost like I was being taunted with:
“OK … let’s see if you really mean that.
You have four months to get back to us.”
It’s a sneaky way of encouraging — maybe even enforcing — accountability.
Or, as I’ve taken to calling it, “Possibility Entrapment.”
Allow me to end on a human note.
Accepting the limited possibilities of the unsmiling two-minute elevator pitch AI somehow allowed me to make peace with a few challenging souls in my immediate environment.
I realized — like with the clone — that nothing I say will ever produce the response I want.
Their programming is limited and — like waiting for the reflection in the mirror to smile first — their response is utterly out of my control.
Perhaps, as with the Catalyst deadline, everything will miraculously shift, but I can live in a reality where that does not happen.
Like Emily, I can “dwell in possibility,” knowing that the ones within me are infinite.
Tell A New Story. Transform Your Life.