I Hate Everything but I Need the Money

I was listening to How I AI recently, and the host was talking about testing YouTube thumbnails. One version was basically her, looking like herself, under normal office lighting. The version YouTube preferred had blue hair and some kind of neon glow. She didn't sound thrilled about it, but the numbers were the numbers. That was what people clicked.

And I thought: what if everything I'd have to do to succeed at this is everything I hate most about it?

I know what the answer is supposed to be. Study what works. Learn the algorithm. Better thumbnails, better hooks, faster openings. Figure out exactly how long people will tolerate something before they leave. MrBeast and people like him have turned the whole thing into an art, or a science, or whatever the hell it is. And clearly they're right about most of it, because I click the stupid thumbnail too. I complain about manufactured outrage while watching manufactured outrage. I bitch about the neon-blue-hair thumbnail while being, apparently, more likely to click it.

I'm one of the idiots too.

I've seen a version of this before. When I was young I went to work for Andersen Consulting. Andersen was a huge worldwide operation, and the forty or so people I remember from my January incoming class were just one group entering at one moment. There were classes and offices and people being fed into the bottom of that pyramid everywhere. They weren't hiding the pyramid, either. They wanted us to understand how the place worked: you came in, you moved to senior consultant if things went well, then manager, and eventually a relatively small number made partner. Openly up-or-out.

I looked at that structure and figured I'd be managing partner.

That sounds more ridiculous now than it did then. At Purdue I'd gotten used to moving into leadership without much of a fight. Executive boards, president, all of it. I'd learned that once I figured out the rules of an organization I was pretty good at playing the game. The guy who opened the Andersen door for me had also been president of my fraternity and gone on to make managing partner. Why wouldn't I?

At one point during training they announced how much overtime people had logged the previous year. Something like forty percent. Since overtime was paid, our group cheered.

We fucking cheered.

Nobody heard you're going to give this company an enormous piece of your life. We heard we're going to make that much more. They could show forty ambitious young people the pyramid, explain the rules, spell out exactly how much of our lives the game would eat, and every one of us still looked around the room and assumed the problem belonged to somebody else.

We all did the math on the guy sitting next to us.

Never on ourselves.

I think about that now because I'm staring at another version of the same bargain. I've been teaching more than twenty years, and right now I'm doing some of the most interesting work of my career. A class that has me thinking differently about what students can do with AI, what it means to learn with it instead of just getting answers from it, what school might look like if we quit pretending none of this changes anything. I think some of it is really fucking good.

So naturally I've started wondering whether I can make money from it. And not in the noble way, where the money would simply let me carry these important ideas to more deserving children. I mean I need money. I'm sixty-one with two little kids. I've just come through bankruptcy. The side businesses that used to throw off extra income are all in a dry spell at once. The expenses aren't. Preschool, daycare, new drivers. Retirement has stopped being something that happens to some distant old guy and become something coming for the current old guy pretty fast.

So yes. Money would be useful.

And I can see the path. Package what I'm doing. Name it. Build the framework. Give it seven pillars. Start posting. Build an audience. Go to conferences. Become one of the AI-in-education people. Eventually spend more time talking about teaching than teaching. I've been around education consultants a long time and I can't remember once meeting one and thinking, Holy shit, I wish I had that guy's life.

There's a personality you have to perform to sell yourself for a living. You can't really be Eeyore and become a successful education consultant. At some point you have to be excited about the thing, excited about telling people about the thing, and ideally excited about yourself as the person who figured the thing out. And the thing is, I like being Eeyore. Not all the time. Sometimes.

Here's the part I keep circling. I don't want to promote myself. I don't want to post every day. I don't want to interact with strangers because apparently that's how you "build a community."

And that's the easy part. Underneath it is the part I want even less. I don't want to convince the luddites that AI is coming whether they like it or not. I don't want to convince anybody that students learn more when we figure out how to use it well. I don't want to keep proving that what I make isn't slop, then proving all over again that it's actually good. I don't want to be the guy at work telling everyone they're behind.

I know none of that is automatically noble. If nobody reads something because I gave it a shitty title, learning to write a better title isn't selling out. It's just learning to write a title. Sometimes the audience is right. Sometimes the winner just learned to do the thing better than I did. Fine. None of that is the problem. The problem is simpler and dumber than that: the exact things this would take are the exact things I don't want to do, and deciding they're allowed doesn't make me want to do them.

Meanwhile somebody else always does. They'll make the neon thumbnail. They'll post every day. They'll turn the messy classroom thing into a clean seven-part system with a logo. They'll get very good at being the person everybody notices, and maybe the audience, or the clients, or the money, goes to them.

Somebody does become partner. Somebody becomes CEO. Somebody gets twenty million subscribers. Somebody turns the classroom idea into a business and makes a fortune. The existence of that person is what keeps the bargain alive for everybody else. And maybe we need it that way. Nobody starts anything worthwhile after carefully studying the median outcome. Bands form because they think they might be the band. Forty young consultants can look straight at a pyramid and see forty future exceptions.

I've spent a lot of my life running into versions of this. There are more stories there, but they belong somewhere else. The relevant part is that I've been good at playing games I eventually decided I didn't want to play, and now I'm old enough to recognize the game earlier. I can see what it rewards. I can see what it costs. I can see that the big prize almost certainly goes to somebody else.

Same fucking pyramid, new fucking logo, nearly forty years later, and still no backup plan.

"Fuck the man" is still the closest thing I have to a work philosophy.

What's your version of the pyramid—the game you hate playing but still need something from? Let us know through the contact page.