Knowledge Workers.

This day is special.

You only get to live once.

It’s already becoming clear that some people do not like AI very much, programming was like an art for many engineers, even to me in some way, deciding the stack, chasing those good practices, using the newest tech, refining the site for speed, buying VPS and doing stuff on it, just playing with stuff that will mostly be of no value to end-users. It was fun, but with AI that feeling is now robbed, all you do now is serve. Businesses have profited most from this. More wealth indeed is getting created, but not into the hands of workers, this was a natural result, but do I really care? Once I finish here, I will go back to T3Code, speak some bs and the AI will start speaking some gibberish back and voilà, it’s done.

This does allow one to do more, make more things, imagine the unimaginable, if you like being that person this time is wonderful, honestly it’s just about change, it’s just that the change is too dramatic for the many developers where earlier it was just PHP, react, now it’s a whole different new game. I do sometimes feel all my learning is wasted, as if all the time I spent the last 3 years programming is worthless now, anyone can make it? The ability of thinking is now put in a box. More stuff will be done than ever before, businesses will grow, the article by Anthropic on the economy 2 days ago made me feel sad, hopeless, depressed. But today I am happier. Humans find possibilities and hope in the harshest situations, don’t they? I can create stuff, build cool new things, businesses, grow things I could have never thought of before.

I actually tried prompting AI a lot of times about what I should do, what Ideas I should work on? What kind of SaaS I should make? That is really not a good way. You can’t just blindly give it full freedom, I learned that the hard way, last year I prompted it to tell me some ideas, ranging from iPhone apps to B2B SaaS, it showed me all, I was unhappy. It felt just not me. Maybe it’s me actually, I hate acting stupid, exploring new paths which will put my earning timelines farther, but here I am, living on hope for the last 1 and a half years that something will pick up.

What will I be doing tomorrow? I woke up really early today, I wrote down that today’s task was finding something that can make me money, honestly I have spent 5-6 hours today doing work with AI, reading, and stuff. I feel a lot happier, maybe I like doing this, I don’t know, here are some good quotes I found from one of Big P’s essays.

It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.

Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student? Well, you don’t, and that’s what you need to find out. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it’s probably worthwhile to join it.

You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do

but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.

Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it’s the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They’re all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they’re not interested in. One still hasn’t sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

I’m not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I’m often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don’t run for several days, I feel ill. It’s the same with people who do great things. They know they’ll feel bad if they don’t work, and they have enough discipline (not the case with me sadly) to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That’s why he’s so good.

When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it interesting. That’s what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that’s compellingly mysterious.

The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you (looks like that is what I will do for the next 3-4 months), and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.

Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you’re deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)

Don’t disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that’s what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you’re not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren’t supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you’re doing no worse than expectations. [8]