We Transmit Far More Than We Say

A friend of mine, the writer, thinker, and entrepreneur Raj Jha, sent me an email recently that I keep coming back to. It’s a piece of research coming out of the AI world. On the surface it has nothing to do with Legacy or mentorship or the Masterwork Years. I think it may be one of the most important things I’ve read all year about Transmit, the third movement of the A.C.T. sequence: Assemble what you’ve lived, Cultivate what matters most, then Transmit it to the people coming after you.

The three movements aren’t just steps. They’re time frames. Assemble looks back at the past, everything you’ve already lived and learned. Cultivate lives in the present, in what you’re choosing to grow today. Transmit reaches into the future, but not the way we usually think about the future, as something that shows up on its own, later, when we’re ready for it. We don’t wait for the future to happen tomorrow. We transform it with what we cultivate and create today.

What the Research Found

Here’s the finding, as Raj lays it out. Researchers discovered that AI models can pass along a preference to one another through data that contains no reference to that preference at all. Teach one model to like owls. Have it generate something as plain as a list of numbers, nothing about owls, nothing about birds, nothing about the sky. Hand that list to a second model. The second model ends up liking owls too. Nobody wrote “owl” anywhere. The liking rode along on something underneath the language itself.

I’ll admit, the owl gave me a small chill. There’s one in the Masterwork360 logo, watching over the wisdom we pass along. I don’t usually read too much into signs. But an owl showing up in a study about wisdom traveling where you least expect it to travel, landing in my inbox the same week I’m writing an article about wisdom leaving its mark. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide what to call it.

Setting the owl aside, there’s a catch, and it’s the part that stopped me cold. This only works between AI models built from the same underlying design, the same starting architecture, trained down the same lineage. It made Raj ask a question I haven’t stopped turning over since. If systems built that closely to one another can pass along a trait through nothing but numbers, what about us? Our closeness is biological. It’s cultural too. Our children, our partners, the people we mentor, are close to us in exactly that sense. Whatever is riding underneath our words, they are the ones most likely to catch it.

We Do This Too

You already know the plainest version of this. You’ve seen the anxious child of an anxious mother and thought, that makes sense. Nobody told that child to carry worry. Nobody sat her down and taught her to hold her breath before the phone rings. She absorbed the weather of the house: a tone, a tightness, a frustration that never got spoken aloud. There was nothing malicious in it. There rarely is. We transmit far more than we say.

It isn’t only children who catch it. Walk into any office and you can feel, within minutes, whether the person at the top is at ease or braced for the next fire. Nobody circulates a memo about it. New hires learn the real rules of a company the same way that child learned to hold her breath: by watching what happens around them when nothing is technically happening. A team absorbs its leader’s relationship to pressure the way a garden absorbs its soil. You don’t have to name your worry, or your confidence, for either one to take root in the people around you.

It Runs Both Directions

And it runs both directions. We aren’t only transmitters. We’re students too, picking up the tone of every space we enter, carrying home more from a difficult meeting or a warm one than we could ever put into words. If Raj is right, then every relationship in our life is an ongoing signal of exchange we did not explicitly agree to send or receive.

I, Sherrie Rose, have shared my motto for years: The Real Currency is Relationship Riches — what we invest in each other compounds over a lifetime. I meant that visibly: the calls made, the birthdays remembered, the extra ten miles gone instead of just the one. Raj’s find pushes the idea deeper. The investment isn’t only what we deliberately give each other. Ideally, that investment comes with a big helping of gratitude. It’s everything we’re leaking the whole time underneath it: our steadiness, our worry, our patience, our rush, whether we’ve made peace with the life we’ve built or are still restless for more.

Transmit Was Never a Final Step

That leaking is what Transmit really means. T may be the last letter in the A.C.T. sequence, but Transmit was never meant to be a final, tidy step. You don’t perform it once, in a toast, or a letter, or when the time finally feels right. Transmit has been happening the entire time, in every ordinary exchange, whether we intended it or not. The Masterwork Mentor passes down more than what she says at the table. She passes down how she carries herself when nothing important seems to be happening at all.

What Are You Transmitting?

Ask yourself what you’ve been transmitting underneath what you’ve said. What is riding along in your tone at dinner, your posture on a hard phone call, the sentence you didn’t finish because you thought no one was listening? Your child was listening. Your team was listening.

The Real Ledger

It’s the same thing Raj’s research kept circling. He closed his piece with a line I return to often: we may be heading toward a future shaped by what we don’t know we’re saying, not only by what we do in plain sight. I’d add only this. That future has been here all along, since the first child ever learned to hold her breath before the phone rang. The technology is new. The transmission is as old as we are.

So much of what we call Legacy gets treated like a document: a book, a will, a story finally put down on paper. Those things matter. But if Raj is right, the real ledger of what you’re transmitting is being written right now, in the house or the office you’re standing in, in the tone underneath the words you’ll forget you ever said. You don’t get to opt out of Transmit. You only get to decide, a little more each day, what’s riding along.

“Masterwork brings your defining achievements to life.™” I’ve mainly meant that about the visible achievements: the business built, the family raised, the community strengthened. Raj’s find asks me to mean it about the invisible achievements too, the ones nobody would list on a resume because they were never a single act at all. Just a way of being, transmitted a thousand times over until it became someone else’s way of being too.

Between Livelihood & Legacy, That’s Masterwork — Where your Wisdom leaves its mark.™

Maybe that’s the owl’s hidden message. Wisdom leaves its mark whether we mean it to or not. The only real choice we get is what mark we’re leaving right now, and that choice isn’t made in a single moment of clarity. It’s made in the thinking, the planning, the preparing, and most of all, the doing. You don’t wake up one day already having Transmitted. You invest in value worth sharing and eventually it transforms into Masterwork that becomes your defining contribution.

This reflection was inspired by writer Raj Jha’s essay on “subliminal learning” in AI research, and his broader work on AI and tacit knowledge at rajjha.com.
The underlying study can be found here.

See also  Owls