technology is amazing.

the 3.95 ounce smartphone i keep with me in my pocket every day is several times more powerful than the 20 pound desktop computer my father bought in the early 90s. with a couple taps of my thumbs from anywhere i have a cellular signal, i can instantly chat with a friend on the other side of the globe. i can see her face and wish her a good friday morning on a thursday afternoon. it’s not too far of a stretch to say i hold the future in the palm of my hand.

but in our quest for ‘better, faster, cheaper, more efficient’ we can easily lose those parts of us that make us uniquely human. nothing says “we appreciate you” quite like an automated message from unmonitored email account wishing us a happy birthday or happy anniversary. we expect to become sought-after experts because we put some information in our twitter or linkedin profiles. we begin to SEO our lives hoping to pop up on as many results pages as possible. and all the while we forget that life and business always has been about building and maintaining relationships.

technology is amazing, but it’s also easy to hide behind it. it’s simple to update a profile or add a few tags or write another script and think that your work is done—just let technology take care of the rest.

but the real work is just beginning.