“I swear, all she does is use ChatGPT all day long and then copy and paste the output,” my friend told me over dinner. He was thoroughly disillusioned with the marketing person at his company. “You can’t do that for a product as technical as ours. You need to get the details right.”
Besides creating potential safety issues for customers, having factual holes in your materials also just makes for lazy marketing, my friend explained—and these days, lazy is no longer good enough. “Everything she does, someone else has to double-check and correct. Nothing can go out as is.”
When he said that, a line sprang to my mind. It’s not exactly a German idiom, but it could be: “Alles angefasst, nichts berührt.” Both “anfassen” and “berühren” mean to touch something physically, but only the latter also carries the meaning of making someone feel touched. Moved. Affected. “Touch everything, move nothing,” you might say. That’s what this person seems to be doing.
At Mercedes-AMG, all major engines are still built by a single individual. “One man, one engine,” goes their philosophy. Imagine such an engineer operating with the carelessness of “touch everything, move nothing.” The engine might fall apart before it makes it into the car or, worse, break at 200 kilometers per hour.
And even if someone who doesn’t put much thought into their work could deliver qualitatively impeccable output, there’d still be one thing missing: love. That feeling AMG customers get when they hit the accelerator and hear the engine’s low rumbling, it’s not just physics. It’s knowing that a human being put a piece of themselves into the work that creates the goosebumps—and goosebumps are what buying an AMG is for.
In chess, there’s a rule that if you touch a piece, you must move it. In life, the moving we wish to do is often of a different kind, but the rule still applies: Only touch what you truly intend to move—with your effort, care, and real emotion—for if we touch everything yet move nothing, we miss not just the victory but the point of the entire game.