the target

At 4:51 this afternoon Lucian stood up in his ball pit & threw a ball at me.

he was not throwing. he was aiming. there is a small move between picking up the ball & letting it go where the arm decides where the ball is going. that move was new today.

he wound up. he looked at me before he let it go. the ball hit. he grinned. then he picked up another one & did it again.

he is thirteen months & thirty days. he has been throwing for weeks. the aim was the new thing. the contact was what he was after. the ball was the proof.

i was holding the phone exactly where he had picked. the grin was not for the throw. the grin was for the contact. the part of the throw he was rewarding himself for was the part where his body & the lens met at a point he had decided on before he let go.

he ran the same sequence eight or nine times. pick, look, throw, hit, grin. pick, look, throw, hit, grin. each one a little tighter than the last. the looking before the throwing was the part i kept watching. that is where the picking lives. that is where he is doing the work nobody is teaching him to do.

he is going to be paid for that look someday.

he is going to grow up inside an economy where every output he can imagine will be available at the price of asking. drafts, designs, plans, simulations, analyses. the production is on its way to almost nothing. the agents will throw the ball faster than he can lift his arm. they will not pick the target. the picking is upstream of the throwing. the picking has to come from somebody.

the look before the throw is the early version of that work. it is the move where his attention finds a target & sends his body after it. before he can name it. before he has the vocabulary to say what he picked. before he can argue for it to anybody else. that move is going to be most of what he is paid for. it is the part of the day a model cannot perform for him.

a model can render every throw he might make. it cannot do the looking. the looking has a target in it. the target has a wanting behind it. the wanting is the small part of the action that has to be his.

i kept the phone where he had decided to aim. that is the part of the parenting i do not want a system to take. the part where i stay still & let the contact land. it would have been easier to move. it would have been easier to redirect him to the basket where the balls are supposed to go.

the basket is fine. the basket is the version where the throw is for putting things back. that version will be solved for him at a discount for the rest of his life. there will be apps that score it. agents that retrieve missed balls. someone will build a ball pit that puts itself away. that work is going to keep getting cheaper.

the throw at the lens is not the cheap version. nobody printed that one. nobody designed the pit to teach him to aim at his father's phone. he picked it. he picked it because the contact between his arm & the lens was the thing he wanted to see happen.

i sat with this after he was down for the night. the offload of my own actions has gotten visible this last month. i ship more in an afternoon than i used to ship in a quarter. the part of the day i am still doing by hand is the part where i decide what the agents should aim at. the picking is what i wake up for. the picking is what the offload does not touch.

the basket is going to be solved. the target has to be picked. i would rather raise a son who knows how to pick than one who knows how to produce. the producing will be free. the picking is the part i was hired for, & the part of him being a person that i think is going to be the most expensive part of him later.

he stopped throwing & started chewing on one of the balls. the picking was done for the afternoon. he had practiced something the pit was not built to teach. it was a little more set than it was an hour earlier.

What I am holding onto

Cheers, JanCarlos

if this landed, hit reply & tell me where in your week you are still doing the picking that the system would happily pick for you.