I have a running joke with friends of mine that the movie scene that I find the most aspirational is from Forrest Gump.

It comes after Forrest learns that Lieutenant Dan invested their money in “some kind of fruit company.” (It was Apple.)

Forrest got a call saying they didn’t need to worry about money anymore.

“That’s good,” Forrest says. “One less thing.”

But my favorite scene comes just after that, when Forrest explains that now that he’s a “gazillionaire” and has given money to the hospital and church, he likes mowing the grass for the school so much that he does it for free.

Being able to do tasks that you actually enjoy that benefit others is what I find most aspirational.

I mowed lawns for my first paying job, and I can practically smell the cut grass in that scene.

It’s been my observation that we humans enjoy doing productive, meaningful work.

Some of it we would do for free if we could.

The most aspirational version of success is not quitting work. It is being free to keep the work you would do anyway.

A great head administrator I worked under many years ago at a state agency used to insist on personally pulling together a certain weekly report that I and others could easily have done.

It was one he had personally designed that provided a few key metrics to more accurately gauge our burn rate.

He told me that when he retired, he’d come back once a week to run that report and explain it to me over a cup of coffee.

Looking back, he was joking, but not really.

He enjoyed certain aspects of his job enough that he’d do them for free.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that just about everyone has some version of that weekly report.

There are parts of our jobs that energize us more than others.

There are tasks we hope we are asked to handle and others we hope they forget we even know how to do.

Most jobs have both.

But maybe one of the keys to our personal motivation and fulfillment is recognizing what parts of our jobs we’ll miss someday.

We all have metaphorical school lawns we’d gladly mow for free.

Appreciate yours a little more today.

And if you lead people, notice what activities they would seem to do for free.

When are they smiling? When are they most energized?

Protect that work.

I’ve recently been citing a quote from an American Banker article in speeches.

That quote is, “AI seems to scale both positive outcomes...and mistakes...with equal speed and efficiency.”

As bankers take that in, I reveal that the author of the quote is someone I trust implicitly.

I then share that the author was me.

And if you can’t trust yourself, well, who can you trust?

And so help me, I did not intend to prove that point last week in the way that I did.

While working on a website that I help a family member with, I was prompted to optimize the SEO search thing-a-ma-bob.

Now, I’ve about had my fill of the various programs I use for both personal and professional purposes constantly inserting pitches to let AI handle things.

But for some reason, this one seemed to make sense. It only took me about a minute to review the optimization suggestions.

And then I clicked okay.

That’s when the fun started.

I hadn’t realized that the AI program was going to change something in literally every paragraph on the site.

I (foolishly) thought that the changes would be behind the scenes and not visible on the actual page. Uh...nope.

The now “optimized” website read like total AI-generated slop.

It was as if an animatronic Borat had become the website’s copywriter.

I spent the next hour manually restoring the text we actually liked. I chuckled at how thorough and efficient AI had been in helping me make a complete mess of something that had worked fine for several years.

It only took a few seconds.

My “AI seems to scale…” slide had come to life.

By chance, I was asked to help that same relative with a billing and payment issue a week later.

The automated phone menu and chatbots were useless except for raising my blood pressure.

Then I finally reached Winnie.

She was an agent who spent five minutes on the phone with me, identified the issue, and resolved it while being genuinely empathetic.

She was so…human.

I think I got off the phone feeling better about humanity. (That’s not entirely a joke.)

Technology is great and getting better. And yet, good people are more needed than ever.

Identify and thank your own Winnies.

And hang on to them.