What Can My Pet Teach Me That AI Can't?

Weekly reflections from Pure Pawsitivity • Week 12

AI can help me understand the person I want to be. My animals give me the opportunity every day to become that person.

What I Learned This Week

I was sitting on the couch enjoying a beautiful Arizona storm, having a conversation with artificial intelligence.

Which is becoming a pretty normal sentence around our house.

Edan and I use AI constantly. We even call it Chatty G.

Anyway, I was thinking about what makes a life wealthy.

Things like...

Health. Love. Spirit. Money.

I was explaining that I'd gladly have the first three overflowing, even if the financial side wasn't particularly impressive.

AI immediately started organizing my thoughts into a beautiful framework.

Give it four ideas and suddenly you're a professional monk with a new LLC.

But something didn't fit.

It was treating wealth as another separate category.

To me, wealth emerges from all the other meaningful parts of life.

So I pushed back.

And something interesting happened.

The more I questioned its answers, the more I understood my own thinking.

I was using AI to explore what I believed.

And that got me thinking about something our animals have been teaching Edan and me for years.

Watch This Week's Presentation

What Can My Pet Teach Me That AI Can't? | Pawsitivity Presentation #12

This week I'm exploring what happens when we stop accepting answers simply because they sound convincing, and start paying attention to what our animals give us opportunities to practice.

[WATCH PAWSITIVITY PRESENTATION #12]

The Animal in Front of Me

Rosa used to hate blueberries.

Now she loves them.

She also used to have trouble with beef. Today, she does well with it.

Opal used to get diarrhea from raw goat milk when she was younger. Now she tolerates it well.

What changed?

I don't know exactly.

But imagine if we'd decided years ago that those things would always be true.

We'd be making decisions for the animals they used to be instead of the animals standing in front of us today.

Of course, that doesn't mean ignoring genuine sensitivities or repeatedly trying something that causes serious problems.

It means staying curious.

And then there's Lokah, who eats Edan's clothes.

I'm not even going to try connecting that one to artificial intelligence.

Sometimes a cat's just an asshole.

Moving on.

Here's what I keep discovering.

Our animals give us opportunities to practice things that are remarkably easy to understand intellectually.

Patience.

Responsibility.

Presence.

Love.

I can read about patience all day long.

Then Carlito takes 25 minutes to find somewhere to pee.

Now I get to practice.

Weekly Thought

What can my pet teach me that AI can't?

This week, I was also reminded of something while preparing to watch seven hours of commercial-free football.

Edan started reminding me of things I'd promised to do.

I didn't want to do them.

But I caught myself resisting.

And I realized:

What I wanted in that moment wasn't necessarily aligned with the life I actually wanted to live.

I wanted to watch football.

I also wanted to be the kind of husband who follows through.

Both were real.

We got most of it done.

I watched some football too.

Compromise. That's a happy marriage.

And our animals give us opportunities like this every day.

AI can help me understand something. My animals give me opportunities to live it.

Keep Exploring

While researching this presentation, I found a fascinating study involving dogs and nosework.

Researchers compared dogs practicing scent-searching activities with dogs practicing heelwork.

After two weeks, the nosework group approached an ambiguous food location more quickly, which researchers interpreted as a more positive response to uncertainty in that experiment.

It's a small study, but it raised a question I love:

How much of what we learn depends on what we get the opportunity to practice?

EXPLORE THE NOSEWORK RESEARCH

I started this week wondering what makes life wealthy.

And some of the most important things I've ever learned have come from a Chihuahua who doesn't even know what a Tuesday is.

Some of the greatest wealth I've ever experienced came from loving animals who have absolutely no idea how much they've given me.

Keep Practicing With Us

If this made you look at your animal a little differently, that's enough.

Pawsitivity in Practice is where we keep sharing what we're learning each week through our animals, the shop, the podcast, the research, and the questions that follow us home.

Pure Pawsitivity™

Learning in public by paying attention to the animal in front of us.