Creativity comes from boredom.

Real boredom. The kind where you stare at nothing for half an hour and let your mind wander.

When you fill every moment with distractions, you get lazy creativity. You pick the first thing that comes to mind. That’s the path of least resistance.

Real creativity needs mental free time. Space to break habits and explore different perspectives.

But we’ve eliminated boredom entirely.

You have access to almost all music ever recorded. Every movie you could want. Infinite YouTube videos. Chat tools that answer any question instantly.

And we use it all.

We’re always distracted from boredom.

Too distracted to get creative.

Make sure to leave some room for boredom. The kind where you sit and suddenly find yourself daydreaming.

We’ve adapted behaviours that interrupt us constantly, then we wonder why we can’t focus deeply.

Every app fights for our attention. We cram every hour with meetings.

We want to be productive, but we have designed much of our day to day with pings, dings and rings.

These are the systems we live in now, and identifying them is only the first step.

Whether a decision is good or bad shouldn’t be determined in hindsight.

You can make good decisions with bad outcome or bad decisions with great success.

Sometimes we don’t want to do so we practice and sometimes we do want to do and we practice.

Consistency is what makes practice less like practice.

Your experience and feelings cannot be replaced by an LLM, but it can help you find the words to share them.

With all the outrage about AI writing and coding not being “real creativity”, I can’t stop thinking about when sampling became a thing in the 80s.

Musicians taking bits and pieces from other records to create something new.

It was legally messy but creatively fascinating.

Is this what we’re experiencing now?

AI will follow sampling’s playbook: outrage, adoption, amnesia.

Today’s “AI kills creativity” will be tomorrow’s “I’ve always used these tools.”

Creativity when you’re stuck feels like eating when you’re sick. Food loses its appeal even though your body needs it. The spark feels absent even though some part of you knows engaging will help. Sometimes you have to gently force yourself back to the thing that usually brings pleasure.

If AI can write any code, then the real value is in understanding systems well enough to give the right instructions.

Top developers will focus on having great prompt files that explain how they work. The tools they like, the APIs they use. How they want code to be tested and written.

It will be the dot-files of the future. Personal config files that define your entire coding style and follow you from project to project.

Sure, you can copy someone else’s prompt files. But to really benefit, you need to understand and own them, just like traditional dotfiles.

Anyone can ask ChatGPT to write a React component. But not everyone knows how to ask for error handling, team patterns, and optimization for their users.

Just stop waiting to be comfortable. There will never be a time when you’re so comfortable that it’s easy to start. Don’t put expectations on your surroundings before you get started.

Do I need a perfect synthesizer? Do I need to sit in a special chair? Do all the kids need to be in bed and asleep? Do I need a two hour window?

Stop waiting to be comfortable.

I’ve noticed something interesting with tech companies and their websites. They often struggle to keep their own sites updated because they built everything custom from scratch.

It’s rarely about actual technical requirements. There’s this unspoken feeling that using existing tools might make them look less skilled as developers.

The result is predictably frustrating. While others focus on shipping products, these teams struggle to even update their website with new features because their custom CMS has become a maintenance burden that multiple developers have touched over time.

It’s one of those situations where professional pride works against business outcomes.