Small Steps
We are awash in maximalist thinking and news. Token maxxing. Billion-dollar valuation rounds. TAMs larger than the entire tech sector. Hyperscalers. Trillion-parameter models. AI that is going to change every job or eliminate every job. National government involvement. Everything is big, has massive impact, is changing everything.
And maybe at one point in my career I would have gotten sucked into this maelstrom. But I find myself inspired by other voices now.
First, Joan Westenberg on the cockroach:
A cockroach has no ego, only the instinct to persist.
The core traits I want to build are resilience first; then adaptability and then indestructability. These might be inglorious, but if they mean the difference between living on my own steam and my own skills vs. going back to a job on someone else’s paycheck, they’re more than enough for me.
I love this. Success at a hot startup is a crapshoot and out of any individual's hands. But we can all focus on small simple steps, on incremental progress, on being scrappy.
On to Ted Gioia on how he came up with the moniker The Honest Broker. Worth reading the entire essay; there are no pithy quotes that pull it all together for me. Ted became inspired by mentors and associates who taught him to provide true, authentic feedback, focused on the consumer. This is how Walt Mossberg built his reputation as well.
I sometimes pull my punches for fear of offending someone, but these guys show how to do it right. They aren’t focused on achieving a certain amount of success or a certain amount of impact. They are focused on being enthusiasts about music or technology, and sharing what they see.
And finally, from one of my favorite books of the last several years, Jeff Tweedy in How to Write One Song:
It’s soul-crushing, at any job, to aspire to BE something versus being driven by what you want to DO. Do you want to be a “star”? Don’t bother. You’re going to lose. Even if you make it, you’ll lose. Because you’re never going to be exactly what you’re picturing. But what do you want to do? You want to play music in front of people? You can do that.
This is, I think, the best advice of all — don’t worry about external validation, about external measures of success, about recognition. Focus on doing the things you want to do, and getting better at those things one day at a time.
Shorts
Senior developer doesn't mean memorised everything.
It means knowing exactly where to look and what the answer should feel like.
He is onto something here with the phrase “knowing what the answer should feel like”. In this age of AI, it is easy to whip out essays or apps or code or whatever. A thoughtful, experienced user knows how to look at the output and apply judgment; they know what a correct answer “should feel like”. I’m not yet convinced that AI will replace this last step.
“In a few years, AI systems will be robustly superhuman at the act of doing mathematics,” Tsimerman told me. “The social consequence of that, how we choose to react, what you feel about it—those are much harder questions.”
I am in the camp that AI will replace most of existing human knowledge work. But there will still be plenty of things to do — it is just that we will all be working on AI, with AI, or for AI.