Chapter 15 of 18

Movement 13 — Twelve months ago I could not breathe

In August of last year I was frightened, and I'm going to be pretty vulnerable here. I had anxiety.

My work is teaching people to code. That's the business I do. That's how everybody who works for me gets paid.

And I kept asking myself the same thing. Is this AI really going to destroy the world? What if that chaotic scenario is real? If the thing I teach becomes free, what am I selling?

I'm not an AI scientist. I don't have a machine learning degree. What am I going to do?

I don't trust myself. Maybe I don't make mistakes. But whenever I trusted myself, I screwed up.

I was walking. That's what I remember about that month.

What I kept arriving at, on those walks, was that I couldn't out forecast the thing and didn't have to. I only had to end up on the right side of it. If this was going to be a weapon, the question was never whether it existed. The question was who was holding it.

So I stopped predicting and started building.

I made that decision that time I was walking with my cyber security engineer. We said, let's build this app. We made that decision, we developed the app as a team, and it's going really well.

That product now earns three or four thousand dollars per month.

I'm excited that I can build things with it now. I genuinely implement it really well, and that is the part I can actually hand to you.

One app making four thousand a month. Ninety nine point nine nine percent of apps fail. I would rather be accurate than impressive, and that is the accurate frame for it.

But this August isn't last August, and the difference isn't the money.

Twelve months ago I was the guy who's feeling suffocating. I cannot breathe, what am I going to do. Today I exactly know what I do.

What were you doing in August of last year, and can you honestly account for the twelve months since?

If you produced one or two events and then a blank, the blank isn't a memory problem. It's what an unexamined year looks like from the inside. And the next one is currently built to look identical, unless something interrupts it.