“The most difficult part of positioning is selecting that one specific concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if you want to cut through the prospect's wall of indifference.”
And at the same time though, I do think that there’s been a serious decline in the quality of things that we build and a kind of disposability to the world. This is what really saddens me and it goes back to beauty and the way that that interweaves with writing and AI. We got so good at making stuff in China that if your shirt doesn’t hold up,... See more
You can mentally replace the “generative” in generative AI with generic by the way, and it honestly works better (totally fine for some things, but you have to know where).
And yet, we often approach our work and lives as if there were—as if every day is a competition, every achievement a test of our worth rather than a step in an ongoing journey.
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it