Have you ever thought about how much it must have sucked to be alive during the Pleistocene Epoch?
That’s the last ice age for any non-archaeologists in the room.
Imagine you’re one of the lucky humans alive in this era of extreme cold (don’t forget all that charming ice!): You’re living in a cave and it’s like 3 degrees outside. It’s your day to hunt and the survival of your entire tribe is on the line. How are you going to get that bison, champ?
There’s a perception that ice age cavemen had the brain power to match their tools: primitive. Erroneous! They were sophisticated enough to know there just had to be a better way than to randomly go out hunting for whatever they saw and hope for the best. And now we have proof!
2023 was a real thrillgulp because this incredible thing (that you maybe didn’t know about) happened: Ben Bacon figured out that those 20,000-year-old cave drawings of animals weren’t just cavemen expressing themselves to the world. They were animal reproduction cycles tracked over the lunar year – by animal!
Yup – these drawings had a legit function: tribe thriving dashboards that saved hunters critical time and energy when deciding what to hunt on any given day. Imagine how many people these dashboards saved.
{{ subscriber.first_name }} – what I took away from this melted my modern brain: cavemen from 20,000 years ago are suddenly closer to us today than ever thought possible. It goes to show that as humans, we’ve always had problems. And you know what: we’ve always figured it out. Cavemen’s remarkable ability to work smarter, not harder (sans modern technology), and share their knowledge with the tribe helped get us here, right now. You and me.
Today, we modern folk are lucky enough to be technology rich. We have apps, computing power, and systems for our convenience, screw survival: our refrigerators tell us when our oat milk is about to expire, we can watch anything we want anytime, and we can literally parent with the entire internet’s knowledge at our fingertips.
But (you knew that was coming) there’s a cost to all of this technology: complexity.
How painful (and time-consuming) is it to get all these rad systems to talk to one another and work together?
The complexity of our techstack, tools, and timelines now defines and decides what we can and can’t do with our data and our business. It changes the conversations from innovation to limitation, and we usually give up before we even start.
It’s time to change the conversation from can’t to how.
In a world of connected complexity, it’s time to go caveman style: use focus and what you have now to figure out how you can solve that bison sized problem dancing around in your head at 1:14am.
If it’s winter outside – and your tribe is depending on you: what is the one question you need answers to in order to thrive? What would you need to look at on your cave wall?
Can you figure out how to get there, without letting the complexity and distraction of the modern world stop you?
