Lovely Human,

Do you actually mean what you say? I do. And it gets me deep respect or in trouble a lot.

I am careful about what is culturally appropriate, always. But when there is a hard thing that needs saying, and it is very clear to me what it is, I say it.

Over the years that habit has earned me two things in equal measure: people who go out of their way to ensure I disappear, since they cannot hide out with me around, and people who follow me blindly in work and life. Both, if I am honest, come from the same place. They know I meant it. Good or bad. I deeply care and that can be scary for those who don’t really.

This really matters right now, the sincerity of our words. Given AI defaults to talking to us in politeness and niceties.

It's incredible how you just became the smartest and most charming person you know with AI. Everything is "a fascinating direction." Every half-baked idea is "a really strong instinct." It never flinches, never pushes back, never makes you feel that little sting of really deep WTF were you thinking sincerity.

And notice how good that feels to many of us. The "AI agrees with me so I am good" high. We even begin acting a bit arrogant given we now have AI paparazzi.

But it is the sting of honesty, disagreement, re-direction, negative feedback +++ from those who have a track record of care that tells you where you actually stand with a person or an organization. Remove it and you do not get the version of the truth you need to consider to chew on. You get a very polite room where nobody means anything at all. Nobody cares but for themselves.

So this week I want to ask you the uncomfortable thing. Not "is AI too nice." That is easy. The harder one: are you still willing to have those crucial and difficult conversations., mean it with kindness etc. when there is now a machine happy to agree with and praise everyone all day long?

Go say one unkind truth this week where you have earned the right to do so b/c you have showed you care with action and not just words. The kind that might cost you, or sting another person so they grow. Watch what it does and how they react. The reaction is also truth about who and where you should be investing your energy.

P.S. I am taking one month of writing to you each weekend. Enjoy the summer as I go head down working my 2nd book this week…thus the break;-) See you on the other side post Aug 15th.

Sincerity might be the last advantage a machine cannot fake.

The sting you keep removing was the honesty telling you where you stand.

When everything agrees with you, agreement stops meaning anything.

Religious Focus this month- Shinto

The brewery smells of steamed rice and cold water even in June.

Haruka slides open the heavy wooden door of the kura her grandfather built in the hills outside Niigata. Above the lintel sits the kamidana, the small household shrine, a sprig of fresh sakaki leaves set in front of it.

This morning a buyer is coming from Tokyo. A good one. He wants forty cases of the junmai daiginjo, the brewery’s crown, the bottle her father’s name is tied to.

There is a problem only she knows about.

One of this year’s tanks went slightly wrong. Nothing spoiled. The rice, the koji, the water all behaved, but the fermentation ran a half degree warm for two nights in March, and the result is a sake that is good. Just not the sake the label promises. A normal palate would never catch it. The buyer certainly would not. He is buying the name, not the nuance.

She could ship it. The label would be true on paper. The money would be real, and the brewery needs it.

The buyer arrives, bows, admires the old beams. She pours him a small cup from the tank in question.

“It’s beautiful,” he says.

“It’s good,” she says. “It is not our daiginjo.”

He looks up.

She explains the two warm nights in March. She tells him what the sake is and what it is not. Then she pours him a cup from a different tank, a humbler junmai, brewed exactly as it should have been.

“I can sell you this one as what it is,” she says. “Or I can sell you the other at a lower grade and a lower price. What I cannot do is sell you a name the cup did not earn.”

The buyer is quiet. Then he orders the humbler junmai. Fewer cases. Less money. And he asks when he can come back for next year’s daiginjo.

This is makoto.

Makoto is one of the oldest words in Shinto. It is usually translated as sincerity, but that is too thin. Makoto is a true heart. It is the state where what you think, what you say, and what you do are the same thing, with nothing performed in between. The kami, in this tradition, are not moved by ritual without it. A perfect offering made with a divided heart is empty. A simple one made with makoto is whole.

It is not about being impressive. It is about being undivided.

Most of us will never brew sake. But all of us know the warm-tank moment. The product that is good but not quite what we said it was. The update that is technically true. The cup we could pour and call something it is not, certain no one would catch it.

Someone would catch it. We would.

The machines around us can now produce a flawless label for anything. The one thing they cannot do is care whether the cup earned it.

Guiding question:

Where in your work this week could you pour the humbler cup and tell the truth about what it is, even when no one would know the difference?