Justin Reidy

Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them.

But here’s the point, the promise of this technology is speed and efficiency, a shorter route to an end product, and the removal of barriers between you and your creative self.

For those of us who are not geniuses, it may be tempting to outsource some portion of our creativity to the AI, so we can get past the fact of our non-geniousness, but those... See more

As you build newthing you will discover that building a newthing is a strange act where the harder you go about trying to do it, the harder it becomes. It will resist direct force and control. The more you relax and allow it to speak through you, however, the easier it will be.

Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal sequence of words. Less can go unsaid when you don't have tone of voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem excessive in... See more

Writing is hard, and it’s not surprising that the promise of removing that friction from the writing process is appealing. But we need to be able to recognize when removing the friction from the process might mean losing something important.

You just have to grab hold of what awakens a sense of loving curiosity in you. If you pursue those things, they never cease to open up to new questions and observations and ideas.

People of steady faith cannot always understand why the rest of us do not simply open our hearts.