Success: Learning + Doing + Improving

Doing the hard stuff is hard, because it's hard.

Hey y’all!

This is being delivered 12 hours after I had wanted to deliver it. Now, I could be pretty bummed about it but the fact is that I still shipped something to you, as promised, each business day.

And I’m grateful that I found time this evening to put a few thoughts down; mostly for me this time. Starting something is hard. Not quitting is harder. Making a real promise is hard. Not keeping should be even harder.

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The thing is, I’ve been thinking a lot about starting things, like startups and all. When you watch and witness companies like OpenAI — regardless of what you think of them — continue to innovate and ship great products that are changing the world, it makes you pause and think about what you’re doing with your own life a little.

It’s why I started this newsletter, to be honest. I had been watching the (generative) AI space for a few years and even had the chance to build a few products in large and small companies that were using these as core parts of their product. I had a ton of fun learning and then realized I didn’t know enough. I had to get more.

And I wanted to continue to work on my writing. And the only way of getting better at writing and communicating is actually doing it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ZFellows

Two days after my first post I published this one with the simple idea of showing how fast this industry is going. Follow the money indeed. And it’s been growing even faster as more eyeballs are captured, more attention is given, and more money gets mixed in.

But this is what I wanted to do with my present time here on earth and I thought it might be fun to capture all of these things in a way that I could use for, say, a personal archive of resources and tools and thoughts and whatever I wanted really.

130 days later I’m still writing and there are days that I definitely want to quit. I’m just tired from a long day of work and tired from the drive in and out (they are hybrid and so I have to be there at least twice a week).

But this is my art. It’s the only one that I’ve got right now. And it’s mine. It’s one that I can control and no one has any say over. That sense of real freedom in life is so rare that I’ve found myself wanting more and more of it as I get older and older.

I wanted to learn, and do, and improve, all the time. And the best way to do that is just to start, put it together, piece by piece, and then just not — for the love of god — don’t quit too early before the magic appears.

So I thought I’d spend a moment to step back and realize that I’m doing the right things. I’m showing up, putting in the (small) amount of work and executing against what I believe was true when I started. That I could learn more about machine learning and artificial intelligence if I actually did something with it.

I knew that I didn’t have time to write software for my own projects but I could still build something small, a newsletter and perhaps a community to boot. And so that’s what I did. And here you are reading it.

I just want to encourage you to keep moving forward, one step at a time. Nothing good happens quickly and the things that do you should be very cautious of. It’s like character development, it simply doesn’t happen over night.

And I’d love to know what you’re building and how I could support you. Just hit me up in the comments! -`ღ´-

With that, good luck and godspeed. I’m on a roadtrip across the US with friends and so I’ll be getting to these things as I can for the next few weeks!

( * ^ *) ノシ

— Summer