Perspective Is a Leadership Skill | Shimmy Says Ep. 41

Perspective Is a leadership Skill, And it matters most When success becomes expected and an era quietly ends. Hey everyone, it's Shimmy. Welcome to Shimmy says, look, this week it's going to be a personal shimmy says, and if you're not into football or sports, I apologize in advance, but I do connect it to technology.

So hang around and listen to what I got to say here this week. You know, for those of you know who know me, I am a amazing Pittsburgh Steelers fan. I live and breathe Steelers football.

And for me, I've been a Pittsburgh Steelers fan almost my whole life. Um, I'm not from Pittsburgh, But I've seen, you know, I started being a Steelers fan. Truth be told, in like 1969, I played peewee football, uh, for the Rosedale Jets, and we wore black and yellow uniforms with lemonhead yellow, uh, helmets.

And I've been a Steelers fan ever since. You know what? And for most of my, for most of my life, it was a great thing.

I've been very fortunate 'cause my team won. The Steelers won. They won a lot.

They were the first team to win six World Championships, and still only them in the Patriots. They've, they've really been a remarkable team. This week was a big week for us.

We just, uh, we haven't won the Super Bowl in a while. And you know what? We just lost in the wild card round again, this marks seven straight playoff exits in the wild card round in the first round where we haven't made it.

And as a result of that, something happened this Monday. Coach Mike Tomlin stepped down after 19 years. Tomlin.

He wasn't fired like John Harbaugh over at the Ravens. Now maybe with the Giants. He just, he felt it was time to go that he wasn't doing the team any good.

And after 19 sec seasons, he stepped away. We think about that, a football coach with the same team for 19 seasons. In those 19 seasons, Tomlin never had a losing season.

He won a Super Bowl, he lost another. But maybe most important, when you, when you ask the NFL players, where did they wanna play? What coach did they wanna play for?

They all said, most of them anyway, he said, Tomlin, I want to go play for the Steelers and Coach T. And it's funny, 'cause Pittsburgh, you know, it's not the biggest market out there. It's not the most glamorous market, but they wanna play for Coach Tomlin.

And in today's NFL, that alone says something. It says something about character. It says something about stability.

You haven't won a playoff game in years, and still players want to come here. But you know, I get it. People, patients wear thin, people get frustrated winning records during the regular season alone.

They start to feel hollow and they don't turn into championship rings. I get it as much as the next guy. I bleed black and gold or black and yellow as the song says.

But most Steelers fans today, they that are alive today, they've never really experienced sustained losing. They don't know what it's like to be a Jets fan or a Cleveland Browns fan. And I mean, no disrespect to the Jets and Browns fans, they're great fans, but you know what?

Entire generations of Browns and Jet fans would throw a parade for never having a losing season. And that's why I think perspective matters. Perspective matters.

Think about that. Perspective matters. And I know what you're saying.

All right, shimmy, you talked a lot about football. What's this got to do with tech? Well, that's where this starts being about something bigger than football.

Because I think it, it's, it's the same thing in technology. It's the same thing. We live in tech, in, in civilization today, all all through it.

We live in inherent right now that for our grandparents would've sounded like science fiction. Like something out of some futuristic book. Think about it.

Think about some of the things we take for granted today. We get on a plane, a jet airplane that cruises at 40,000 feet, going over 500 miles an hour. We're in this giant metal tube with wings.

And what do we do when we're on there? Well, while we're there, if we're not watching TV or a movie, we're scrolling the internet, answering emails, text messaging. Some of us are even doing Zoom calls.

I know you're not supposed to be doing Zoom calls on the plane, but some of us are. And what happens? Wifi goes down or it gets a little slow.

You would think it's the end of the world. We b***h like little babies. Instead of realizing just how remarkable this really is, we walk around with super computers in our pockets that have more power and more computing potential than the computers that powered the Apollo rockets to the moon.

We are con, we are continuously connected to the sum total of all human knowledge at any time at our fingerprints. We don't have to go to the library and look at the card catalog. We don't have to look stuff up in encyclopedias.

We just ask for it. And it's there. We have AI systems today, I get it.

They don't really think, they don't really reason like humans, but man, if we took someone from a couple of a generation or two ago, they wouldn't know the difference. And a lot of us know, know the difference when we're talking to them at two in the morning either. So I think we're all a little guilty sometimes of losing perspective instead of stepping back and saying, wow, this is just crazy that we happen to be alive at this moment in time where these amazing things are going on.

Instead, we complain, right? AI generated code. Some of people are saying 60% of AI of code today is generated by ai.

And what are people saying? Well, this code has some bugs. It's not perfect, it's not the security issues.

Or we ask AI a question and we say, well, that answer feels a little shallow, dig a little deeper, and it digs a little deeper. Instead of saying, wow, it dug a little deeper, instead of saying, wow, it generated this app. Maybe there's a a mistake here or there that we could fix.

We complain about it. We're complaining right now. You know, it's a funny thing.

Human generated code has roughly the same amount of vulnerabilities per x lines of code consistently. Ai, when it first started coding couldn't even get syntax rate, right? It had a lot more vulnerabilities per x lines of code.

But over time, a lot of people say it's about even right now, AI generated code generates the same amount of vulnerabilities as human generated code. But that's not good enough. That's not good enough.

People want better. We want it be perfect code and we'll get it perfect. But right now, only as good as a human could do is the best we could do.

And we, we complain about it. You know, if I told went back to the eighties and we told coders back then what that AI was writing this kind of code on level with humans, they, they would think you're writing some kind of sci-fi movie script. And here's the other thing about it.

AI generated code, just like other technology, cell phones, the internet, it keeps getting better. We keep making improvements. It may not be revolutionary day to day, it's evolutionary day to day, but it keeps getting better.

Don't even get me started on robotics, right? If, if you watched any of the demos or videos or you were lucky enough to be out at CES, you saw the next generations of robots. They're walking, manipulating objects, interacting with people doing real world jobs, not just task.

And I'm not talking about some clunky Robbie, the robot nonsense or robotic dogs that we marvel about not falling over while they're on a treadmill. I'm talking about humanoid robots that can take, can do real jobs today. Are they perfect?

No. Do they walk a little stiffly compared maybe to humans still? Yes.

Are they getting better every day? You betcha, right? But remember, the internet when it came out, smartphone, when they came out, even airplanes, they all went through this improvement process.

Progress is not necessarily linear. It's messy. It makes great leap, then it slows down.

You make a small step forward, two steps back. But when you, when you look at it over the course of time, progress is constant. And it always has been.

That's, that's the nature of the human experience. So as we stand here today, it's the beginning of a new year. We're standing on the edge on the precipice of technologies that could fundamentally reshape civilization.

I'm talking about things like quantum computing and fusion power. These aren't sci-fi moonshots anymore. They're engineering problems that very smart people are working on right now.

And they're, we're on the, we're on the cusp of just really seeing them commercialized. Is this gonna solve everything? No.

Right? But just like the Steelers aren't guaranteed to win another Super Bowl, we aren't guaranteed to have quantum computing next year or anything else like that. But the fact that we're even having these conversations should tell us something important.

And that is the important thing I want you to take here. Keep your perspective. Let me mess with you a little bit.

Imagine we went back and took like Marty McFly from back to the Future, from the fifties to the sixties, you know, or sixties back here today. McFly jokes aside, you showed them that we talk to people around the world on our cell phones. We go on the web and, and what we can access through it, how we interact with AI assistance.

We don't have, you know, antennas or make our kids make all kinds of different type of, uh, contortions while holding an antenna to get a, to get a, uh, a picture anymore, right? Streaming video on demand. We have navigation apps that we tell it where we're going to, and it tells us where the traffic jams are that moment.

We have grocery stores that don't have cashiers. Well, forget about what are we doing Manipulating crispr, right? Manipulating DNA, editing our d very own DNA, how we work, how we communicate, how we entertain themselves.

I guarantee you, they wouldn't ask what's broken. They'd be overwhelmed by what works. Talk to generation.

Talk to programmers from two generations ago. These people were using slide rules and punch cards. Today they're asking AI to build applications for them.

Dinosaur movies. King Kong, you had people with clay animations filming film by film, 30 frames a second film by filming of a dinosaur walking. They didn't have a computer or computer generated graphics to do what we're doing.

You on our movies today, that alone would freak people out. You took 'em to the movie or watch, made 'em watch a movie today. And yet today everybody wants perfection and they want it.

Now it's perspective, my friends, it's perspective. Let me give you another great example. Cybersecurity.

Yes, the threats are real. The bad guys are relentless. They're using ai.

They always seem one step ahead. It's hard. It's hard doing cybersecurity.

But we forget the amount of work that keeps our internet pretty much up minute by minute, second by second five nines, reliability across the board. That doesn't happen without the work of a lot of people. It doesn't happen without steady improvement.

It doesn't happen without people like Dan Kaminski. They rest in peace who quietly prevented the whole internet from breaking because of DNS errors and, and structure. Most people don't even know who Dan is, and they don't really care.

They don't know how, how close it was to the whole internet breaking. But these are the kinds of things that happen day in and day out when people are working to continuously improve the state of our humanity, the state of our technology. And you know what, just like some Steeler fans didn't appreciate Coach Tomlin or the fact that we had 19 seasons of non losing seasons.

We don't as humans don't always appreciate the stability, the, the technology, the state of, of, of our lives today, right? Coach Mike Tomlin wasn't perfect. No one's perfect and the Steelers aren't perfect, and our technology sure as hell isn't perfect.

But perfection has never been the measure of progress. It's the arc. It's about the arc.

You know what they say? The days may be long and the years are short. Sometimes you gotta step back and look at the arc.

You look at the arc of technology. Progress is undeniable. We're better off today than we were yesterday because of it.

And we'll be dramatically better off than we were a generation ago. And we'll be dramatically better off a generation from now. We're standing on the edge of another leap forward, one that finally may help us tackle and solve some of humanity's hardest, longest problems.

I can't promise you that AI is gonna help us cure every single disease. And I can't promise you that robotics and AI and clean energy, fusion energy are gonna solve poverty no more than I can promise the Steelers are gonna win a seven Super Bowl. But I can promise you this, and this is where I want you to go with this.

I said it and I'm gonna say it again. Perspective matters. Perspective matters.

So I salute Coach Mike Tomlin for setting a standard of excellence that few leaders, let alone just football coaches can match. I marvel at the state of technology today, and I am so darn grateful to be alive at this time, to be able to see it, use it, be part of it, and yeah, complain about it once in a while too, because that is the human condition. Because, because complaining from this vantage point is still a pretty amazing place to be.

So it's not what Shimmy says, it's what Coach Tomlin says. The standard is the standard. I'm shimmy.

We're out.