On July 18, a Scottish runner named Josh Kerr lined up in London Stadium to chase a record his sport had written off: the mile world record, 3:43.13, untouched since Hicham El Guerrouj ran it in 1999. Twenty-seven years of better shoes, faster tracks, and smarter science had not moved it.

The attempt wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was that Kerr announced it nearly four months in advance - publicly, by name, with a date. One commentator called it the ballsiest world-record attempt in the history of middle-distance running.

Kerr had pitched the project to his sponsor nearly a year out, then built his whole season around one race. He has spent more than a decade visualizing himself at his peak, rehearsing races years before they exist. In the months before London, every ice bath lasted exactly the same amount of time…

Three minutes and 42 seconds.

The time he intended to run.

He wasn’t just training for the record. He was living inside it until the future felt like a memory. He crossed the line in 3:42.66. He had made real the fastest mile ever run.

I read the Stoics and Joe Dispenza back to back, and loved both.

One is ancient philosophy; the other is a modern teacher fusing meditation, neuroscience, and quantum physics. But both ask the same question - how much of your life do you actually author? - and they answer in opposite directions.

Dispenza says you control everything: your inner state writes your outer world. The Stoics say you control almost nothing - not your body, not your reputation, not a single outcome. Only your response.

I wanted both to be true, but they disagree about something as basic as how the universe works. The longer I sat with them, though, the less that disagreement mattered. What they agree is on how a person should stand inside uncertainty.

First, the Stoics

“Control what you can, accept what you can’t.” That’s the pop-psychology version trending on our feeds. And honestly, it was all I knew before receiving a small book on Stoicism for Christmas from my parents.

Epictetus, born a slave, opens the Enchiridion by splitting the world in two. In our power: our opinions, desires, and aversions - what we do. Not in our power: the body, property, reputation, and the outcome of events - what happens to us.

Read fast, this sounds like resignation. It isn’t. The Stoics weren’t telling us to care less. They were telling us where the lever is.

The Stoics were also determinists. The universe, they believed, is a single chain of cause and effect, governed by reason, and nothing could have happened otherwise. They called it fate.

Chrysippus answered the obvious objection - if everything is fated, what is up to us? And he did it with a cylinder. Someone pushes it down a hill. The push is not up to the cylinder; that is fate. How it rolls is its own nature.

The push is the world. The roll is you.

You can live in a caused universe and still author your response.

I resisted the fate part when I first read it. Through a modern lens, fate can be an ugly word. People are fated into horrible conditions, and I hate the idea of a philosophy that tells them to accept it, make their peace, and let their dreams quietly fade.

But that reading misses what the Stoics actually believed. They released the outcome because they trusted the whole. Fate was not chaos - it was a rational order, a providence. To surrender to it was to trust that what sits outside your control might be larger and wiser than what sits inside it.

Letting go was faith, not a white flag. It never asked anyone to shrink their life.

That is why the Stoic ideal leaves so little room for anxiety. If something bigger holds the outcome, you don’t need to grip it.

Do your part. Release the rest.

Kerr embodied this in training. He did not simply will the record into existence and collect it. Ask him about the attempt in the months before London and he talked almost entirely about the part that was his: the altitude camp in Albuquerque, workouts run at exactly the rhythm the record demanded, his own insistence that every stone had to be turned.

The weather, the field, whether his body would hold - he spent nothing on any of it.

Then, the Manifesting Camp

The Stoic hands you sovereignty over your response. But the Stoic does not promise that your inner state can summon a particular future.

The manifestor does.

The manifestation camp insists we can create, and its logic runs in two steps. First: at bottom, we are energy. Matter and energy are interchangeable; everything, including us, is field and vibration. Shift your internal state, the reasoning goes, and you shift what you are made of and what you draw toward you.

Second: we do not actually understand the universe. Dark matter and dark energy, most of the cosmos, remain a mystery. The observer’s role in quantum mechanics is unresolved. Consciousness has no complete scientific explanation. In a universe this unknown, confident dismissal can feel as unearned as confident belief.

If you believe in manifesting, this is the territory in which that belief lives: consciousness is not merely watching reality but participating in it.

But you do not have to believe that your thoughts alter the quantum field to see that belief changes what becomes possible.

Belief reorganizes attention. Attention changes which opportunities you perceive. Expectation changes persistence and behavior. Public commitment raises the cost of retreat. Confidence influences other people’s willingness to join you. Repeated mental rehearsal can make difficult action feel familiar before it has to be performed.

Belief changes the believer. And the changed believer meets a different world.

Founders do this constantly. They believe in a company that does not exist, act as if it is inevitable, and persuade employees, investors, and customers to enter that imagined future with them.

Sociologists named the mechanism a century ago: the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Jim Carrey, dirt poor in 1985, wrote himself a check for ten million dollars for “acting services rendered,” dated it a decade out, and carried it in his wallet until the roles caught up with the number.

Muhammad Ali put it plainly: “I said I was the greatest before I knew I was.”

The belief came first; reality followed the actions it produced.

The science reaches into the body. Neuroplasticity shows the brain rewires with attention and repetition. Epigenetics shows genes switching on and off in response to behavior and stress; studies of meditation have found shifts in the expression of genes involved in inflammatory processes.

The placebo effect offers perhaps the strangest evidence that expectation is not confined to the mind. In Ted Kaptchuk’s Harvard studies, patients told plainly that they were taking an inert placebo improved anyway. Belief produced real change.

And here is what is easy to miss about the manifestor, the same thing that is easy to miss about the Stoics:

They also let go.

You state what you want, you act as co-creator, and then -every serious version of the teaching says it - you release it. You give thanks before it arrives, the way prayer gives thanks.

The manifestor is not anxious either. The outcome has been handed to the Universe, which may deliver it in a form you could not have engineered.

The faith underneath

Look at what the Stoic and the manifestor are both doing.

Each does their part fully, then entrusts the outcome to something larger. The Stoic calls it Fate. The manifestor calls it the Universe. The religious calls it God.

Different names, same move: act, then trust that what sits outside your control does not need to be managed by you.

Kerr's July had company. Across the Atlantic, Erling Haaland was tearing through the World Cup. Seven goals in six matches, carrying Norway past Brazil and into the first World Cup quarterfinal in the country's history. With Norwegian blood and family still in the country, I was deeply invested in these matches.

Norway had not even qualified for the tournament since 1998. It is a small nation entering a competition dominated by global football powers, and it went further than it ever had before.

Haaland had spent years naming the scale of his ambitions out loud. As a young player, he said he dreamed of becoming better than his father, Alf-Inge, who had himself represented Norway at a World Cup.

The son did not merely return Norway to the stage his father had played on. He helped take the country further than it had ever gone.

Inspired, I wanted to learn more about Haaland and his routines, which conveniently he details thoroughly on his Youtube channel. He describes his life as total control: “You need to be a 24/7 athlete; it’s not just the two hours of the game.” He sleeps like it is his job, ices and saunas on schedule, and calls sleep the most important thing in the world.

Then the whistle blows and conscious control recedes. On the pitch, he says, he just enjoys himself.

That is not a contradiction.

The 24/7 is his part. The play is the release.

And when it was time to play England, the circumstances were out of their control.The match was played in punishing heat and humidity. Norway’s tournament had been shadowed by questions about illness and fatigue. Haaland was substituted late in extra time. Certain controversial calls were made by the ref. And they lost, ending their World Cup tour.

Was it the heat? Fatigue? Tactics? A physical issue? A controversial call? England simply taking its chances at the right moment?

No one can isolate the single variable that turns a game.

The preparation was Norway’s. The bodies on the day, the weather, the whistle, the bounce of the ball, and the final score never entirely were.

Yet another outcome arrived - one Haaland may not have been trying to produce at all.

He spent the tournament kind, unguarded, goofy. He danced. He joked. He interacted with fans. He seemed to enjoy the absurdity of becoming one of the most recognizable people in America almost overnight.

Norway lost the quarterfinal. But Haaland gained 32.1 million Instagram followers over the course of the tournament.

That attention has obvious commercial value in a career where endorsements and sponsorships are part of the business. The World Cup prompted entire conversations about who had really “won” the tournament. Not only who lifted the trophy, but which players, personalities, and brands emerged better positioned than they entered it.

He did not win the soccer game. But he left the tournament more globally beloved than he entered it, the biggest “winner” off the field.

Sometimes the outcome you release arrives in another form.

That is the faith running beneath both philosophies. Not the absence of agency. Agency paired with surrender.

You row, and you trust the river.

Controlling the Wrong Thing

We are anxious because we are trying to control the wrong parts.

We try to control the outcome by thinking about it - rehearsing it, predicting it, worrying it into submission before it arrives.

The Stoic does not need to worry because Fate holds the outcome. The manifestor does not need to worry because the Universe holds it. In both cases, worry is an attempt to reclaim control over something that was never ours.

The compulsion to manage the future in advance, inside our own heads, belongs to neither camp. We have turned it into a modern discipline, and it doesn’t help us, and often times, hurts us.

For both the Stoic and the manifestor freedom lives in the inner act: what we choose, build, and believe. And the decision to release the rest.

What’s Truly Yours

So the contradiction dissolves.

The manifestor and the Stoic do the same thing: they identify what is theirs to move, move it fully, and release everything that is not.

Both put freedom in what you do, not in what you can guarantee. Both, done right, are antidotes to the particular anxiety of living the future before it happens.

Kerr believed in a mile that did not exist, said so out loud, and rehearsed it until it felt inevitable. Then he spent a year controlling only what was his: the training, the recovery, the pacing, the preparation, every stone he could turn.

Belief and discipline were not opposing moves. They were the same act carried all the way through.

On the night, the pacing lights were set to 3:42.99, and there was nothing left to grip.

When he crossed the line half a second under a record that had stood for twenty-seven years, it did not look like luck, and it did not look like magic.

It looked like a man who had done his part and let the rest arrive.

So do your part.

Believe in something better than what exists.

Move what is yours to move.

And then trust the rest to whatever you call the thing that is larger than you.

P.S. What do you actually control, and how do you get better at moving it? That's what we're solving for at Human. If you want support mastering your part, DM me or visit www.achievewithhuman.com

I left a career in Hollywood that I had spent years breaking my way into. I enrolled in a master’s program in Design, Technology, and Business that I didn’t fully understand yet. I entered a new relationship. I made new friends. I built new routines, picked up new hobbies, set goals the old version of me never would have written down.

If you had known me then and ran into me now, you might say it to my face: “You’ve changed.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it. We all heard it growing up. Someone goes away to summer camp and comes back with new confidence, or a new hobby, and within a week of school starting the word is out: she’s changed. We were twelve, thirteen years old. We had barely lived. A girl that age is growing close to three inches a year. The brain is rewiring itself more dramatically than at any point since infancy. Changing is the entire job of being thirteen. And kids said it anyway - to nag, or to justify pushing someone out of the group. We heard “you’ve changed” at the exact age when we were supposed to be sampling - new interests, new perspectives, new boundaries - while we were still actively figuring out who we were.

As if we owed each other consistency.

Think about how strange that is. We celebrate transformation in every story we love - it’s the entire point of the hero’s journey. We buy tickets to watch someone become unrecognizable. And then we flinch when it happens in the person standing next to us. Not because they’re wrong. Because their movement makes our stillness visible.

So we stay recognizable. We keep performing a version of ourselves that expired years ago, because the people around us memorized that version and we don’t want to make anyone relearn us. And we don’t want to offend anyone.

Evolution

In England, the peppered moth was light-colored for centuries. It blended into pale birch bark, invisible to predators. Then the Industrial Revolution blackened the trees with soot and the light moths became visible. Birds ate them. Within a few generations, the dark variant - previously rare - dominated the population.

The environment changed. What didn’t match got edited out.

The moth couldn’t choose its color. The trait that saved one variant and doomed another wasn’t earned or learned. It was fixed.

Some people take what’s fixed and build on it. Simone Biles stands four feet eight inches tall. She didn’t choose that any more than the moth chose its color. But a compact frame rotates faster in the air, and she built the most decorated gymnastics career in history around the exact trait that would have closed most other doors. What’s fixed isn’t always a limit. Sometimes it’s material.

But unlike the moth, we aren’t limited to what’s fixed. We can also change our behavior, learn a skill, adjust our approach when the environment shifts. When sound came to film in 1927, careers ended within a couple of years. Faces that had filled theaters suddenly needed voices, and some of the biggest stars in the world never made the leap. Joan Crawford did. She trained her voice, rebuilt her craft for a medium that didn’t exist when she started, and worked for four more decades. The environment shifted for everyone at once. What separated the careers that survived from the ones that vanished was the willingness to treat the new environment as something to learn instead of something to outlast.

That’s the choice the moth never got. When the environment changes, we can evolve to match it - not resist it.

A Major Inflection Point

We are living through one of those environment shifts right now. This is evolution taking place in real time, and many of us can feel it.

We lived through the pandemic. It was horrific. People died. Many of us lost someone, or know someone who did, and nothing about that time should be remembered lightly. And alongside the grief, it changed us at a speed nature never could. Quarantine became an accelerator for relationships: some marriages ended, others began, and almost none came out unchanged. Entire industries shut down while new ones appeared on a screen. People who had barely used video calls built whole careers over Zoom. Behavior that would have taken a generation to shift changed in about a year.

The same thing is happening now. AI - and the exponential curve of technology underneath it - is changing us again. It isn’t a trend. It’s an environmental shift. And it’s already selecting for different traits than the ones we were rewarded for five years ago. Single-track careers, institutional loyalty, narrow specialization, mastering one lane for life - these were once reasonable strategies. In some places, they still are. But in more and more fields, they’re losing power.

The new environment rewards people who learn quickly, work across disciplines, ask better questions, build with leverage, and adapt before the old systems know how to measure them. What once looked scattered may start to look like pattern recognition. What used to be called instability may become range. What used to be called impatience may become speed.

If you’ve spent years apologizing for being hard to categorize, the environment may finally be catching up to you.

And you’re allowed to not like any of this. I’m not asking you to love AI. But if you want to oppose it, oppose it from inside an understanding of it. Learn it well enough to shape it - write the policy, set the guardrails, build the better alternative. What none of us can do is pretend the times aren’t changing. Resisting the shift without changing your approach is like insisting on showing up to the office in April 2020. The building may still be open. The world isn’t in it.

I won’t pretend every change is chosen. Some of it arrives without permission - a pandemic that empties an industry, a fire that reshapes a hometown. I have lived both, and the grief is real. But even then, the question eventually comes back around: is the resistance protecting you, or just keeping you stuck?

When I left Hollywood, it wasn’t because I stopped loving it. I could see the writing on the wall - the consolidation, the ownership structures where your best ideas belonged to someone else, the fewer seats at the table. And I decided that what I valued could become part of something different, if I allowed myself to stop clinging to an identity I had limited myself to.

So this is not about abandoning who you are. It’s about abandoning the constraints you’ve put on yourself - the limits on what you’re allowed to become. And there is some version of that waiting in your life too, even if you can’t see its shape yet.

Surprise Yourself

Besides, it would be boring to live a hundred years - and with where things are heading, maybe a hundred and change - as exactly the same person. We can frame adaptation as keeping up: with the economy, with your job, with whatever role you play in this evolving world. That framing is true. But the more important one is this: you have more facets than any single version of your life has room for. Ones you already have, ones you might want, ones you haven’t discovered yet. Exploring them is not just how you keep up. It’s how you make yourself happy.

So surprise yourself. Become excellent at a sport you’ve never played. Pick up an instrument. Learn a language. Remember how many people learned to bake sourdough in 2020? That wasn’t a coincidence. When the world changes, it gives us permission to change too. To reinvent.

Both times my life changed shape, I became someone the previous version of me wouldn’t have predicted. That used to sound like a warning. I now believe it’s the goal.

So the next time someone tells you that you’ve changed, I hope you can smile and mean it when you say thank you. And if you know someone who is mid-transformation right now - awkward, uncertain, cringe, not yet fluent in who they’re becoming - tell them you see it. Say “you’ve changed” the way it should have been said all along. Most people are only waiting for one voice in the audience to mean it kindly. As encouragement.

Because the environment already changed, and it isn’t waiting up. I invite you to change with it.

P.S. What I’m most excited about (and what we are solving for) is: how to change. If you want to learn more, DM me.

A fast-food chain wanted to sell more of them. They changed the flavor, the size, the price, and nothing moved. So a team led by the late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen stopped asking what the milkshake was and started asking what people were using it for.

Nearly half were bought before nine in the morning, by commuters, alone, with a long boring drive ahead. The milkshake wasn’t dessert. It was something to do with your right hand on the highway. Thick enough to last the commute. Cleaner than a donut. More interesting than a banana.

They weren’t buying a milkshake.

They were buying a better commute.

Christensen called this Jobs to Be Done, and it remains one of the cleanest ways to cut through what a company thinks it sells to what people actually need from it. It is also, in practice, the foundation of positioning.

Positioning is not a tagline. It is a strategic claim.

It is the sentence a company finishes when it says: we are the ___ company.

And if that sentence does not match the job people hire the company for, the business starts rowing against its own current.

A Class Project

When I was in graduate school, in business class, my classmates and I were assigned a company to take apart. We drew Snap, fresh off a monster quarter, the stock surging, Forbes running a headline that basically said: we left Snapchat for dead, and somehow it was thriving.

Then we hit one line on Snap’s own homepage:

“Snap Inc. is a camera company.”

Huh?????!

I remember being so shocked when I found that on their website.

Because most people did not open Snapchat because they needed a better camera. They opened it to send something stupid and warm and low-stakes to someone they loved. A face. A joke. A photo on them with dog ears on their face. A ten-second proof of life. Something that did not need to be permanent to be meaningful.

That became the central insight of our paper: Snap had confused the instrument with the value proposition.

The value was never merely the camera. Snap invented disappearing messages, then stories, then filtering lenses. It taught a generation how to communicate visually, play socially, and be unserious on purpose.

It was an experience company. One of the greatest of its generation.

And yet it was calling itself by the name of its tool.

That distinction matters because a company’s self-definition is not cosmetic. It shapes product strategy. It shapes capital allocation. It shapes what the company sees as obvious, adjacent, or impossible.

If you think you are a camera company, you keep returning to cameras.

If you understand you are an experience company, the strategic aperture widens.

I want to be clear: this is not a takedown. I’m rooting for Snap. A company that has invented new UX that everyone else copied is not a company short on ideas.

Snap’s Specs

Which is what made last week so interesting. Snap unveiled Specs, its $2,195 augmented-reality glasses.

They have spent $3.5 billion on this AR eyewear technology. Maybe their bet will pay off. Maybe not.

In any case, X had a field day with photos of clunky-looking glasses. Snap shares fell about 10 percent on announcement day.

The problem is not that it’s inherently a bad idea. It’s that the experience company keeps insisting it’s a camera. There are side effects to when a company does not nail it’s positioning.

Look at who Snap is racing against. Meta is building AR glasses too — but Meta never calls itself a camera company or glasses company. Its website says it’s building the future of human connection. Not glasses. Not hardware. So it started this venture by partnering with Ray-Ban, then Oakley, borrowing eyewear’s credibility.

That definition does the deciding for them. It tells them where the money goes, which deals to chase, which fights aren’t theirs to pick. The positioning makes the call before anyone walks into the room. That is what a positioning sentence is supposed to do.

And because Meta’s identity is already wide - Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus (!!!), a long shelf of acquisitions - moving into glasses reads as expansion, not confusion. The breadth makes the bet feel earned. Meta has permission to be there.

Adding further color to this, as of today, June 23rd 2026, the date of this publication (and almost exactly a week after the Snap Spec announcement), Meta has JUST announced that they are launching their own branded $299 glasses. A bit of a clap-back to Snap’s $2,195 Specs. Things are about to get messy…

Now imagine the other path. If Snap positioned itself as what it actually is - an experience company - picture what that would allow. Point AI at it, and the whole thing elevates. The position expands. They could build amazing things. The possibilities feel endless.

A Lesson From Two Image Companies

Kodak built the first digital camera and still missed the future, not because it lacked invention, but because it had decided it was in the film business. It held the future in its hands and misread what it was for. In fact, it was an image company.

That is the danger of bad positioning. It does not just confuse the market. It can confuse the company.

And then last week, my phone lit up for the opposite reason: Midjourney was everywhere. Midjourney (originally a text-to-image program which generated digital artwork, characters, and high-quality photography based on simple text prompts) had announced a full-body medical scanner. It was strange, ambitious, and early, but people understood the strategic logic immediately.

Images of the world.

Then images inside the body.

An image company that actually understood it was an image company.

Same job, larger market.

That is what clear positioning gives you. A company that knows what it’s for can move in surprising directions and still make sense.

Who Cares?

What does this mean for the rest of us?

Most of us label ourselves by our equipment too. Our title. Our tools. The tasks on the list. The thing we currently know how to do.

I’m a writer. I’m a founder. I’m an operator. I’m the person who does X.

It feels solid until X changes. Then the floor goes with it.

The deeper question is not what you do.

It is what job you are uniquely built to serve.

The milkshake was not a milkshake. Snapchat was not a camera. Kodak was not really film.

And maybe you are not your title, either.

Maybe the real question is simpler:

What are you here to do?

P.S. If anyone wants to read the original paper, let me know. It’s long, but I’m proud of our analysis.

It’s the beginning of what Joseph Campbell named the Hero’s Journey, the structure underneath almost every story you’ve ever loved. The hero is living an ordinary life. Then something arrives. A message, a war, a knock at the door - and pulls them out of the world they know into one they don’t understand.

And here’s the part we forget: at that moment, the hero is not a hero yet. They’re ordinary. Unqualified. Usually terrified. Campbell even built a stage into the journey for this - the Refusal of the Call - because the first honest response to being chosen is almost always no, not me, not yet, I’m not ready.

Don’t mistake me - the refusal is real. The fear underneath it is real, and you should feel it; it usually means the call matters. Sit with it. Connect to it. But you cannot live there. Stay in the refusal and the story simply never starts. There’s no journey. No movie. No hero - just a person standing at the threshold, narrating all the reasons they never crossed it. The refusal is a beat. It was never meant to be the whole film.

So feel it. Honor it. Then move through it into the thing you were called to.

Because the journey is what makes the hero. Not the other way around. They don’t earn the title in the ordinary world and then set out fully formed. They set out unprepared, and the road does the work on them.

History keeps proving this.

Joan of Arc was a seventeen-year-old peasant from a village called Domrémy. No military training. No standing, no name, no business being anywhere near a battlefield. In 1429 she convinced the French crown prince to let her lead an army to the besieged city of Orléans - and lifted the siege, turning the tide of a war that had dragged on for decades. She did not become a commander and then go to war. She went to war, and it made her one.

Abraham Lincoln had almost no formal schooling - he taught himself, largely by reading. Before the presidency he failed in business, carried debt for years, and lost election after election. By any résumé he was an unlikely choice to hold a fracturing country together. Then the gravest crisis in American history landed on his desk, and he grew into the person it required. The steadiness we now think of as Lincoln was forged in the office, not before it.

Neither of them was ready.

We tell ourselves a quiet lie: that one day we’ll feel prepared, and then we’ll begin. We’ll start the company once we understand the market. We’ll take the role once we’re sure we can do it. We’ll write the thing once we know it’s good.

But readiness isn’t a starting condition. It’s a byproduct. You don’t think your way into becoming someone new - you act your way into it, badly at first, and the capability arrives somewhere on the road. The call comes before you’re ready precisely because being ready was never the prerequisite. Saying yes was.

So when the call comes - and you’ll know it, because it scares you - don’t mistake the fear for a stop sign.

You don’t need to be ready.

You need to take the leap.

When I was seven years old, I could not sleep.

Not because of nightmares of ghosts or fears of monsters under the bed. But because of the weight of being human.

The assignment of existence is insane. We are born into a world where we will love people and lose them. Where we will pour ourselves into dreams with no guarantee they will work. Where we will meet people who hurt us, build things that may disappear, become attached to a life we do not get to keep forever, and somehow everyone expects us to brush our teeth and go to school like this is a normal arrangement.

I found this unbearable.

Most people learn to ignore the existential fine print. I did not. I was a sensitive, creative kid, and every night the weight of it would settle on me like something physical.

How are we supposed to love people if we can lose them? How are we supposed to try if we can fail? How are we supposed to build anything if it can all disappear? What, exactly, is the plan here?

I was lucky. My father is the most patient, grounded, wise person I have ever known. Maybe it’s thanks to his background in communication, religious studies, philosophy, and professional storytelling.

Or maybe it is because he is Canadian.

He would sit on my bed and talk through all of it with me. He never minimized the questions. He never told me not to think about them. He sat with me inside the impossible thing and helped me stay there long enough for the panic to become inquiry.

As I got older, the dread softened. Not because the questions disappeared. They did not. The central terms and conditions of being alive remain, frankly, aggressive.

But life started filling in around them.

Gratitude does that. Experience does that. Love does that. You accumulate enough moments of beauty, enough ridiculous dinners, enough friendships, enough small victories, enough songs in the car, enough proof that being here can feel astonishingly worth it, and the dread becomes easier to carry.

Not solved.

Carried.

And maybe that was the beginning of meaning. Not finding the answer all at once, but collecting enough life that the question became less terrifying.

The Chemistry

I found another version of the answer in chemistry class at thirteen.

An isolated atom does not have most of the properties we experience as “material.” It does not have a boiling point. It is not wet or hard or fluid. Those qualities emerge when atoms interact in numbers, bonds, structures, and systems.

Hydrogen alone tells you one story. Oxygen alone tells you another. Hydrogen and oxygen together become water. The relationship creates something neither element possessed on its own.

Chemists call these emergent properties: characteristics that arise from interaction, not from isolated parts.

At the cellular level, the principle holds too. A liver cell removed from the body cannot survive on its own. It needs the system. Nutrient exchange, waste removal, signaling, structure, context. Its function is relational.

Even in physics, there are serious interpretations of quantum mechanics - Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics among them - that argue properties are not absolute possessions of isolated things, but appear through interaction. You do not need to become a quantum physicist to feel the philosophical punchline.

This is what landed for me: maybe people are like this too.

Maybe we do not discover who we are by thinking harder in isolation. We discover it by making contact with the world and paying attention to what changes.

We understand ourselves through other people. Through work. Through heartbreak. Through ambition. Through friendship. Through the things we try and the things that try us back.

The world touches us, and something in us becomes visible.

The Sampling

David Epstein writes about this beautifully in Range. He calls it the sampling period - the value of trying many things before committing.

We live in a culture that wants every child to have a personal brand by twelve. Sampling feels like falling behind.

But sampling is not flakiness. It is information gathering.

Roger Federer played soccer, basketball, handball, and badminton before specializing in tennis. Yo-Yo Ma started with piano, then violin, before finding the cello. Their range was not wasted time. It was how they learned what fit.

David Epstein makes a version of this argument in his book. Range is all about why sampling widely before specializing is not a failure of focus, but often the way people discover where their real strengths belong.

For years, the Army had a retention problem with some of its most talented young officers. Many West Point graduates made it through the academy, completed their required service, and then left as soon as they were allowed. Epstein’s point in Range is that this was not simply a failure of grit. It was a match-quality problem. These were disciplined people. They had just learned, through experience, that the life they had chosen at seventeen or eighteen did not fit the person they had become.

The Army tried throwing money at the problem. It did not really work. What helped more was giving cadets and young officers better exposure to different roles earlier, so they could understand both the work and themselves before locking in. When West Point piloted talent-based branching, nearly 90 percent of participating cadets changed at least one of their top three career preferences.

That is the point. Not that people are flaky. Not that commitment is bad. That self-knowledge requires contact. You cannot always think your way into the right life from a bedroom, a classroom, or a brochure. Sometimes you have to try the thing, meet the people, feel the work in your body, and let reality answer.

This is what I mean by data. Every new thing you try tells you something. Does it feel uncomfortable in a good way - the stretch of growth - or uncomfortable in a bad way, the signal that something is off? Does this person make you feel safe, energized, seen? Or do you leave the interaction feeling smaller? That feedback is not noise. It is information about you, about them, about the world. And you honor it by listening.

You do not know what you are capable of by staying theoretical. You learn by entering the arena.

You try the job. You go on the date. You make the thing. You move to the city. You have the conversation. You let yourself care. You get embarrassed. You survive. You update.

Some experiences stretch you in the good way - the way that makes you more alive.

Some experiences make you feel smaller, stranger, less yourself.

Both are information.

The trick is not to avoid the data because it is uncomfortable. The trick is to become honest enough to read it.

The Feedback

There is a reason art requires an audience.

A film made only for yourself is not really complete. A song no one hears is still waiting for the second half of its life. Creativity needs contact.

You make something from the private, mystical vessel that is your being and then you put it in front of people. The world responds. Sometimes it claps. Sometimes it yawns.

But the response matters.

Not because the audience is always right. But response is information. Resonance is information. Confusion is information. Silence is information. The work changes when it meets the world.

Product design works the same way.

You build something, put it in front of people, and learn what survives contact. The best products are made through loops: build, test, observe, adjust.

The interaction reveals the truth. What people use. Where they hesitate. What they misunderstand. What they love. What they ignore. What they hack around because they are trying to make the product become what they actually need.

Art and product share this: the work is not finished in isolation.

It is finished in relation.

The Shift

I started my career as a screenwriter.

I sold specs. Some movies got made. Some did not. This is Hollywood, where a project can be alive, dead, resurrected, cursed, packaged, unpackaged, and somehow still “looking for the right director” for eight years.

But I learned something real.

I learned that I could build worlds. I learned that I understood character, stakes, momentum, desire. I learned that storytelling was not a hobby or a quirk. It was one of my native operating systems.

I also learned that the container was not quite right.

Not the storytelling. The container.

I kept writing characters who were building things: computer scientists, entrepreneurs, astro-physicists, ethno-biologists, people trying to bend reality with ideas. I was fascinated by science, technology, systems, ambition, invention. The work was pointing somewhere before I had language for it.

So I went back to school for technology, design, and business.

And something clicked.

For the first time, the story did not end on the page. It had to move from narrative to system, from character arc to behavior change, from imagined transformation to real transformation.

I started building a company around a problem I could not stop thinking about: how people actually become who they are trying to become.

Not in the viral social media way. Not in the “wake up at 5 a.m. and ice your face” way.

I mean the real way.

How do people hold onto a vision for their life when daily life keeps eating it alive?

How do they translate potential into action?

How do they keep going when the original spark fades, when the path gets messy, when the world does not immediately applaud their very brave decision to try?

Building exposed me. Of course it did. Anything worth doing will eventually find the parts of you that you hide.

It exposed what I needed to learn. Where I was strong. Where I was avoidant. Where I needed better people around me. Where I needed to lead better. Where I had to let go. Where I had to push harder. Where I had to listen.

Some paths opened. Some closed.

Some people felt right. Some did not.

Some feedback hurt. Some feedback saved me months.

All of it taught me.

The Meaning

This is what being human is.

Not solving the dread once and for all. Not arriving at a clean answer to the impossible questions.

Being human is going after it anyway.

It is loving people you cannot keep forever.

It is trusting people who might let you down.

It is trying things before you know whether you will be good at them.

It is pouring your heart into work that may fail.

It is supporting other people while they become themselves.

It is letting the world give you information and having the courage to stay open while it does.

Some of that information arrives through things we choose. Some arrives through things we would never choose - loss, failure, circumstances entirely outside our control. And sometimes those uninvited experiences teach us more than anything we planned. Not because suffering is noble, but because how we move through it reveals something about who we are that comfort never could.

It is realizing your potential, whatever that means for you, not as some prewritten destiny waiting inside you, but as something that emerges through contact. Through effort. Through relation. Through the strange accumulation of lived experience.

Maybe meaning is not something we discover in isolation.

Maybe meaning is what happens as we live.

As we love. As we build. As we lose. As we try again. As we sit with what happened and let it become part of us.

I am not claiming to have this figured out. The questions my seven-year-old self asked are still very real, and I do not have clean answers for them. But the quelling of that dread, to the extent it has been quelled, did not come from finding one perfect answer. It came from making meaning piece by piece. Collecting it along the way. Letting life become evidence for itself.

You do not know what a substance is until you introduce heat, pressure, another element. The reaction is where the truth lives.

The same is true of us.

We emerge in relation.

There is a story everyone tells about NASA.

During the space race, American engineers supposedly spent years designing a pen that could write in zero gravity. Ink needs gravity to flow. No gravity, no ink. So they engineered pressurized cartridges, nitrogen-sealed chambers, tungsten carbide tips.

Meanwhile, the Russians brought a pencil.

The details have been disputed. But that is not why the story endures. It endures because it captures something we all recognize: smart people pouring enormous energy into an elaborate solution while the actual answer sits quietly in the corner.

We have all been in that room.

We have all been those engineers.

The question is why.

There are two different ways we miss the real problem. They look similar from the outside, but they come from different places and require different fixes.

The first is when we genuinely do not understand the problem.

This is the version that gets the most attention. A team builds a product no one asked for. A founder solves a pain point that turns out to be mild. A company invests in a feature set based on assumptions no one tested.

Juicero raised $120 million to build a WiFi-connected juicer, a $400 machine engineered to squeeze proprietary juice packs with four tons of force.

The engineering was extraordinary.

The problem was that you could squeeze the packs by hand.

This kind of failure is not about intelligence. It is about depth. The team did not sit with the problem long enough. They did not talk to enough people, observe enough behavior, or challenge their own assumptions with enough rigor.

They saw a surface and mistook it for the floor.

The flip side is what happens when someone does sit with the problem long enough. I saw a small version of this recently at SFO. After you clear security, there are these little counters between the baggage belts. No bins, no signs, no obvious instruction. Just a narrow ledge.

It took me a moment to understand what they were for. People lean on them. That is the whole function. And it works.

The area in front of the belts, where people usually cluster while repacking bags and putting shoes back on, was suddenly clear. No one had to tell anyone to move. No one needed a sign. The space simply gave people a better default.

I do not know whether it was designed intentionally or discovered by accident. But it captured something I keep thinking about while building: the best solutions often do not announce themselves. They change behavior because they understand the real constraint.

The visible problem was that people were blocking the flow. The real problem was that people had nowhere to go. You do not fix that kind of chaos with more instructions. You fix it by giving people a better place to stand.

The fix here is discipline. Pause before building. Ask the question five more times. Talk to users. Watch what people actually do, not what they say they do. Stay in the discomfort of not knowing yet. Go deeper until the problem you are solving is one you could explain to someone and they would nod, not because you persuaded them, but because they feel it too.

The second type is harder.

It is when you know the problem, somewhere underneath everything, but you do not want to look at it. So you tell yourself it is something else.

You say the problem is fundraising. But the real problem is that you have not validated whether anyone wants what you are building.

You say the problem is hiring. But the real problem is that you have not decided what this company needs to become.

You say the problem is your pitch deck. But the real problem is that you are not clear on why this matters, or whether it still does.

This is not a knowledge gap.

This is avoidance.

And it does not only live in startups.

We reorganize the apartment when the relationship needs a conversation. We optimize the morning routine when the job is the actual problem. We read another book about productivity when what we are really avoiding is the risk of starting.

The surface-level problem is easier to face. It is concrete. It is containable. It lets us feel like we are making progress.

The real problem is the one that makes us uncomfortable to name.

And the more capable we are, the more sophisticated our workarounds become. We can build genuinely impressive systems around the wrong problem and feel productive the entire time.

This is not laziness. It is protection.

A founder who questions whether the mission still resonates is not just revisiting strategy. They are confronting whether the story they have been telling themselves, and everyone around them, still holds.

No wonder we avoid it.

But avoidance does not make the problem smaller. It makes it quieter.

And quiet problems compound.

The discipline for each type is different.

When you do not understand the problem, the answer is curiosity about the world. Go deeper. Ask more. Assume you are wrong and let reality correct you.

When you are avoiding the problem, the answer is curiosity about yourself. Why is this the framing you keep reaching for? What would change if you named the real one? What are you protecting by not going there?

The first requires investigative energy. The second requires honesty.

Most of us are far more comfortable researching a market than researching our own patterns.

And this matters more now because we are building in an era where AI makes it possible to move faster than ever.

Idea to prototype in a weekend. Deck to website in an afternoon. Strategy, copy, code, design, research, all compressed into timelines that would have seemed impossible a few years ago.

But speed without clarity is just expensive motion.

In the film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer spends 7.5 million years calculating the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

The answer is 42.

Perfect. Precise. Useless.

Because no one ever figured out what the question was.

AI can make answers cheaper. It can compress the distance between question and output. But it cannot make us honest about whether we are asking the right question.

We learned this ourselves at our startup.

Early on, we thought we were solving one problem. It felt real. It felt urgent. But the deeper we went, the more people we talked to, the more we heard, the more we saw that what we had identified was not the root. It was a symptom.

The real problem lived underneath it.

Admitting that meant letting go of what we had already built around the first version. It meant accepting that we had not understood the problem deeply enough, and that part of us had not wanted to look too closely, because looking closely meant rethinking everything.

The pivot was not just a strategy exercise.

It was an honesty exercise.

We have not been the fastest company. But we have talked to more than a thousand people and researched with more than three thousand. And when we finally stopped solving for the symptom and got honest about the root, we could see what we were actually building and why it mattered.

That clarity was worth more than any speed we gave up to get there.

Problem identification is not a phase before the work. It is the work.

Before the sprint, the deck, the roadmap, the pivot, or the prototype, there is one question that deserves more respect than we usually give it:

Are you sure this is the problem?

And then the harder one:

Are you sure this is not just the version of the problem you feel comfortable naming?

Write it down. Say it out loud. Take it to someone who will not let you hide behind polish, productivity, or momentum.

If you do not know yet, go deeper. If you already know and you have been building around it, stop. The clarity you are looking for is behind the thing you do not want to name.

Nothing in problem discovery is wasted. The wrong framing, the dead ends, the time you wish you could get back. It is all data.

There is no sunk cost in getting closer to the truth.

Now tell me whether a film is good.

This is the core tension sitting beneath every conversation about AI and creativity right now - and we are not being precise enough about what it actually means. The real bottleneck in building intelligent systems is not generation. It is validation. And once we understand that, the entire discourse around “taste” starts to look very different.

The Asymmetry

In mathematics, verification is cheap. The answer is either correct or it is not. This is why AI has excelled in domains with clear, binary feedback loops - code compilation, protein structure prediction, chess. The system generates an output, checks it against a known standard, and iterates. The loop is tight. The cost of validation is nearly zero.

Creative work breaks this loop entirely. There is no compiler for a screenplay. No unit test for a melody. The output can be generated at scale - we are already there - but the mechanism for evaluating that output remains deeply human, deeply subjective, and deeply contested.

This is not a small problem. It is THE problem. Generation without reliable validation is just noise at scale.

Who Decides?

The week Michael opened, I could not escape it. His music was playing at my juice spot. It was coming out of car windows. People were not just watching a film - they were feeling something. His streaming catalog doubled. "Billie Jean" re-entered the Hot 100 top 20. Songs that are decades old climbed back onto the charts because a movie made people want to hear them again. That is not just nostalgia. That is a film eliciting something real in millions of people at once. The trailer had pulled 116 million views in its first 24 hours, more than the Eras Tour trailer, more than Bohemian Rhapsody. Opening weekend the film made $97 million domestic, $314 million worldwide - the biggest biopic debut ever. Within weeks, it had crossed $600 million worldwide, closing in on Bohemian Rhapsody‘s $910 million record for the highest-grossing music biopic of all time. Audiences gave it a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Critics gave it a 39%.

This is not new. James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash made $1.5 billion worldwide - critics gave it a 66%, audiences a 90%. A Minecraft Movie crossed $950 million worldwide with a 47% from critics and an 84% from audiences. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 opened to $63 million on a reported $36 million budget despite dismal reviews from critics 16% - versus 83% from audiences. A massive critic-audience gap on a hugely profitable film.

These are not edge cases. They are a pattern. The centralized arbiters of taste and the people actually paying for the work are operating on entirely different validation functions.

And the stakes of this disconnection are not theoretical. The U.S. has lost thousands of movie screens since the pandemic. Annual ticket sales are down nearly 40% from 2019. The theatrical business is fighting for its life. In that context, a film like Michael - highly profitable, filling seats across six continents, giving people a reason to go back to the theater - is not just entertainment. It is economic infrastructure. A production like Michael employs thousands of people - crew, musicians, post-production artists, marketing teams, theater staff. These films are not just content. They are livelihoods. For critics to consistently tear down the work that is keeping the industry alive is, at best, a misread of the room. At worst, it is actively contributing to the collapse. It tells millions of ticket buyers that their experience is wrong and that they are dumb, and it tells the people whose jobs depend on these productions that their work is not worthy of respect.

For decades, we treated the professional critic as the closest thing to an objective evaluator of creative quality. The review was the verification step. But the economics tell a different story. Revenue is not the same as artistic quality, but it is a validation signal - a very loud one. When audiences consistently and enthusiastically reward what critics dismiss, we have to ask a harder question: whose taste are we optimizing for?

The Economics of Taste

Taste is not a single axis. It is at least two competing forces. There is curatorial taste - the ability to identify craft, originality, risk-taking, technical precision. And then there is resonance - the ability to create something that lands with real people in real emotional terms. The critic optimizes for the first. The market optimizes for the second. These are not the same optimization problem.

The economic question underneath is: when can you afford to optimize purely for curatorial taste? The answer is scarcity pricing. A luxury brand, a limited-edition art piece, a members-only experience. These can ignore mass resonance because the business model does not require it. The price itself becomes the validation. But for anything operating at scale - a film, a product, a piece of content - resonance is the metric that pays the bills.

Maybe film critics should save their energy for Oscar season. Write a think piece, celebrate craft. That is a valid role. But reviewing the thing that a mother takes her kids to on a Saturday afternoon, the thing people drive to the theater and pay $16 a ticket for because they want to feel something? That requires a different skill set entirely.

What we are witnessing is not audiences having bad taste. It is the possibility that a class of professional evaluators has drifted so far from the people they serve that their signal has decoupled from the market entirely.

What This Means for AI

As AI systems get better at generating creative output - and they will - the bottleneck will increasingly be evaluation. The question is not “can the machine write it?” The question is “who decides if it is good, and by what standard?”

If we default to curatorial taste as the validation function, we build systems that optimize for a narrow, increasingly disconnected standard. If we default to pure engagement metrics, we risk losing the work that challenges people.

The opportunity here is to build validation frameworks that hold both. Systems that can recognize craft and risk-taking while also measuring whether the work actually moved someone. That requires a more sophisticated understanding of quality than either the critics or the algorithms currently offer.

Spielberg is 26, shooting on the ocean, and the mechanical shark keeps breaking. The salt water corrodes the mechanics. The thing seizes up, falls apart, has to be hauled out and repaired night after night. It looks fake when it works at all. He’s over budget, behind schedule, and the whole production is frantic.

So he stops showing the shark. It isn’t a strategy. It’s an act of desperation that turns into a breakthrough.

He shoots the water. He shoots the faces of people who see something we don’t. He lets John Williams’ two-note score do the work that a rubber prop couldn’t. Jaws, what was supposed to be a creature feature becomes the most psychologically effective thriller ever made, built not on what the audience saw but on what they were forced to imagine. It changed what a movie could do.

Spielberg said later that the malfunction was the best thing that happened to the film. The constraint forced him into a decision he never would have made with a working shark. It wasn’t a creative choice. It was something he was forced into.

People love this story because it sounds like a lucky break. But the same thing shows up in too many places to dismiss.

Tough Winters

For most of Nordic history, the growing season was short and the cold was long. No fresh food for months. The question wasn’t what you wanted to eat. It was what you could keep from spoiling long enough to survive.

The answer was preservation. Gravlax literally means “grave salmon” because fishermen salted their catch and buried it in the sand to get it through winter. Smoking, curing, pickling, drying. None of these were aesthetic choices. They were survival techniques forced by a climate that gave you no alternatives. And what came out of that pressure is now celebrated as one of the world’s great food traditions, born entirely out of necessity.

The same thing happened in Korea. Brutal winters, nothing growing, no way to get fresh vegetables for months. The circumstances were the same: make what you harvested in autumn last until spring, or don’t eat. The answer was fermentation. Cabbage, radish, garlic, chili, salt, time. Buried in ceramic pots in the ground, left to transform slowly through the cold months. What started as a survival strategy became kimchi, the dish Anthony Bourdain called 'the heart and soul of Korea,' a food so central to the culture that families still gather every autumn to make it together the way they did centuries ago.

And it’s not just climate. When Napoleon’s Continental Blockade cut off cocoa imports to Europe, chocolatiers in Piedmont stretched what little they had with local hazelnuts. That improvisation became gianduja. A century later, when WWII rationing made chocolate scarce again, an Italian pastry chef named Pietro Ferrero went back to the same trick. His version eventually became Nutella. One of the most beloved foods on earth exists because, twice in history, someone didn't have enough of the ingredient they wanted — and invented something better from what was available to them. Nobody planned Nutella. It was the result of scarcity, and what’s produced when it's forced on you.

What’s striking is that these constraints produced culture. Techniques that started as desperation became traditions, then identities, then points of national pride. The constraint, in every case, was the thing that forced people to discover what they never would have gone looking for.

Fifty Words

In 1960, Dr. Seuss’s publisher bet him that he couldn’t write an entire book using only fifty unique words. Seuss gave it a go.

He took the bet. He starting making diagrams. He tracked every word. Forty-nine of the fifty words were one syllable. The fiftieth was “anywhere.” He leaned into the constraint, mapping each word on graph paper. Then he sat down to see how much a box that small would allow.

The result was Green Eggs and Ham. It became his best-selling book of all time, one of the best-selling children’s books ever written.

The book that defined his legacy wasn’t the one he wrote with unlimited freedom. It was the one someone else put a fence around. Fifty words, no exceptions. And what he created from inside that tiny box was electric.

Shakespeare's actors never saw the full script. Paper was expensive and companies didn't want rivals stealing the play, so each actor only got their own lines and a few cue words from whoever spoke before them. Nothing else. They didn't know the full plot, didn't know what the other characters were saying, and had to stay completely alert because their cue could come from anyone at any time. Every reaction onstage was genuine because it had to be. And we don’t just tolerate constraints. We invent them. A haiku gives you seventeen syllables, three lines, and a single image. A sonnet gives you fourteen lines, a specific rhyme scheme, and a volta. These aren’t limitations that poets work around. They’re structures that poets choose, on purpose, because the restriction is where the interesting work happens. Poets figured this out a long time ago.

There’s a pattern here that keeps showing up. Not just in film, not just in food, not just in children’s books, not just in theatre and poetry. The best creative work tends to emerge not from abundance but from the tension of working against something. A budget that’s too small. A season that’s too cold. A shark that doesn’t work. A vocabulary of fifty words. Fourteen lines and a volta. The constraint doesn’t just limit what you can do. It forces you to find what you actually want to say, in a way that nothing about pure freedom can.

The Question Nobody's Asking

Which brings me to what I think might be the most important question nobody is asking about all of this.

We’re living in the most unconstrained creative moment in human history. AI can generate images, write drafts, compose music, produce video. The tools are extraordinary and they’re getting better every month. The cost of creating almost anything is approaching zero. The barriers that used to force hard choices - you can’t afford that, you don’t have time for that, you don’t have the skills for that - no longer exist.

And everyone is celebrating, understandably. More access is better. More tools are better. Democratizing creation is better.

But if the pattern holds - if Spielberg needed the broken shark, if Korea needed the winter, if Seuss needed the fifty-word box - then what happens when the constraints disappear? If you can make anything, how do you decide what matters? If nothing is off the table, what gives the work shape? I think these might be the defining questions for creation in this AGI era.

I don’t think the answer is that abundance is bad. But I do think there’s something worth sitting with: the possibility that constraint isn’t just an obstacle on the way to good work, but a requirement for it. That the tension between what you want to make and what you’re allowed to make might be the most undervalued ingredient in all of creative AI.

And if that’s true, then the most important creative skill of the next decade might not be learning to use the new tools. It might be learning to build your own four walls. Choosing your fifty words. Setting your own limits, so that what comes out of them is something only you could have made. Maybe that’s how the work transcends what is considered AI slop, and actually becomes your own.

Maybe there’s already a clue. One of the first things people figured out about prompting AI was that you often get better results by telling it what you don’t want than by describing what you do. “Don’t make it formal. Don’t use jargon. Don’t explain the obvious.” The negative space shapes the output more than the ask itself does. Even in the most wide-open creative tool we’ve ever built, the best results come from deciding what to leave out. The whole conversation about AI and creativity has mostly been about what's now possible. But maybe the better question is the opposite: what should we make impossible on purpose? I don't have the answer. But I think it might be the most important question we're not asking yet.

P.S. — Read the last letter of the last word of every paragraph. I took my own advice.