Get a habit of publishing. It primes your brain. Suddenly something is needed. Your brain starts searching for content and ideas. Automatically.

I felt this instantly. The commitment was the trigger. I chose to publish every day, and that created a constant push. Not pressure exactly. More like alertness.

Sometimes it’s exhausting. But I remind myself: one line is enough. One sentence. Some days become shit posts. That’s fine.

Seth Godin: “You can’t have writer’s block if you write. You can say, ‘I have bad writer’s block,’ and I say, ‘Show me your bad writing,’ and if you show it to me, then you don’t have writer’s block.”

The priming works in both directions. Forward: what can I write about today? Backward: what lessons did I miss back then?

Once you commit to output, your brain stops waiting for ideas. It goes hunting.

Writing is a muscle. You train it. Not to be good, but so your brain knows you’ll use it.

Write a lot. Most of it won’t be great. That’s fine. At some point the good work comes through. You can’t schedule when.

I’ve posted something every day for over a year now. Some are shit. That was never the point. Output is the point. The reps.

When I started my YouTube channel, I obsessed over the system. How do I create a video every day but post twice a week? The system made it possible. Not motivation. Not inspiration.

Few people read my stuff. That’s okay. This is my habit. Output is the habit.

Faulkner said it: “I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes at nine every morning.”

When ideas don’t come, record yourself talking. You rarely have talker’s block. Like never.

Writing adds a filter. Your finger hovers over backspace. You delete before you finish the thought. Speaking doesn’t let you do that. Once it’s said, it’s said. So you keep going.

I use this constantly. Pressed for a blog post? I talk it out. Need clarity on a vision? I ramble until it makes sense. Tangents are fine. You come back.

The only catch: I need to be alone. When others are around, the filter returns.

These days I send the recordings to Claude or ChatGPT. They find the patterns in the rambling. Faster than I ever could.

MVP. POC. Spike. Beta. We throw these words around like everyone knows what they mean. They don’t.

I’ve been in meetings where one person’s MVP was nearly shippable. Another thought it meant a weekend hack. Both were frustrated. Both were right in their own heads.

The problem isn’t the words. It’s that we never stop to define them together. And the later you have that conversation, the more it hurts. By then, people have already built their MVP in their minds. Sometimes in code.

Get everyone in a room early. Ask what we’re trying to learn. Write it down. Make it boring and obvious. Then people can push back. “That’s not what we agreed to test.”

Without that, you’re just building and hoping.

My estimation ability is completely broken.

Everything I think will take weeks or months might take hours.

So now I have two problems. The thing I’m building. And the fact that I can’t trust my own judgment about how long anything takes any more

When the tools change this fast our assumptions from experience becomes a liability. You know too much about how things used to work.

I’ve spent years thinking weight loss was complicated. Needed the right program. The right workout plan.

We overcomplicate because simple feels wrong. Like we’re missing something. Like the real solution must be more sophisticated.

I tried to be clever last month. Built a tool that used cheaper LLMs for tool use. Tool use is when you let the chat bots know what kind of features they have access to like data that live on your server.

Reasoning was solid. Cause when tool use first came out it was slow. Really slow. One way to solve that is to use a cheaper model to make understand which tools to use.

But that constraint doesn’t exist anymore. Tool use is fast now. Has been for a while.

I built an entire cost and speed optimization for a problem that was already solved.

AI gives you 10x only if you already know how to do 1x.

I can build something in six hours that would have taken months. Not because AI is magic. But because I already know most of the stack.

If I don’t know how things work, AI can’t teach me fast enough to understand what it wrote. I’ll spend my time confused. Debugging things I don’t understand. Building things that don’t fit together.

But when you already know the domain, suddenly you’re flying.

You can’t skip the fundamentals and expect acceleration.

Many creatives use only a small part of what they’re capable of.

Not because they lack skill. Because they’re waiting.

Waiting for someone else to join. Waiting for the right collaborator. Waiting for permission. Waiting for the moment to feel right.

But you have to be the one who does it.

Nobody else will carry your vision the way you will. And while you wait, that fraction stays a fraction.

Someone asked me how to get started with AI. Like ChatGPT.

I’ve been doing this for three years. Almost every day. And I realized I’ve completely forgotten what it’s like to be new.

My answer was clumsy. Just try. Don’t be scared. Use it often. You’ll figure out what works.

True. But not helpful.

When you do something long enough you forget the first steps. You forget what was confusing. You forget the fear of looking stupid.

The curse of experience is forgetting that others don’t have it yet.