When I was in 5th grade, my math teacher drew a single line on a piece of paper, put it under a projector, and magnified it huge on the wall. Up close, it wasn’t a clean line at all; it was fluid, thick in some places, thin or broken in others. I found it interesting, but I did not understand why my teacher showed it to us. He did not deliver a follow-on lesson; it did not show up on a test, and he never mentioned it again. But I can still see that image on the wall as clearly as if it were in front of me today.
It has come back to me at odd moments over the course of my life, and I think about it a little differently every time. My husband and daughter are both artists, and when they talk about creating the illusion of a line through shading, I think back to that projector. There is no such thing as a perfect line. There is just the illusion of one.
Consider a walk I took with my daughter through our neighborhood. We were looking at the houses, at how their edges were formed from paint and plaster and stone and wood, the same way an artist builds an edge out of shading instead of an actual line. Maybe there are no lines anywhere. Just the places where one thing is built up enough that your eye decides something else begins.
If you work anywhere near technology right now, you already know why this keeps surfacing for me. AI is reshaping jobs faster than anyone can chart on a slide. You cannot draw a clean boundary around what your role will look like in two years. Neither can I. So how do you prepare for something you don’t know yet?
You don’t wait for the line to appear. You build the edge yourself, the way an artist does, one layer at a time, adjusting as the shape gets clearer.
The next time someone hands you an unclear boundary, a shifting role, a job description that reads differently every quarter, remember the line on the wall. It was never as solid as it looked from the back of the room. Get close enough, and there’s just shading, and the shape you decide to build from it.