Sunday Setup
A weekly newsletter to help get your mind set up for a positive workweek.
07.06.2025 — Cyborg Salutations
Human-ish Hospitality
It seems we humans are hell-bent on automating just about everything we do — possibly to the detriment of humanity. From configuring automatic bill payments, to installing self-checkout registers in every store, to the proliferation of self-driving cars on every highway, the apparent goal is to simplify life by making the mundane more tolerable. But when automation turns eerie, it's time to stop.
Thanks to a hotel chain in Japan — Henn na Hotel — creepy, life-like robotic receptionists clad in white outfits and pillbox hats now sit behind the front desk and check guests in for their stay. Spontaneous, cordial greetings from smiling human faces have been replaced by a paltry set of programmed pronouncements from a cadre of computers cosplaying as humans. Whoever thought this was a good idea should win the Ig Nobel Prize for causing frequent travelers to replace "booking.yeah" with "booking.OMG-This-is-Creepy-AF!"
Sadly, it gets worse, or just more weird. The hotel chain — who's name "Henn na" translates to "strange" — is doing the most trying to live up to its moniker, staffing the lobbies of its more than 20 branches with interactive holograms, mobile robot assistants, and guest-greeting dinosaur droids. As much as I like a good themed hotel experience, I'd rather stay at The White Lotus. Avoiding an eclectic group of eccentric wealthy vacationers that have been irritated and enraged by a paranoid, coked-out hotel manager has to be easier than trying to outrun an 11,000 pound, carnivorous, robotic T-Rex that's become self-aware. Which, by the way, might just be the plot for the next Jurassic Park sequel given Holloywood’s lack of creativity these days.
JP: B&B — The goal was to live and dine with the dinosaurs. Now it's to live or be dined by them.
It’s Goal Time…Again
If you've been rolling with me this year as I've been conducting a bit of an experiment of sharing a few unsolicited thoughts on mindfulness in the workplace — thank you, by the way — you may remember that just three months ago I wrote about goals. Since many businesses tend to (virtually) gather their employees in big conference rooms on a quarterly basis to review the company's financial goals and progress towards them, I figured it might be a good idea to do something similar now that we've officially stepped onto the "back nine" of the year.
Regardless of whether you set any goals at the beginning of the year, it's human nature to get so caught up in the challenges of every day life that you lose sight of the big picture — whatever that is for you. Three weeks quickly bleeds into three months, which then miraculously morphs into three quarters, and it's only after some significant event snaps you out of your active slumber that you sit back and review your year like a montage in a movie. But unlike the training sequence in any Rocky movie, that montage can leave you feeling gassed instead of pumped if it's filled with a myriad of missed opportunities.
So, don't wait until you have 8 weeks left in 2025 to see where you've been and what you've done. Do it now, while you still have 25 weeks — and 3 days — to course correct and continue making progress towards the things that really matter in your career. Ask yourself a few carefully crafted questions that will require an accurate and honest assessment of your goals and your efforts — or lack thereof — towards achieving them.
Have you focused more on the things you can control, or are you still fixated on Taylor's typo-filled emails that don't really affect you?
Have you become more aware of how you speak to yourself when things don't go as expected, or are you still berating yourself for minor oversights?
Are you still allowing management to impede your advancement, or have you identified — and begun executing — strategies to circumnavigate those obstacles?
Do you still find yourself loudly complaining about how things are to anyone who will listen, or have you begun quietly working behind the scenes to improve said things with anyone willing to collaborate?
Have you made a serious attempt to step out of your comfort zone and try a new way of thinking and working, or are you stuck on perfection and afraid to learn from failure?
While those are questions are rather broadly specific — if that is such a thing — the real questions to ask yourself are:
What have you done in the last six months?
and
What are you going to do in the next six months?
You've got about 4,272 hours left to make changes. Not quite the 10,000 needed to become an expert, but more than enough to move the needle.
Time to get moving.