Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. Listen to “Continuous Scarcity”, an original extemporaneous improvisation by Howard Lieberman, composed for this column.
Optionality as a cultural addiction
The brain rewards the anticipation of options more than the making of decisions.We are wired to enjoy keeping doors open. Which means the culture of maximum optionality is not just a business model. It is a neurological exploit. Choice feels like freedom until it prevents accumulation.
And accumulation is the only mechanism by which anything gets deep. There are platforms now selling infinite optionality to everyone, with an endless queue and a perpetual pivot, which offer a friction-less exit from anything that gets difficult. Yet we know that it would not have been possible to build these sites if their developers had kept their options unlimited. Barry Schwartz documented this in his book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.”
I know this from the inside. From 1991 to 2013, I lived and worked inside Silicon Valley, the machine that built the optionality economy. Optionality is useful early in a problem. It becomes an addiction when it prevents you from ever accumulating anything. In 1980, I was the first engineer hired at Bose with a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE )in Digital Signal Processing, a field so new it did not yet have a name. One of my roles was to take Bose from analog to digital. Then I moved to Apple, where I convinced the company that every personal computer needed to hear and speak, and spent years designing the acoustic systems for every product in their line. Silent movies to talkies. These were ideas I had before the institutions had them, and then there was the long, sustained work of making them real. I tell you this not as a biography but as context. The engineering teams that made those products possible had staying power. They went deep. They accumulated the kind of tacit knowledge that cannot be hired in or parachuted down from a consulting firm. I had a chance to apply and to teach these lessons.
Between Apple and founding the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute in 2005, I ran ESCAtech, a multimedia company I started in 1994, and then, beginning in 2000, spent five years as a physics professor at Cogswell Polytechnical College, where I created and taught the school’s Innovation Management Program. Standing in front of students and having to explain how innovation actually works forces a rigor that practice alone does not. And what I kept having to teach, against the grain of everything the culture was saying, was this: the pivot is a tool, not a philosophy. Optionality is useful in the early stages of a problem. It becomes an addiction when it prevents you from ever accumulating anything.
Why meaning requires persistence
The popular mythology of innovation is the eureka moment. The garage. The pivot that changed everything. The reality, in every case I have studied or lived, is almost the opposite. Dyson made 5,127 prototypes before the cyclone vacuum worked. The Wright brothers ran the same glider tests at Kitty Hawk for years, changing one variable at a time with the patience of scientists who had accepted that the problem would take as long as it took. The architecture underlying modern AI, the foundation of every large language model now reshaping entire industries, sat in academic obscurity for years because it had no immediate commercial application. No one wanted to fund patience and persistence, yet they are exactly the qualities that produced the breakthrough.
What appears to be a sudden emergence from the outside is almost always a long accumulation that finally crossed a threshold. I think of this as the tree ring principle. The rings only form under seasonal constraint, periods of growth interrupted by periods of consolidation. A tree in a climate-controlled greenhouse grows fast and falls easily. The rings require winter. Mastery and meaning are structurally identical in this respect: they are both lagging indicators of duration. You cannot have a rich relationship in a weekend. You can have an intense one. Intensity and depth are not the same thing, and the culture of maximum optionality has spent a decade teaching us to confuse them.
I know this from the inside of a creative practice. Each of the more than one hundred columns I have written for this publication has been accompanied by original music I composed and performed, and by visual artwork I created with AI assistance. This multimedia form is not decoration. It is a deliberate argument about what columns can become as they move into digital life. I invented this form because I believe the future of the column is media-rich, and because it gives my other creative expressions a home. A Juilliard-trained composer does not stop composing because he became an engineer. The practices accumulate. They do not compete.
A single note is just a frequency. It becomes music only in relationship to what precedes and follows it. Improvisation, which appears to be pure freedom from the outside, is in fact a prepared continuity operating at high speed. Coltrane could play what he played because he had internalized structures deeply enough to move through them without thinking. The freedom was real. But it was the result of years of constraint. Freedom without continuity is not improvisation. It is noise.
Relationships under short time constants
In engineering, a time constant describes how quickly a system responds and resets. A short time constant means fast response, fast decay. The platforms restructuring human relationships, dating apps, gig work, remote-first contract culture, and the relentless churn of social media are all short-term constant systems. The problem is that the software running inside us—attachment, trust, love, creative collaboration—evolved over millennia to operate on long time constants. We are running long-duration processes on short-cycle hardware and wondering why nothing accumulates.
Google’s Project Aristotle, one of the most comprehensive studies of team performance ever conducted, found that psychological safety, the condition in which people feel safe enough to take creative risks, was the single strongest predictor of innovation output, more powerful than individual talent or team composition. Psychological safety is not a personality trait. It is a product of time and continuity. You cannot manufacture it on a team that reconstitutes every quarter. The distributed, asynchronous, high-turnover structures that tech normalized after 2020 did not just change work arrangements. They eliminated the conditions under which genuine creative risk-taking happens.
I left Silicon Valley in 2013, not for a better opportunity or a pivot. My father had dementia, and my roots were pulling me east. That was not an optimization. It was a recognition that some continuities matter more than any option on the table. The Berkshires are where I have been since, running community groups, watching which organizations survive transitions and which dissolve, continuing to convene SVIII every Friday at noon Pacific. What I observe consistently is what the research confirms: the groups that survive are not the ones that never change. They are the ones that change together, maintaining the thread while allowing the form to evolve.
Trust is not built in moments of connection. It is built in moments of staying after the connection fades. That is precisely what short time constants eliminate—the unglamorous middle, the maintenance, the repair. And it is in the unglamorous middle that the most interesting innovation happens. The hallway conversation that became the Post-it Note. The lunch table argument that became the Macintosh interface. These did not happen in sprints. They happened in the accumulated time of people who had not yet left.
Continuity as the scarce resource
The counterexamples are hiding in plain sight. Pixar’s brain trust met for years before it became a recognized methodology. Stripe kept its early team deliberately small and stable while competitors scaled fast and fragmented. In Japan, the concept of shokunin, the craftsman who spends a lifetime mastering a single discipline, produces both the finest sushi and some of the most durable industrial design in the world. These are not anti-innovation stories. They are what innovation actually looks like when you remove the mythology of the pivot and examine the underlying structure.
In a culture of maximum optionality, continuity has become a scarce resource. Which means it has become both the competitive advantage and the only path to anything worth calling meaningful. The most disruptive thing a person or organization can do right now, in a market that rewards the pivot, the exit, the platform, and the frictionless new beginning, is to stay. To close doors. To go deep. To let the rings form.
