En-Chef-erize This

Aicila

[00:00:00] I had an email patch in college that would rer anything you wrote to sound like the sweetest chef from the Muppet Show. It was called being Chef Riser. It was a real thing. People built it because they thought it would be funny and it was- deeply joyfully, pointlessly funny.

I think about that patch occasionally. The memory always brings a smile. And it was one of the first things I installed from the internet. It had nothing to do with commerce or conversion or building an audience. It was just someone making something silly and putting it out into the world. That was the promise of the early internet, whimsical, delight, unexpected learning, random connection to people from all over the world.

It had little to do with convenience or scale. It was connection over commerce. And now we've built something else instead. As a kid, I was a voracious reader, science fiction, and fantasy mostly. Stranger in a strange land at [00:01:00] nine dystopian futures like on the beach and after the bomb. And more whimsical things like the wonderful flight to the mushroom planet diamond in the window.

I was captivated by what science could open for us. Even the destruction in those stories pointed somewhere, new horizons, new possibilities, something beyond what currently existed. Then the internet showed up, and for a moment it felt like that. Like it felt exactly like that. When I was a newly out lesbian living in a college town in Utah, early message boards meant I could find people to talk to and learn from. People who lived in a world I was just beginning to recognize as mine.

What else could instant communication create, I wondered? Before even handwritten letters had allowed momentary peaks into other lives. That was the promise, real specific personal connection. The possibility that the right words put out in the dark would [00:02:00] find the right person at the right moment. And we've built something else Instead. We've connected the whole world and somehow made it lonelier.

And here's what I wanna sit with today, because I don't think this is a story about nostalgia or about tech going wrong. I think it's a story about what happens when we optimize for the wrong thing. The early internet wasn't valuable because it was un monetized. It was valuable because the people building it were oriented towards something real.

Curiosity, humor, belonging. The satisfaction of making something and trusting that someone out there needed it. At some point the orientation shifted and we started measuring things that took us away from our opportunity to connect, learn, and grow together. And the cost of that shift,

that's what I keep coming back to. It isn't just aesthetic, it's also energetic in the most literal sense of what I track in the energy equation. Connection energy is one [00:03:00] of the three types that I talk about. Momentum is the drive to start and finish. Creative is the capacity to generate and solve. And connection is the relational fuel. The thing that makes the work feel like it means something beyond the output.

And here's what I've watched happen, my own work and in the founders I work with. When you optimize for reach, you often slowly drain your connection energy without realizing it. You're technically talking to more people. You're touching more screens, but the relational quality has gone thin.

You're performing connection rather than being it. It's not a mindset problem, it's a resource management problem. So what's the alternative? I'm not arguing for going off the grid. I'm not interested in burning down a working system in favor of purity. Uh, what I am interested in is what would it mean to reorient, even partially back toward that original question, not how do I reach more people, but is what I'm putting out worth finding. [00:04:00] And that's a real distinction. Reach can be about volume and frequency,

worth finding is about depth and specificity. The izer was worth finding if you were a certain kind of person. It wasn't trying to be for everyone. It was unambiguously fully itself.

And my content has always come from that place of not so much how do I grow this, but my first question is, am I leaving something worth finding? Because the early internet taught me something that still holds the right thing in the right place at the right moment, finds the right person.

It just doesn't scale. And honestly, I think that's okay. The scale obsession is part of what created this problem in the first place. And what I wanna build, what I want the show to be is more like a lighthouse than a billboard. I don't need it to be everywhere, just visible when you need it, and solid enough to navigate by.

So here's [00:05:00] a practical way to think about this. 'cause I don't wanna just leave this at the level of metaphor for you. When I sit down to write my posts or come up with a topic that eventually will become a podcast, I go through lists of topics and prompts I have gathered, and I see which one I can find real connection to for myself and more than a, like a prompt library or hack, really being present in and connected to myself consistently produces something that gets more engagement. I've really come to believe that engagement is a byproduct of being present and sharing from that space.

And it produces very different things, content made from genuine connection. Something I actually want to say to someone. I can actually sense lands differently than content made from the fear falling behind the algorithm, or because I feel like I need to do something right now, even when the words look similar on the surface.

It's shifting from effort to orientation. The same amount of time spent writing toward an actual [00:06:00] person versus writing towards a number produces a completely different result. And the inverse, which I think matters as much, when you find content that lands, that feels like a lighthouse rather than a billboard, it returns something to you.

That's connection, energy coming back in. It refills something for you, which is why I'm still here, making things, putting them out in the dark because the right thing for the right person at the right moment still works. It just doesn't scale. And I'm okay with that. So here's what I wanna leave you with this week.

When you let yourself focus on value over metrics, on depth over reach, on a person rather than the number, what shifts for you? Not rhetorically. Think about a specific piece of work, a specific conversation, a specific moment where you are oriented toward the real thing rather than the measurable one.

What did that feel like? And where in your current business is there room for that? [00:07:00] And that's where the connection energy, that's where the connection energy is. And it's worth protecting. If you wanna get a clearer picture of where your three energy types are now, how much you're running a momentum versus creative versus connection.

The energy equation snapshot is free. At bicurean.com/snapshot a few minutes and you'll have something concrete to work with. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for tuning into business as unusual, remember, in this ever evolving world of modern business, it's not about fitting in.

It's about standing out. See you next time. Stay curious, stay innovative, and always keep it unusual.