This Moment is Different

This week was weird.

Entertaining. Slightly unhinged. Productive in a way that probably isn’t sustainable but also felt necessary. AI headshots. 80-hour weeks. RevOps identity crises. Same-day calendar ambushes. Me bouncing on a medicine ball like a middle-aged intern.

It all connects. Stay with me.

Let’s start with effort.

I clocked 80 hours last week. Not proud. Not ashamed. Just honest.

Not because I think hours equal impact. Not because I hate my family. Not because I worship long hours. Because of timing. This moment is different ya'll. AI lets small teams move faster than big ones are even formed. The distance between an idea and something real has collapsed. What used to take weeks of coordination now takes hours. That breaks the old game of hiding behind meetings, org charts, and “alignment.”

But early on, AI doesn’t magically run itself. You still have to wire it up. Train it. Break it. Fix it. Replace the manual steps one by one. That’s where the hours go. Founders doing 70–80 hours isn’t toxic. It’s table stakes. Employees being stuck there forever is the failure. 996 can't be a business model, it has to be a phase. Miss that and you miss the point. You grind early to buy your way out later. If you still need hero hours once you’ve scaled, you screwed up. Effort changes when leverage changes. And leverage changes roles.

Some jobs evolve slowly. Others wake up one day and realize they signed up for something entirely different.

I have a friend who’s been in RevOps for years. Smart guy. Knows Salesforce inside out. Can build dashboards in his sleep. He told me he doesn’t like where the role is going. First it became GTM Engineer. Now it’s drifting toward AI Ops.

His words: “Too different from what I signed up for.” And he’s right.

We went from: Sales Ops → RevOps → GTM Engineer

Now it’s AI Ops. You’re not building workflows anymore. You’re building teams of Cloud Employees. You don’t manage the tasks. You manage outcomes.

You hire AI agents. Train them on your systems, playbooks, and tone. Deploy them into real roles. Monitor performance. Improve them. Scale without adding headcount.

RevOps was about control.
Control the data. Control the forecast. Control the process.

AI Ops is about design.

Control was defensive. Design is offensive. And that’s why my friend is uneasy. He didn’t sign up to architect digital labor. He signed up to manage systems. I don’t blame him. This is a different job than what he signed up for. I broke this down more in Thursday’s post.

AI is making roles evolve. But it’s bigger than that. It’s coming for self-presentation too.

AI headshots on LinkedIn. Let’s talk about it.

I’m torn. I used one. And honestly… I look incredible. Like, “Is that the same guy?” incredible. It's me, but it’s the me that gets 8 hours of sleep, drinks water, and understands skin care :) So here’s the question: Are AI headshots the new resume lies? Or just good branding? I asked multiple people about their pics. They looked great. Like, suspiciously great. Turns out all were AI. I’ve apparently lost the ability to detect reality. Cool cool. So now I’m wondering... are we just embracing the glow-up, or are we crossing a line?

Also, drop your AI photo if you're brave enough. Let’s see your ‘optimized’ self.

Mine are below. I assume you can you tell which ones are real and which are AI?

Identity is signal. And signal isn’t just how you look. It’s how you move. Especially in sales. Because the fastest way to undo your perfectly optimized AI headshot… is to act desperate five minutes later.

Which brings me to my favorite move.

There’s a special move in sales I call the Same Day Calendar Ambush.

You know it. We trade a few messages. I say, “Happy to connect, here’s my link.” And suddenly… boom. 3:00 PM. Today.  Look, I gave you the link so we don’t have to play 17 rounds of “does Tuesday at 2 work?” Use it. Book time. I love that….just not in one hour like the building’s on fire and I’m the only exit.

A same-day slot without context feels like sending a DocuSign after I said, “Interesting.” It is technically allowed but socially its annoying. It doesn’t come off as decisive. It comes off like you really, really need this meeting. Good operators think one move ahead. They grab something a few days out. Next week. They show they’re busy building, not hunting in a panic. Book time. I gave you the link for a reason. Just don’t act like the clock is running out on your whole career. Plan ahead. Move with intention. Act like you’re going to be around next month.

How you book a meeting signals how you operate. And how you operate eventually shows up everywhere. Even in something as boring as your chair. Because most people try to fix symptoms. Very few redesign the system.

Which brings me to office chairs.

The office chair debate is over. You’re all wrong.

Meanwhile… I’m over here bouncing on a medicine ball like a 42-year-old startup intern. I tried the fancy chairs. Sat in the Herman Millers and nodded seriously at the lumbar science. And then I realized something. No chair is fixing the fact that you’ve been glued to Zoom for 6 straight hours. The problem isn’t your seat. It’s that you haven’t moved since breakfast.

So yes, my official vote is still the medicine ball.

No backrest, no armrests, no executive energy. Just instability and the constant threat of public humiliation if I lose focus and roll into the wall mid call. If you see me bouncing during our next call, just know it’s not nerves. It’s just me refusing to finance a chair to survive my own calendar.

So that was the week. Individually, it’s all kind of funny. Collectively, it’s somewhat obvious.

The timeline between idea and execution has collapsed, while roles are mutating. Signals are becoming more amplified and behavior is exposed faster than ever. You can’t hide anymore. You either design how you operate in this new reality… or you drift into it and wonder why everything feels slightly off.

Optimize your leverage. Optimize your behavior. Optimize your system. And maybe… take a walk between Zoom calls.

I’ll be the guy on the medicine ball trying not to roll into the wall mid-demo.

That’s it for today. Connect with me on Linkedin if you actually want to understand what an Autonomous Organization looks like in the real world.