On music, political climate and personal growth

I have four more things to share with you this week: the Marsh family, Biden-Trump, the AI Maturity Spider – and the death of a character I learned to love.

The Marsh family makes my heart sing (along)

They are a musical family of six: parents with two girls and two boys, all now in their teens. They live in Kent (UK) and play their original songs and clever covers with a twist.

Initially, it was the way this family made Covid isolation a bit less shit, and once they published their first cover in 2020, 'One Day More', the internet exploded. They took the good old hit from Les Miserables and gave it a family treatment.

It was a very homemade event, but it had more than just a little out-of-tune singing and family inside jokes. I was hooked.

Since then, they have published a ton of videos, originals, and covers. The production quality has improved significantly, and the kids have grown physically and in their musical skills. I have come to love their wit and weird ways of telling the truth, which sometimes could be hard to hear, but it is irresistible when it comes from these innocent-looking kids and their plain, ordinary parents.

One of my all-time favourite Marsh Family tunes is their Prostate Cancer tune. Listen to it.

So, what does the Marsh Family have to do with Biden?

Nothing at all, and all for nothing. I saw the painful – so-called – debate where these two old men misbehaved; one a pathological liar and one almost sedated zombie.

The political climate is such that it generates this kind of weather event where the substance is missing, but the lies are pissed down, and the truth is washed away, drowned and buried under this acid rain. It was not a debate; it was an x-ray of emptiness.

There are no alternatives when a convicted felon and a frail grandpa are the only ones to choose from. There is no path forward with this kind of political climate change, but it will destroy the nation and, eventually, the whole world unless we let more Marsh Families sing out loud what really matters. And then sing along.

When Nazis came to power, they had hardly 36% of the votes, and all good people were silent and keep their heads down. No Marsh Families were singing then.

Luckily, the time is different. The current political weather (in the US, France and many other places) is severe and makes us shiver, but I can hear in the tunes of Marsh Family how the climate can change if we all sing with them and take action.

The AI Maturity Spider

On a positive note, our FairAim AI business is growing, and we are building small, nifty AI tools for SMEs. Our latest innovation is our AI Maturity Spider.

Our customers can use an AI evaluation tool and create a nice radar diagram to facilitate communication about assessing their AI maturity, adoption, and strategies. I believe that this kind of 8-segment spider web can help businesses identify what they could do with the AI.

The diagram is an output of a survey that uses AI to analyse their business, identify strengths and areas where they could find low-hanging AI fruits and recommend the steps forward.

This AI Maturity Spider is one of the many ways we can make AI accessible, understandable and more practical for our customers. If you are interested in AI Maturity Spider, email me, and I'll give you free access to the tool to test it for your business.

The death of one main character

If you have been reading these newsletters, you know that I am also writing a murder mystery novel. I now have about 60,000 words done spread across 38 scenes. I still have some 80,000 to 100,000 words queuing to jump from my keyboard to the remaining 80+ scenes.

On Friday, things took an unexpected turn that wasn't part of the plan. One of my main characters met his maker. Can I say it in that way if I am the maker? I can because the scene wrote itself (kind of – against my will and wishes), and in the end, the young Michael was lying on the floor with a bullet hole in his head.

It is strange how sometimes the story writes itself. I was devastated, and to my surprise, the sorrow and pain of loss felt real. This death opened up a new depth and forced me to write things I would otherwise avoid. It feels that Michael gave his life for the love of the story and for helping me to write it better than I would have otherwise done.

In life, this happens all the time. The unexpected makes us re-calibrate everything, and if we are honest with ourselves, we grow wiser and become more generous than we were before. That's the power of a story.

What is your story? Who of your imaginary fragments have you sacrificed to give space for you to grow?

Ngā mihi

Jussi

The quote of the week

‘The role of citizen in a democracy does not end with your vote.’ – Barak Obama