Colleagues you care about are coming over for dinner. What should you make?

Some people don’t care if it’s delicious, as long as it’s interesting.

Some don’t need it to be interesting, but it needs to start on time.

Others define delicious differently than you do.

One couple doesn’t care at all about the effort you put into it.

A few don’t care if you’ve worked hard to create a spectacular meal, they’ll notice that the kitchen is a mess.

One person is really concerned that the food match their dietary needs.

And many are paying attention to the sustainability and cost of what you prepared.

Some are uncomfortable if you put in too much of effort.

The lesson is simple: empathy matters and empathy is hard. The more diverse the group’s interests, the more you’ll need to let them know in advance where you’re heading.

Get clear about what it’s for before you start doing the work.

Tonight, when you’re off the clock, what will you listen to, watch or read?

I imagine that most of us would agree that this is a free choice. To watch a silly video on YouTube, read a book on Greek philosophy from the library or scroll your feeds. We have time (surprisingly called “free”) and we allocate it to focus our attention on something.

While it might seem like a free choice, well-paid people and powerful forces are working to shift our focus. Many systems are built to manipulate us into focusing on things that benefit them, not us.

If you’ve ever felt lousy after doomscrolling, you might question how free your free time actually is. It takes effort to regain our freedom of focus.

We can take this one step further. We not only make choices about the media we consume, we also make choices about our internal focus. Until you got to this sentence, I’m guessing you weren’t spending much time thinking about your high school graduation.

We don’t need research to show us that the internal narratives we focus on shift our attitude and soon become our reality. We’ve all experienced it. Soon after we stop the broken record, things get better.

Perhaps it’s not a free choice, though. Perhaps the stories we relentlessly focus on are simply the byproduct of our brain’s chemical reactions, a reaction to the world inside us and around us.

And yet… many people have learned to shift the stories they rehearse.

The first step: change the external focus. Change the people we interact with, the media we consume, the attention we offer. Not all at once, but as a habit, a persistent practice of being mindful about the triggers and amplifiers we consume. If you’re not happy with what your attention is bringing you, you can change it.

Aristotle said that we become what we do, but before we do, we focus.

And the freedom and responsibility of that focus belong to us.

After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate, professional job that cost more than $1,000. As he was finishing the job at 1:30 am, he was arrested and charged with a felony.

A hundred years ago, the default was that pedestrians were in charge. Cars were guests, only going where they were invited. But the persistent productivity and cultural force of the automobile carried the day, and the default flipped. The roads must roll.

If it can be paved or straightened or sped up, it is. If the car wants it, the answer is “yes.”

80,000,000 people have died as a result of automobiles over time. (It’s harder to estimate how many lives were saved or enriched by this massive shift in the transport of food, people and resources.) A successful system can redraw our maps and our expectations.

When systems gain momentum like this, it’s because they create urgent and immediate value, enough to disrupt the status quo. And once the status quo has changed, the momentum becomes normal, the way things are, until persistent community action (or another, even more relentless system) changes the defaults.

The system doesn’t care about Joseph Brandlin’s kid. It cares about the flow and the status of those that maintain that flow.

Ironically, his arrest is almost certainly going to result in a stop sign being installed. Using one system (the media) to change another.

We’re all living through the biggest and fastest systemic shifts in a century, whether we want to or not. The internet, healthcare, the aging of populations and now, particularly, AI–they’re changing defaults. It’s possible (even likely) that individuals will go out in the middle of the night and seek to change something in their neck of the woods, but as we’ve seen with system change before, that’s not usually the reliable path to make a lasting impact.

Every system eventually acts as if it’s more important than the people it was built to serve. HAL isn’t going to open the pod bay door merely because you insist. But persistent systemic action often bends the system toward better. And better is up to us.