In my first week at a new job, I sent my team an email. It opened with a line from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: “I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.”
I’m still asking them. This is where they’ve led me.
A.1Two machines, one title
In 1967, the poet Richard Brautigan imagined a world where people and computers lived in harmony, watched over by machines of loving grace. His poem wasn’t sold in bookstores. It was printed as a broadside and handed out for free on the streets of San Francisco.
In 2024, Dario Amodei borrowed the title for a long essay about what the world could look like if AI goes right.
Both are hopeful pictures, and I share the hope. But in both, the grace belongs to the machines. I want to move it back to where I’ve always found it: in people. Machines can enable. Only people can care.
A.2Employee 0
Marc Benioff often talks about “customer zero”: before you sell a product to anyone, you use it yourself. If you aren’t convinced, nobody else will be.
I believe the same is true of work. You can’t ask anyone to trust a new way of working until you’ve lived it yourself. So you test it on yourself first: the product, the business model, everything. Nobody knows in advance what the best outcome will be.
That’s what Employee 0 means. It’s the person who tests the system on themselves before asking anyone else to.
Without quite meaning to, I’ve already been Employee 0 inside two of the largest platforms in the labour market. I built the largest partnership of its kind in my market through nothing more complicated than understanding people and earning their trust. I built tools nobody had asked for, trained sales teams on the side, and launched an executive community of 25 enterprise leaders in its first year. Later this month, it launches in Mexico.
Each time I reached the same conclusion. The work was working. The systems around it weren’t designed to see it. That isn’t a story about bad people. It’s a story about legacy design: processes, job titles, compensation models, and now AI rollouts, all adopted without anyone stopping to ask why.
So I’m doing what customer zero would do. I’m testing a different system, starting with myself.
A.3What we’ve accepted as normal
I’ve lived in twelve countries. What one culture treats as the natural order of work, another finds strange. The Western way of organizing labour isn’t universal, which tells me most of it was designed. Anything designed can be redesigned.
It’s worth redesigning. We spend roughly 90,000 hours of our lives at work. We live in arguably the most productive, opportunity-rich period in human history. And yet well-being is falling around the world, while the gains concentrate among a small number of nations, companies and people.
That isn’t a people problem. It’s a systems problem. And it shows up everywhere work happens: small businesses, enterprises, governments, universities, and the job search itself.
A.4What a Tuesday could look like
I won’t pretend to forecast ten years out. But I think that within the next couple of years, the question that matters will stop being “What’s your job?” and become “What do you want your Tuesday to be?”
Executive, warehouse worker, new grad, parent coming back to work: at the end of the day, each of us is a person with skills, interests, values and dreams. The job is one way to express them. It shouldn’t be the only one.
Two examples from the past few weeks.
Next door to my house is a printing press that has sat quiet for years. It belongs to a chef who runs an Indian restaurant nearby. He bought the press and held on to it. Now we’re bringing it back to life together, so writers, artists, designers, poets and business people can make their own work and get it into the world on their own terms. Neither of us has a job title that explains why we’re doing it.
Over Thanksgiving dinner, a family member told me how hard it has been to return to the job market. She spent years in HR in Pakistan, and employers in Canada treat that experience as irrelevant. She isn’t even sure she wants HR anymore. So I asked what she loves. Design. Fashion. Connecting people. Hosting. She regularly invites her whole street over so the kids can play and the parents can talk.
That’s her business, and it’s already running. So I asked her: why wait for a company, a system or a process to give you permission to do it today? She asked how. I said come over one evening, bring a glass of wine, and I’ll show you.
Technology makes that evening enough. But only if it’s democratized, and only if it’s governed so the value it creates reaches everyone, not just the few who already have it.
A.5What loving grace means
Loving grace at work means operating from a core belief system that works like a compass. Whatever you’re doing and whoever you’re doing it with, it keeps bringing you back to what’s right.
In practice, that means any framework you design gets tested against one question: is this doing good for society, globally? If not, why not? Answering honestly takes judgment and discernment. No process can do that for you.
It also brings us back to Employee 0. You can only convince someone of something you’re convinced of yourself. That’s what trust is: the confidence that the person advising you is coming from a good place. When you make mistakes, and you will, you own them. And you show your thinking, so people can see why you said, wrote or built what you did.
The principles I shared in that first-week email still hold:
That last one is why Employee0 doesn’t have a business model yet. I’m only taking on work with people I trust, and I trust the model will come, with the right people on board. Relationships first. Model second.
The critical skill in all of this isn’t technical. It’s curiosity, and the ability to connect with another person. And the only way to do that well is to genuinely give a shit about them.
A.6A strange thing to do
A while back my son wore one of my work t-shirts to bed, then wore it to school the next day. His classmates told him it was a cool shirt, but it seemed a bit suspicious that a seven-year-old was helping people get jobs.
I laughed. Then I kept thinking about it.
They’re right that it’s unusual. Somewhere along the way, we built a world where helping someone find meaningful work looks like a strange thing for a person to do, as if that were the system’s job.
I’d like my son to grow up in a world where it isn’t strange at all. Where the systems carry the weight so people can carry each other. Where we’re all, in some small way, employees of loving grace.
If that sounds like your kind of Tuesday, let’s talk.