A few years ago, Kade found this phone in an antique store. Without missing a beat, he picked it up and started talking into it like he'd used one his entire life...or ever, for that matter.
I snapped this picture because it made me laugh. Here he was standing in front of a phone that hadn't been connected to anything in ages, pretending to have a conversation. Meanwhile, the rest of us walk around carrying devices with more computing power than NASA used to send astronauts to the moon, and somehow, we're all more confused than ever.
The past few days, I've been thinking about this picture a lot. Not because of the phone, but because of its simplicity.
There was a time when technology felt so much easier to understand. You picked up a phone, dialed a number, and somebody answered. If they didn't answer, they weren't home. If they weren't home, we did not know where they were. That was the extent of the mystery.
Today, I can publish an article, post it across multiple social media channels, send a newsletter, and watch a dozen analytics dashboards light up with charts, percentages, impressions, engagements, and metrics that sound important enough to justify their own MBA course.
For example, algorithms. Every platform has one. Every platform is constantly tweaking it. Every platform insists it's helping connect people with the most relevant content. Yet somehow the experience feels less like science and more like trying to understand women (Admit it, Ladies. We're complicated.).
You spend hours writing something thoughtful and nobody sees it.
But...if you post a random observation about coffee, dogs, or airport delays, suddenly thousands of people engage with it.
The craziest part are all the people who claim they've "cracked the code" for all of humanity. And...for the low low price of $49, you can join their webinar where they will explain X algorithm, why it's obvious, and how you can subscribe to their proprietary framework and capitalize on it.
Amazing!! Here I am. I can't even figure out why my own posts perform differently from one week to the next.
What frustrates me is not technology itself. I love technology. I strive to use the latest and greatest tools available to make our business run more efficiently.
What frustrates me is the growing expectation that we are supposed to build predictable strategies around systems that are intentionally opaque.
Google decides who gets found. LinkedIn decides who gets found. Meta decides who gets found. TikTok decides who gets found. AI increasingly decides which sources get cited.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are left refreshing dashboards and trying to convince ourselves there is a logical explanation for everything.
Maybe there is. Maybe there isn't. I don't know. What I do know is the older I get, the more comfortable I get admitting I don't know.
Every time I chase the latest algorithm update, platform trend, or growth hack, I end up feeling like I'm renting my success from somebody else's system...and they could shut it down at any moment, for any reason.
That old yellow Mickey Mouse phone wasn't about metrics. Kade wasn't trying to "optimize" a conversation with an imaginary person. He simply picked it up...and started talking.
He wasn't thinking about reach, impressions, engagement, or conversion rates. He was just...communicating.
Somewhere along the way, I think many of us lost sight of that. We've become obsessed with measuring visibility because it's easy to measure. We can count clicks, views, followers, shares, impressions, and engagement. We can build charts and dashboards and reports that make us feel like we're in control.
The reality is, the things that actually matter have always been much harder to quantify.
- Trust.
- Reputation.
- Relationships.
- The confidence someone has when they recommend you to a friend.
- The reason a client calls you first when they have a problem or need a resource recommendation.
- The feeling people get when they think about you or your business.
None of those things fit neatly into a spreadsheet or a graph. Yet, they've probably driven more business opportunities in my life than any algorithm ever has.
Perhaps that's why I find myself caring less about trying to decode every platform update and more about whether I'm creating something worth reading, sharing, or talking about. I know, without question, that platform will keep changing. The algorithms will continue changing. AI will keep evolving.
Five years from now we will probably be having a completely different conversation on an entirely different platform.
Yet, people will still be people. They'll still look for answers. They'll still look for expertise. They'll still look for someone they trust.
The more I think about it, the more I realize the problem isn't that algorithms exist. The problem is believing they're the point.
Guess what? They're not. They're just the wire. The conversation is still what matters.
If we're lucky, somebody is listening.
