Talk to My Clone

This shouldn’t be happening.

At least, that’s what I kept thinking.

Yet after the third failure — and after I’d even called the clerk over to the self-checkout lane — it became obvious that something was seriously amiss.

Even though I’d come straight from the bank, where I’d successfully made a cash deposit, try as I might, I could not pay for Vlad’s favorite wet dog food.

For that specific errand, I had brought only that one bank card and had just deposited all my cash.

Opening the app, I easily confirmed that my available balance was more than enough.

Calling the number on the back of the card, I passed on the opportunity to create a new Voice Print ID, eager to get through to a human.

I was told the wait would be 10 minutes or more.

Reasonably confident Vlad would not starve to death, I headed home, where I added a scrambled egg to the remainder of his less-than-favorite kibble.

Admittedly, this wasn’t exactly the mystery of what killed the dinosaurs, yet, for obvious reasons, it still needed to be solved.

I had made that cash deposit that morning to cover an important transaction.

I completed it on my laptop in the bank’s lounge immediately after adding the money to my account.

After I quickly confirmed that it had gone through, Vlad and I turned our attention to his breakfast.

Apparently, the bank had flagged that transaction and sent me a fraud-alert text I never received.

I don’t know whether the supermarket’s terrible reception was somehow out to sabotage me.

Even though the problem was cleared up relatively quickly, what unnerved me was how neatly it underscored a recurring motif this week.

Ironically, this month’s theme is Fearless Clarity — meditation HERE — yet I’ve been troubled by exactly this kind of miscommunication: messages that never came through, including some I fear can never be recovered.

There’s an old fable — one I’m pretty sure is totally made up — about a frog that fails to notice the water gradually heating around it until the water begins to boil.

Way too late, in other words.

Basically, the inverse happened to me this week.

There’s been a huge flurry of digital activity around my wellness startup since I joined the Harvard Business School Foundry, but I was only dimly aware that, on one front, things had become a little quiet.

Unusually quiet, in fact.

Specifically, I haven’t been talking to as many people as I usually do about coaching on creative projects (or genuine life reinvention).

Since I’m fighting a daily battle with my email inbox, this hadn’t quite registered.

When I lifted the hood on my website — we’re launching a new quiz for the app very soon — I realized something.

Although people could submit answers through the updated coaching Typeform, a change in the platform meant the results were no longer being delivered to me.

I found evidence of one or two submissions I had never been notified about, but I don’t know how many others may have tried to reach me over the past few months.

This is rather significant.

Missing a text in the supermarket left me standing in line, puzzled and unable to purchase dog food.

A form on my website that silently failed to deliver its submissions may mean I’ve missed out on deeper relationships with people who reached out — and who may now think I’m ignoring or rejecting them.

Such miscommunication is truly the opposite of Fearless Clarity.

Books and movies abound with examples of such mishaps.

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Tess writes her fiancé a deeply significant letter about her past and slips it under his door.

She assumes he’s read it, but the letter has actually slid beneath the carpet, unseen.

Sometimes there’s active suppression of communication.

In The Notebook, Noah writes Allie daily for an entire year, but her mother intercepts all 365 letters.

Each believes the other has moved on, costing them years they could have spent happily together.

More playfully, in Harry Potter, the Dursleys keep intercepting Harry’s letters from Hogwarts, creating an increasingly absurd flood of them until Hagrid the half-giant arrives to deliver one personally.

Sometimes a message refuses not to be delivered.

There’s a new internet trend this summer based on a classic acting exercise.

It goes by different names — the “same phrase” challenge, the “one phrase, four emotions” challenge, or even the “Wow, okay” trend.

Someone repeats the same phrase, but each time with a new direction: supportive, disappointed, sarcastic, angry, surprised, or flirty.

I saw what could have been a sensational example of this in real life.

The day before, during one of the Harvard Business School Foundry’s live lectures, the professor delivered a remarkable line with utter sincerity.

The exact same words could just as easily have been spoken with a completely different stage direction.

Although he was extremely open to questions from students, he’d made clear that the lecture format did not allow him to dive deeply into the specifics of any particular project.

When a student nudged him for increasingly specific advice, he suggested using the super-advanced AI chat agent patterned on his work.

In the most helpful tone imaginable, he said:

“I’m sorry, but I really think
you should talk to my clone about this.”

In the Harvard Foundry, there are, in fact, seven different advisor agents — professor clones — that you can add to a chat in any combination.

It was suggested I add two of them to a conversation about our business model.

After two hours of work with the first, I asked Clone #2 to comment on what we had created.

They respectfully disagreed with Clone #1’s approach and redid everything in seconds.

Clone #1 agreed that Clone #2 was right.

(Which, by the way, brought us back to the business model I’d started with — but who’s keeping score?)

Yes, they are imperfect, but they are also astonishingly brilliant and fast.

And, as the professor kindly pointed out, their greatest advantage is that they are perpetually available.

Your message will never get lost.

I often find the process of resolving a fraud alert a little unnerving.

You’ve probably had the experience of being asked to identify certain facts about yourself, such as whether you’ve ever lived on a particular street or worked for a specific company.

It seems so odd to reclaim my current identity by knowing where I lived 15 years ago rather than by knowing something about my life today.

I’m honestly not that person any longer.

I get the tiniest bit nervous that I’m going to get the answer wrong, even though I’m the person who did — or didn’t — live or work there in the first place.

On a related note, I also wonder if you’ve ever received mail for a previous tenant, either because their mail forwarding expired or because they never set it up.

Sometimes messages do get delivered, but to an address that no longer applies.

Before I wrap things up, I want to apologize to anyone who reached out but never heard back because of the technical snafu.

You were not being rejected (at least not by me).

To make up for this, though, I’ve cleared space over the next two weeks and opened up a bunch of spots for Discovery Sessions — free 20-minute chats, without any “hard sell” — to see if we should work together on something.

The form — which we’ve now seriously tested and I’m reasonably sure works — is HERE and below.

Connect HERE.

Or just reply to this and we’ll begin a conversation.

Although I was initially dismayed by my dysfunctional form and my inability to buy Vlad’s breakfast, I recovered quickly.

Even people who talk about Mercury retrograde constantly may not realize that, while Mercury is technically retrograde only about 20% of the time, many astrologers also include the pre- and post-retrograde “shadow” periods as part of its effect.

That cosmology pushes communication problems closer to 50% of the year.

Texts get lost, and suddenly you have to prove who you are by knowing where you lived over a decade ago.

Only AI clones are available 24/7, and sometimes they completely disagree with each other.

Fearless Clarity may be the goal — again, meditation HERE — but it is far from our everyday reality.

Sometimes the best we can do is reach out again … and again … and again … trusting that somehow, when the timing is right, the message will be delivered.

Whether or not you’ve reached out before, if there’s something in your life or work that could benefit from some Fearless Clarity, I’m happy to help.

And I promise you’ll get me (and Vlad) — NOT our clones.

Explore Connecting HERE