Means and Goals

Why it's worth pausing most meetings.

In a radio broadcast from September 1941 titled, “The Common Language of Science”, Albert Einstein said the following:

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem—in my opinion—to characterize our age.

I first heard this quote on an episode of Dialectic, where Anjan Katta references this quote, with a slight twist. He says:

Einstein says, “What characterizes the modern age is optimization of means, yet confusion of goals.”

Both of these—the original quote and its variation—got me thinking about why I don’t like meetings. Most meetings anyway.

Meetings are a means.

In the world of work—I can only speak to knowledge work from personal experience—we seem to have perfected the art of defaulting to meetings.

We’re optimizing them even further now by asking AI to get involved and note take, compress, clarify, and suggest things to us.

In her excellent book, The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker talks about an ancient Japanese idea called Ichi-go ichi-e, which roughly translates to one time, one meeting.

The idea is that this moment, in this time and place, with these people, doing this thing, will never be repeated. As such, it should be treated with with a certain level of reverence.

I fear that in our pursuit to optimize and perfect meetings as means, we have lost the ability to treat them with reverence. As Einstein said so many years ago, we have become confused about why we meet in the first place.

If you ever find yourself questioning what a meeting is about, whether it’s the first of its kind or a routine meeting, it’s worth pausing. If you wish to treat a meeting with reverence, you must first be clear about its purpose.

Let’s stop meeting for the sake of meeting.

Let’s find reverence through purpose.