There is some term for this thing that I am thinking of, but I can’t remember what it is. This is my attempt to remember it before using the Google or asking Gippity.

Imagine a thing so desirable that people go out of their way to try to acquire it, to their peril.

A mirage is somewhat like this, in that you see a water source that is not real and try to move toward it, eventually to die of thirst in the desert.

The siren’s song from the Odessey is more like it. It’s something that sounds attractive, too beautiful to ignore, yet will absolutely kill you if you try to move towards it.

I guess I’m trying to imagine a siren’s song that lures people into throwing men, materiel, and money into the Pit of Bezos. But it doesn’t look like a bottomless pit. If it did, you wouldn’t go near it. Instead it looks like 15%+ CAGR and/or a winning $1 billion lottery ticket, even if it is actually a bridge to nowhere.

I suppose I am re-treading this old ground because change is about to be thrust upon us. Part of the shape of that change is that there is someone still listening to the siren song. Someone who wants to commit even more to that simultaneously illusive and elusive dream of a city in the clouds. The name of that city changes, but the bridge to it always has the same name.

Meanwhile, until someone tells me otherwise, it’s my job on Earth to fight the holding action required to fund that glorious project to the skies. Except it’s also my job to build a different bridge to somewhere else on land. Except it’s also my job to build a third bridge across the Atlantic Ocean. Any two of which I could do well. I need more men do to all three. But there will be no men for that.

“Hey, if we stop doing this thing, could we free up a few people to go work on something else?” We could free up exactly two, assuming they don’t mind you stabbing them in the fucking back just as they are at the finish line of what was the bloodiest race I’ve ever seen. I guess you could free half of me up also, except you’ll need me to actually keep the company afloat while you guys decide whether the unicorn you want to make has a white horn or a purple horn.

I think I’m nearly spent. I have been the hinge around which an entire company has pivoted, and that pivot has not resulted in the quantum leap desired. “It’s going to take off any moment,” I was told as I was handed a free lottery ticket.

I can do some math, and the lottery ticket is worth approximately $0 if everything remains as it is and as it has been for the past decade. If I were to succeed at everything I imagine is within my direct power now to change, then perhaps that lottery ticket will be, at best, worth less than I make in one year. If the person who handed me the lottery ticket is correct, then that lottery ticket will be worth a very tidy sum.

In analytical chemistry, I was taught that one measurement is not a measurement, and that two measurements is a very bad measurement. Any two points makes a straight line, and almost nothing is a straight line. Three points makes a curve. We’re about to get a fourth point that will probably be an inflection, and I have no idea which way it will go. I suppose that’s what I’m waiting for to tell me what my lottery ticket might be worth.

Then again, I never play the lottery…