Field Notes from the Language Age
The Improvement Plan
Before the Next Hill
I grew up in the future. Well, not exactly. But I spent a good part of my childhood imagining it.
I remember sitting with volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, reading about science, looking at illustrations of space exploration, and flying cars. Video telephones. Computers that could think. Machines that might do things humans couldn't.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Star Trek appeared on television. Captain Kirk could talk to his ship's computer, ask it a question, and receive an answer. People communicated across enormous distances using handheld devices. A machine could transport somebody from one place to another. The future was so exciting to me.
The world I was living in was considerably less sophisticated at the time. Telephones were attached to walls. Long-distance calls were expensive. Pay phones went from a nickel to a dime and eventually a quarter. And if somebody wasn't home when you called, you tried again later instead of leaving a voice mail. Gasoline was just gas, and I did not even know there was lead in it. The television only had a few channels and went off the air at 11 PM.
A few years later I was riding my bike on a paper route dreaming about watching bands play live and traveling through space as an astronaut. In another flash around 1976, I remember a friend and I setting up a sound system together. I didn't know it then, but I'd found something that would occupy much of the next fifty years of my life. I had no idea how my life would witness the many changes that would soon come in technology, communication, and lifestyle.
Computers moved from universities and corporate offices into homes. Analog recording gave way to digital. Cellular telephones appeared, initially looking more like something you'd carry over your shoulder onto a construction site than put in your pocket. The internet arrived in our everyday lives. Then email, websites, portable music, smartphones, cloud computing, and more devices than I could ever have imagined needing to be charged.
In 1982, EPCOT Center opened at Walt Disney World, offering an entire collection of exhibits devoted to imagining tomorrow. I loved the idea that people were building physical places where you could experience the technology of a future time. Of course, the future has an interesting habit of refusing to arrive exactly as advertised. We still don't have flying cars parked in every driveway. But I can make a video call from an airplane, carry thousands of songs in my pocket, and ask a small device on my desk questions that once would have required a trip to the library.
Somewhere along the way, what was once science fiction began turning into ordinary life.
Kirk had been the captain of my childhood imagination — action, adventure, exploring the unknown, winning the fight, and often the girl’s affection. By the time Patrick Stewart took the center seat as Jean-Luc Picard, I was older too. Picard was different. He thought before he fired. He listened. He questioned. He faced the Borg. The future was still full of impossible technology, but the stories had become more interested in what humans might do with it. And then there was Data as an android that could reason, learn, communicate, and would spend years trying to understand what it meant to be human. Somewhere along the way, I had changed too.
The questions became considerably larger than whether a computer could add numbers faster than I could. What is intelligence? What is understanding? What separates information from experience? What is the difference between observation and evaluation? Now I was learning lessons on emotions, love and life, but no longer as a 6-year-old dreamer with my head in the clouds reading in the basement or watching a TV show. As a young adult the events I used to dream about were becoming real and would take me to places that not enough people are able to experience firsthand.
I have since helped introduce new sound systems, built technical infrastructure, worked with early digital technologies, started businesses, managed productions, and developed relationships with people whose jobs depended on making complicated things work. I'd learned something important along the way. The technology itself was rarely the problem. It was more often the change. People often had to be given a reason to change something that they were accustomed to.
Sometimes I was the person introducing the change. Sometimes I was the person who had to accept it. Sometimes I had to work alongside a person who was completely resistant to changes they didn’t understand. By late 2025, I had nearly fifty years of experience watching the future become the present, and I've spent decades in the live-event industry, watching technology change almost every aspect of how we create our experiences.
Ray Kurzweil and others began writing seriously about the possibility of a technological singularity, a future in which accelerating machine intelligence could transform civilization in ways that would be difficult to predict with certainty. Whether or not those predictions prove accurate, the questions were no longer confined to science fiction. Now artificial intelligence has begun making another leap into everyday life. This time, there wasn't necessarily a new mixing console to learn, a computer language to master, or an elaborate technical system to configure before I could begin… I'd seen enough change to recognize when something deserved my attention.
This new technology could respond, ask questions, help organize ideas, and participate in work that previously required an entire collection of separate tools and applications. Was this really a new form of intelligence? Was it understanding what I was saying? Was it the beginning of something Kurzweil had been describing for years? Or was it just an idea that started as a tv show about the future or a great science fiction novel? I didn't know. What would I say to Data if I met him today? Could we have a conversation about living life?
The light in the tunnel wasn't coming at me. It was already here.
So I subscribed to ChatGPT.
I wasn't looking to reinvent my life overnight. I wanted to understand what was happening, what was possible, and how it might affect the things I already knew how to do. After all those years imagining the future, this caught my attention as a big deal. All the years learning technology didn’t really change what I did, and I had found the Girl, but I did have a few things I wanted to improve.
It Started with Tomorrow Morning
In November 2025, I decided to make a few improvements.
Nothing particularly revolutionary. I wanted to organize my professional life, improve my online presence, clean up an email inbox that had accumulated far too much history, and develop some more consistent daily routines. It did not yet feel like something that required me to change, but it was exciting to imagine the possibilities of a technology I did not yet understand. I wanted to learn more about what artificial intelligence was. Not necessarily to become a programmer or suddenly reinvent my entire career. I was simply curious about what these new tools could do, and more importantly, how I might incorporate them into my day-to-day life.
I had been freelancing in the live-event industry for nearly forty years. During that time, I'd accumulated thousands of photographs, countless professional relationships, stories, accomplishments, a few disappointments, and more than enough experience to fill a resume. Finding a way to present the story in a useful way was another matter. Friends told me I should write a book, and although I did want to pass on lessons I had learned, I was not sure if anyone wanted to learn them outside of the lobby bar.
So, I quickly became we and together we established something called the Improvement Plan.
The first agenda was almost comically ordinary. Wake up. Have coffee. Check email. Spend a couple of focused hours improving something. But keep a record of what happened. Two hours in the morning, maybe one less video game, maybe one less tap on the snooze button. That seemed like a reasonable place to start.
The Digital Legal Pad
I've been using Apple's Notes application for a long time. In fact, the oldest note I could find dates to 2012. It contains a few numbers from a tour, including mileage between a hotel and a house. Nothing profound. Just information I needed to remember. For years, Notes served that purpose. A place to jot things down, capture a thought, save a telephone number, or record something that might become useful later.
I understood how to take notes. That wasn't the new part. I had a day timer or a legal pad next to me most of the time. The Franklin Covey store was as much fun as Best Buy. What changed was how I began using them while working with ChatGPT. Instead of treating a conversation as something that happened and then disappeared into a chat history, I started using Notes as a digital legal pad alongside the conversation. A place to capture ideas, organize objectives, collect the things we wanted to revisit, and keep useful information accessible outside the chat. That distinction might seem minor, but it changed the workflow. I could now think out loud with an assistant, capture something worth preserving, and return to it later. The notes provided continuity. The conversations helped organize and develop what I was thinking. It was no longer just a giant collection of multicolored Post-It notes on the wall.
We began experimenting with Apple Shortcuts to make that process easier. One early shortcut turned a repetitive note-taking task into something much faster. Another attempted to merge daily notes into a single summary. And that's where the first little complications appeared. The Shortcuts interface didn't always behave as expected. Variables appeared in unexpected places. Controls weren't always available where the instructions suggested they would be. Sometimes the process required starting over with a cleaner approach.
It was frustrating at times, but it was also instructive. We weren't just learning how to operate a single application. We were learning how to communicate. We shared what was happening on the screen, recognized assumptions from two different perspectives each with its own user interface, adjusted our approach, and tried again. The first change-agent experiment with this new intelligence was happening in real time, right in front of us.
Building the Cockpit
I've spent much of my career sitting behind control surfaces. Audio consoles, computer systems, communication networks, and production desks all serve a similar purpose. They put the right information and controls within reach of the person responsible for making something happen. The system can be extraordinarily complicated behind the scenes, but the operator needs a useful way to interact with it.
I began thinking about my home workspace in much the same way. My new M2 Mac mini would become the primary workstation. The MacBook, iPad, and iPhone would serve different purposes depending on where I was working and what I needed to accomplish. We explored the known tasks like Notes, email management, Microsoft Office, Dropbox, Adobe applications, browsers, and the tools I'd already been using in live production.
Anyone who has built a live-event system knows there's a period when the equipment is technically present, but the system isn't quite ready to operate. Cables are connected. Network addresses are being identified. Signals are being tested. Gaps are discovered. Something else needs a firmware update. Eventually, things begin talking to one another… eventually.
The same thing was happening here. There were new applications to install, accounts to configure, files to organize, and devices to synchronize. At one point, I was using the MacBook to document the process while the Mac mini was downloading an update. We learned when the keyboard was taking too much time, and when one emoji on the iPad said enough. We discovered talk to text while taking my dog for a walk.
We started calling the workspace the digital cockpit. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated invention. It was a practical attempt to create an environment where I could spend less time finding things and more time doing something useful with them. But the act of building it raised another question. What exactly was I building it for?
A Little More Than a Resume
One of the original objectives of the improvement plan was to improve my LinkedIn presence. That meant updating my profile, organizing professional recommendations, and finding a better way to describe what I actually do professionally. I've worked as an audio engineer, production manager, technical director, systems engineer, and in plenty of roles that don't fit neatly into a single job title. For years, much of that work came through relationships. Someone knew me. Someone had worked with me. Someone needed a particular combination of technical experience, judgment, and the ability to stay calm when things weren't going according to plan.
The telephone would still ring, but I was starting to feel behind. I started to feel like I did not know how to communicate who I was to an AI recruiter. It seemed like there must be a new way to network in this Language Age. How to share my skills and core competencies with someone who had never worked with me was becoming a different challenge.
We began looking through photographs from my career. There were thousands. Unfortunately, thousands of photographs aren't much use when you can't find the twenty you need. So, we spent time learning how to sort, export, transfer, and organize images across devices. Tasks that sound simple when written on a checklist can consume an entire afternoon when the files are scattered across years of different storage systems.
Then came an idea for a LinkedIn post. I had photographs showing something every event professional recognizes: cables. Messy cables. Organized cables. Cable ramps protecting the paths people need to walk. We assembled four images into a progression from chaos toward something more organized, protected, and ready to use. It was a simple visual story. But it also happened to illustrate something I had spent most of my career doing. Taking complicated situations and making them manageable.
On November 16, we published the first carousel. The first version wasn't a masterpiece. We tried editing images, considered different approaches, and eventually decided the original photographs told the story well enough. We had taken an experience from the physical world, organized it into a sequence, added context, and communicated an idea to people who weren't standing next to me. And we had done it through a new kind of collaboration.
I began to see possibilities beyond simply improving a résumé.
Putting a Face on the Work
A website seemed like the next logical step.
We began exploring Squarespace, looking at templates, gathering more photographs, and deciding what someone should encounter when arriving at the site. There was a hero image to choose, a headline to write, services to describe, and a career that needed to make sense without requiring someone to read forty years of history.
That was harder than I expected.
I knew how to introduce a live event. I've been involved in thousands of them. The opening moments matter. Before anyone speaks, the room has already begun communicating. Lighting, sound, scenery, timing, and the energy of the audience all contribute to that first impression.
A website has an opening moment too.
We started working on mine. The headline changed. The photographs changed. The descriptions changed as I realized that certain words made my experience sound narrower than it was. I wasn't simply presenting myself as an audio engineer looking for the next show. I was trying to communicate the larger collection of skills that had developed around that work.
We began discussing experience, leadership, systems, innovation, and the possibility that AI could become another useful component of an already complicated professional life. And, as expected, the software had opinions of its own. Controls moved. Instructions didn't always match the screen. Some visual changes affected elements we hadn't intended to change.
We even discovered that we'd been building on a Squarespace trial site rather than the site on the domain we wanted to use. That was an expensive lesson in time, although not necessarily in money. We had to reconstruct work we'd already done. There were moments when six hours of effort seemed to have produced considerably less than six hours of progress.
But there was a difference between repeating the work and repeating the learning. Once we understood the account structure, the layout, and some of the interface behavior, we could approach the rebuild with more confidence. We were beginning to learn something about the relationship between capability and usability. Just because the tool can accomplish something doesn't mean the path to accomplishing it will be obvious.
And just because an AI assistant can describe a procedure doesn't mean it can see the same interface the human is looking at. We needed screenshots, questions, corrections, and sometimes a completely different approach. Life with AI was becoming a team sport.
The Binder
While all of this was happening, another part of the project was growing. The binder. I've used production binders throughout my career. They contain the information needed to bring an event together: schedules, technical details, plans, references, decisions, and the many other things people need to know before something goes wrong.
So, it seemed natural to create one for the Improvement Plan. We began organizing daily logs, website notes, AI experiments, reference materials, images, and ideas worth developing later. Some documents were practical guides. Others were reflections. A few contained stories that had very little to do with building a website, at least on the surface. We even started documenting the differences between AI models and thinking about which tools were useful for which kinds of work.
The binder was becoming a record of what we'd tried, what had worked, what hadn't, and what we might want to do differently next time. It was an organized collection of notes with a timestamp. And an important distinction was emerging. I didn't need to master every new application. I needed to understand how to get useful work done. That meant learning when to use a tool, when to change tools, when to ask for help, and when the most productive thing I could do was simply stop adjusting something that already worked.
For someone who has spent a career solving technical problems, knowing when to stop is an important skill.
The View from the First Hill
By the middle of November, we'd made real progress. My daily routine had more structure. Notes had become a working companion to our conversations. Shortcuts were reducing some repetitive tasks. The digital cockpit was taking shape. We had improved LinkedIn, published a visual story, established the beginnings of a website, and created a binder to preserve what we were learning. There were still plenty of unfinished tasks.
Files remained scattered. Some applications weren't configured. The website was incomplete. The binder needed organization. We had more photographs than we could reasonably review and more ideas than we could develop at once.
But we had accomplished something useful. We'd established a way to work. Looking back, I recognize the experience from countless live-event setups. Early in a production, there's a moment when enough of the system finally comes together that the team can stop concentrating exclusively on getting the equipment operational, and you can start building a show, the show, a live event. That doesn't mean the work is finished. It means the creative work can really begin. Our modest Improvement Plan had brought us to that point.
We'd climbed the first hill. And for the first time, we could see how much farther the landscape extended. There was a website to finish. A professional story to tell. Decades of experience to organize. New technologies to understand. New relationships to develop. Possibilities I hadn't seriously considered when I first sat down with a cup of coffee and a two-hour agenda.
What started as a few improvements to tomorrow morning was becoming something considerably larger. We needed a plan. We gave ourselves six weeks.
And suddenly, that first hill looked pretty small.