This week, someone gave me this proverbial Confucius advice in relation to a social media strategy, "The man who chases two rabbits catches neither." It's advice I have heard and given a lot in my personal and professional life: focus, pick one thing, don't scatter your energy if you want to achieve a goal.
Later, I started thinking about this proverb in a broader sense. Historically, this made a lot of sense, because it turned out often to be true, given the time, effort and mastery required to achieve a goal.
Our fascination with modern and historical polymaths, Musk, Jobs, da Vinci, Franklin, reinforces this belief. Being at top 1% of of anything, let alone in multiple disciplines is billon-dollar-winning-lottery-ticket unlikely.
But now, because of AI, outputs like research, models and even creative arts that used to take time and deep skill can now be compressed into seconds and minutes, How many of us have received something from someone over the past year that was at a much higher level of output then we had ever seen. And how many of us when probing the author, discovered that they couldn't explain what they sent.
In relation to the proverb, now we don't just have two rabbits, we are standing in a field of rabbits and we don't have to chase them, we can merely bend down and pick up one or many without any effort.
This changes something big.
For a long time, the result and the effort were tied together. The result (the caught rabbit) signaled all the effort and mastery behind it. Now that assumption vanishes, output reflects neither knowledge, nor effort nor mastery. There is something sad and unfair about that.
I think this may be part of what people are reacting to at this moment in history, and I found myself thinking about it in relation to the Super Bowl. This year it drew the second-highest viewership in history. On the field, effort is still visible, skill and outcome are fused.
In a world where so much can be generated with little mental and physical effort, there's something extremely grounding about watching something that cannot be.
Which makes me wonder whether the proverb is wrong from here on. Catching a rabbit used to imply the work behind it. Now, often it doesn't.
And then another Confucius-attributed proverb came to mind, "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." If producing things becomes easier, maybe what separates people isn't how much they produce, but whether they really understand what they've done and the limits of what they know, and whether they want to understand more. It looks like AI may be giving us that time.
It's a good thing I think, Confucius has a lot of proverbs.