✴️ How I'm Making... #23

Hey, it’s Ben.

I hope you’re having a lovely weekend 🙂 

I’m going over to Korea next week - should be interesting!

✏️ Summary

• You won’t have the full picture when you start

• Take the first step you know how to

• New ones will be revealed as you move.

"Yes, but I'd rather get it right the first time."

I was having a conversation with someone at work about how to use a new tool. I told them to try a bunch of things out, because it doesn't matter if you get it wrong. But they didn't agree. They wanted to get things right the first time around.

I didn't have the words at the time, but if I could go back, I would say: "That is a great thing to do... for something you already know how to do. If you're trying anything new, failure is a sign of progress."

📈 The Lesson

Growing up, whenever someone asked what I wanted to be, my answer was always "entrepreneur". But there was a problem. I didn't know what that actually meant. Since I didn't have the answer, I waited... for a year, five years, ten years...

The fatal mistake I made was thinking I had to have all the answers. This was the case with problems I had to solve at school. You look at a problem, decide how you're going to solve it, then start. If you solve it, you succeed. If you don't, you fail. This is an incredibly misleading pattern.

Think about what it means to have everything figured out. More specifically, think about what that kind of problem looks like. If you know precisely how to solve something, and have certainty that you will solve it, it means that problem is a subset of what you know.

You are playing it too safe. I know this, because this was what I did for the first 25 years of my life. You are playing it too safe. If you're trying to improve yourself, or the world, you will run into problems that you don't know how to solve.

This is a feature, not a bug. Use failure as a leading indicator that you are on the verge of improvement. It's okay to fall. You have to, in order to climb.

🔗 Progress Update

What do stories look like?

More generally speaking, what does a piece of writing look like? This is the question I am asking.

The idea of generating a picture of how ideas relate to each other is not new. Sentence embedding and relational mapping is over a decade old.

The hope is that by mapping out what ideas look like, we might be able to see where the gaps lie.

AI is expensive!

A lot of this week was spent figuring out how I was actually going to use AI to do what I want. After some tinkering, I have decided to go with an open source model for the core thinking engine. I already have the engine running on a server, time to secure it and get building 🙂 

What’s Next?

We had a few more users come on-board last week. New users are so helpful for getting feedback

That’s all for now!

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Ben | X