By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Unlost Self — Column 1
In 1947, a Polish-American sculptor named Korczak Ziolkowski drove to the Black Hills of South Dakota with $174 in his pocket and a promise he had no business making.
A Lakota elder named Chief Henry Standing Bear had asked him to carve a mountain — not a sculpture on a mountain, but an entire mountain — into the likeness of the warrior Crazy Horse. The finished monument would stand 563 feet high and 641 feet long. Ziolkowski was 40 years old. He had no equipment, no road, no electricity, no water, and no realistic chance of completing what he was agreeing to do.
He said yes anyway. He blasted the first stone in 1948. He worked every day until he died in 1982, having removed more than 7 million tons of rock. His wife Ruth carried on after him. Seven of their ten children joined the work. Grandchildren are on the mountain now. It is still unfinished. It may not be finished in their lifetimes either.
And here is the thing: nobody who knows this story thinkswasted his life. Nobody stands at the base of that mountain and thinks “what a shame he didn’t complete it.” The incompleteness is not the point. In some way that is hard to articulate but impossible to miss, the impossibility of the task was the whole point. He wasn’t building a statue. He was honoring a people, correcting an injustice, and planting a dream deep enough to outlast him by generations.
He understood something about purpose that most of us are only now being forced to confront.
The Problem Nobody Is Talking About Honestly
Here is the question that keeps me up at night, and I suspect it keeps a lot of people up without them quite knowing how to name it.
Fifty years ago, building a business from scratch was a decade of work, minimum. Writing a serious book consumed years. Mastering a craft — surgery, architecture, cabinetmaking — required thousands of hours before you produced anything worth showing anyone. The scale of what one human being could accomplish in a lifetime was naturally bounded by time, energy, and the limits of human capability. That boundary gave accomplishment its weight. You made something happen against real resistance. The resistance was what made it mean something.
That boundary is dissolving.
The tools available today allow a person with intelligence and effort to accomplish in months what previously took years. In twenty years, what takes months now will take days. The question this creates — and I want to sit with it seriously rather than wave it away — is whether accomplishment retains its meaning when the resistance evaporates. If a machine can write the novel, design the building, compose the symphony, and run the company, does the person who does those things with machine assistance feel the same satisfaction as the person who did them the hard way? And if not, what are we actually after when we pursue meaningful work?
I think the answer is embedded in Korczak’s mountain, and I want to try to pull it out.
Korczak Ziolkowski and his wife Ruth in 1982.
What Accomplishment Was Actually For
The cabinet, the company, the marathon time, the novel — these were never the real point. They were evidence of something. The real point was what you became by doing them.
The discipline of showing up every day for years. The patience of doing something badly for a long time before you could do it well. The character built by honoring a commitment when honoring it was costly. The resilience formed by failing and starting again. The self-knowledge that comes from struggling with something genuinely hard. These are the actual products of meaningful work, and they are entirely immune to automation.
A robot can build a perfect cabinet. It cannot develop the character that building cabinets builds in a person. An AI can draft a business plan in minutes. It cannot become the person who spent five years turning a failing idea into something real — who learned to read people, manage fear, make decisions without enough information, and get back up after catastrophic mistakes.
This reframe matters enormously: stop measuring purpose by what you produced, and start measuring it by who you became in the producing. This has always been the deeper truth about meaningful work. It just becomes urgent now, when the produced thing can be outsourced but the becoming cannot.
The Inversion Nobody Expected
Here is the counterintuitive thing that is already happening, and will accelerate dramatically in the next decade.
As accomplishment becomes easier, chosen difficulty becomes more meaningful — not less.
When anyone can publish a polished novel with AI assistance, the person who writes one entirely by hand — who struggles through every sentence, revises for years, earns every word — is making a statement. A deliberate one. They are choosing a harder path when an easier path is available, and that choice carries meaning the easy path cannot.
We already see this everywhere. People run marathons when they could take a cab. They grow vegetables when supermarkets exist. They learn to play piano when Spotify is free. They build furniture when IKEA is twenty minutes away. The point of these things is not efficiency. The point is that the difficulty is the experience, and the experience is the purpose.
In the age of AI, this inverts the assumption most people carry about technology. The assumption is that easier is better. For human purpose, that’s backwards. Difficulty is not the obstacle. Difficulty is the terrain where growth actually happens. Choose it intentionally and it becomes one of the most powerful sources of meaning available — precisely because you didn’t have to.
Purpose isn’t finishing the mountain—it’s choosing a direction worth a lifetime, knowing the summit may belong to someone else.
Five Questions Worth Asking Yourself
What I’m calling the Korczak Principle is not a single idea. It’s a framework — a set of questions that help you think about purpose differently when the old model stops working. Here they are, with some real examples attached.
1.) What are you pointing toward that is larger than you can finish?
This is the Ziolkowski question directly. Not what can you accomplish before you die, but what direction is worthy of a life. The shift is from destination to direction.
The father who decides he is going to be the kind of man his sons measure themselves against — not in any one moment, but across thirty years of consistent showing up — has chosen a direction that cannot be finished and does not need to be. The researcher who dedicates her career to a problem she knows she won’t solve, but whose work will give the next generation a better foothold. The teacher who is not trying to produce graduates but to plant a certain quality of curiosity that will flower in students he’ll never meet. All of these people are building mountains. None of them will see them finished. That’s the point.
2.) What are you choosing to do the hard way, and why?
A retired carpenter I know refuses to use a nail gun. He frames everything by hand with a hammer, the way his father taught him. He’s slower than any contractor on the market. He doesn’t care. He says the work feels different when your hand is what drives it — that the feedback of impact travels up your arm and tells you something about the wood and your own steadiness that a compressor-powered tool can’t replicate. He’s not being precious about it. He understands exactly what he’s choosing and why. That choice is his purpose.
As AI expands what any individual can produce, the most meaningful question won’t be “what did you make?” It will be “what did you choose to do yourself when you didn’t have to?” The answer to that question reveals what you actually value at the level below the story you tell yourself about what you value.
3.) Who are you becoming in the doing of it?
A woman I know spent eleven years writing a memoir about her family’s immigration story. She could have finished a version of it in two. She kept going back because she kept discovering that what she thought the story was about turned out to be the surface of something deeper — about identity, about shame, about what gets passed down without anyone choosing to pass it down. The eleven years didn’t just produce a book. They produced a person who understood her family, her country, and herself in ways that no amount of reading or reflection could have given her without the struggle of trying to put it truthfully into words. The book is almost beside the point. The person who wrote it is the point.
4.) Who are your witnesses, and do they understand what it costs?
Meaning is not a solo experience. It requires people who genuinely understand the difficulty of what you’re doing and can recognize the achievement in it. A grandfather who has spent forty years being present and consistent for his family needs his grandchildren to understand, at some level, what that consistency required — what he gave up, what he pushed through, what he chose when other choices were available. Not so he can receive credit. But because meaning without witnesses is just private experience, and humans are not built for purely private experience.
The communities that will matter most going forward are the ones whose members understand each other’s work at the level of its actual cost. The woodworkers who know what a hand-cut dovetail requires. The farmers who know what a failed harvest costs a family. The parents who know what it means to stay when staying is the last thing you want to do.
5.) What long thread are you setting in motion in the people closest to you?
Legacy, properly understood, is not about monuments or being remembered. It’s about the choices made by people you’ll never meet, in situations you can’t predict, being quietly shaped by something you set in motion.
Korczak Ziolkowski’s grandchildren are on the mountain not because they have to be, but because something was planted in them — a sense of what the work meant, a connection to a promise that predates them, a feeling that this particular direction is worth a life. That is legacy working. It has nothing to do with fame or completion.
The parents who instilled a standard of honesty so deep their children can’t negotiate it away. The grandparent who told the stories that kept a family anchored to where it came from. The person who held to their values so consistently that it became the ambient standard everyone around them rose to, without quite knowing why. These long threads are not dramatic. They are quiet, daily, and cumulative. And they will outlast any monument.
The One Thing That Can’t Be Automated
The old model of purpose — set a goal, work toward it, complete it, feel satisfied — made sense when human capability was the binding constraint. When the barn took a month to build, building the barn was the purpose.
But capability is no longer the constraint. The constraint now is direction. It’s choice. It’s intention. It’s the decision about what is worth pointing your life at, knowing that the pointing matters more than the arriving.
Korczak Ziolkowski knew this without being able to name it. He chose a direction — justice for a people who had been wronged, beauty carved from stone, a promise honored over a lifetime — that was worthy of everything he had. The mountain will be finished by people he never met. That was always the plan.
When Chief Standing Bear asked him to take on the impossible task, Korczak had every reason to say no. He said yes anyway.
That yes — deliberate, costly, open-eyed about what it would require — is the whole framework.
It cannot be automated. It can only be chosen.
Next column: “The Relationships That Hold — Why Father, Grandfather, Great-Grandfather Still Mean Everything”
Related Reading
Crazy Horse Memorial: Korczak — Storyteller in Stone
AI Labor Displacement and the Limits of Worker Retraining — Brookings Institution