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Photo by Todd Stark - https://www.trstark.com/

That's me in the photo.

I'm standing on the outskirts of the Bodie ghost town in California, in front of an old weathered structure that's been slowly returning to the earth. I'm not checking my phone. There's no cell service anyway. I'm not thinking about quarterly goals or client deliverables or what's happening in my inbox.

I'm just there.

No one measures this. There's no ROI. And that's why it matters to me.

I've spent decades in technology, building systems, leading teams, and advising executives on how to make sense of data and leverage AI. It's work I love. But it's also work that never stops asking questions: What's the impact? What's the metric? Where's the value?

And those are good questions. Necessary questions.

But they're not the only questions worth asking.

Photography has taught me something important about how I think. When I'm behind a camera, there's no pressure to optimize, scale, or demonstrate ROI. There's just the light, the landscape, and the moment. I'm not trying to extract value from it. I'm trying to see it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds.

Most of us spend our professional lives in extraction mode. We look at data and ask what insights we can pull from it. We look at processes and ask how we can improve them. We look at people and ask how we can leverage their strengths. It's all about making something useful.

But some things aren't meant to be useful. They're meant to be experienced.

Standing in that desert, I wasn't thinking about what I could do with the moment. I was just in it. And that kind of presence, that quiet, unmeasured attention, is something most leaders have trained themselves out of.

We've gotten very good at doing, but we've forgotten how to simply be.

I'm not suggesting you abandon your responsibilities and wander into the wilderness (though honestly, it wouldn't hurt). I'm suggesting that you need something in your life that isn't tied to a dashboard. Something you do simply because it centers you.

For me, it's photography and exploring remote places. For you, it might be woodworking, painting, or long runs through your neighborhood. It doesn't matter what it is. What matters is that it exists.

The best decisions you'll make as a leader won't come from more analysis or better data. They'll come from clarity. And clarity doesn't show up when you're optimizing. It shows up when you're quiet.

You can't schedule clarity. You can't extract it from a report. You can't ask an AI to generate it for you.

It arrives when you stop asking it to.

I've had conversations with plenty of executives who feel guilty about their hobbies. They talk about them like indulgences, things they do when they "have time," which of course means rarely.

But I think we've got it backwards.

The work that grounds you, that reminds you who you are outside your title and your job, that's not the indulgence. The indulgence is believing that every hour of your life needs to be measured against some outcome.

I don't photograph the world because it makes me a better executive, consultant, or leader. I don't hike for miles into remote canyons because it sharpens my strategic thinking.

I do it because it reminds me that not everything worth doing has to be justified.

And maybe that's the most important thing a leader can remember.

If you found this post helpful, consider sharing it with another executive grappling with AI, technology, and data. If you want to explore AI and other Technology strategies, grab some time on my calendar, and let's chat.

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