Greetings Grasshopper!
Germany, 2009. A scientist named Jan Souman walks a handful of volunteers to the edge of a forest, clips a GPS tracker to each of them, and hands over the simplest instruction a grown adult has ever received.
Walk in a straight line.
No map and no tricks. Just keep walking the direction your nose is pointing.
Four of them set out on a cloudy day. All four did the best they could, but ended up walking in really large circles. Three crossed their own tracks, more than once, and not one of them noticed.
Then two more went out under a clear sky and cut lines through that forest straight enough to rule a notebook with. Their only wobble came in the first fifteen minutes, while the sun was still tucked behind a cloud.
So Souman took the whole experiment to the Sahara, because apparently one forest was not humbling enough. His night walker held a lovely straight course under a full moon. Then the moon slipped behind the clouds, and the poor man made a series of brisk, sharp turns and confidently marched right back the way he came.
Not one of them even felt lost.
The scientists ruled out uneven legs (a myth, apparently) and also ruled out panic. What actually happens is much smaller. The body makes tiny errors all day long, half a degree here, a hair of drift there. With a sun or a mountain or a steeple to steer by, those errors get corrected before they add up. Take the fixed point away and they quietly compound into a giant wandering circle.
A compass cannot check itself against itself.
The same phenomenon repeats itself over and over for entrepreneurs.
Eleven at night at the kitchen table. A laptop, a cold mug, and somebody asking their AI to help with the About page for their website. It writes one. Is it good? It is wonderful, comes the response. Is it maybe a little stiff? What a sharp eye, here is a fresh one. Is the fresh one better? Of course it is. Honestly? Honestly.
Nineteen versions later, every single one of them has been wonderful, and nobody at that table can remember which one they actually liked.
Every question goes into the same instrument that produced the answer, and comes back wearing the same confident smile. That person is walking a perfect circle through the forest, and they are sure the entire time. (I have worn a groove in that particular forest floor myself. The trail markers know me by name.)
Grasshopper, the answer isn’t better walking. Maybe it’s a brighter sun.
The good news comes in two layers. Every time you have sent a draft back to your AI and said that is not it, you were being the sun for it. Your pickiness is the fixed point the machine steers by.
And... somebody still has to be the sun for you. That job belongs to a person who is neither you nor the machine, preferably one holding a mug of something warm, who will look at draft nineteen and tell you, kindly, that paragraph three was better on Tuesday.
Which is exactly why I teach AI live (on Tuesdays, cohort starts Sep 29th). The NO BS AI™ Foundation is classes in a room with me and a few fellow travelers. I help you build your own AI tools with your own hands, with somebody right there to tell you, gently, which way is north. (No coding required. I do not code either, and look at me go.) Cohort 2 starts Tuesday, September 29, 11am to 1pm Central. It is $997, paid once, and the whole curriculum is yours to keep.
enrollment closes September 29
If you would rather try before you buy, dip a toe first. Ninety free minutes with me on Tuesday, September 15 or Tuesday, September 22, at 11am Central, the very same slot as the class, so you can feel the shape of it. No card needed →
Off to go find a steeple,
RJ 🥷🏼❤️🤖
❤️🔪
From RJ’s Secret Invisible Coffeeshop: Stellar Sipper
2 parts Ginger · 2 parts Cinnamon · ¼ part Cardamom
Ginger lands first, bright and a little bossy, like a star that refuses to budge while the clouds argue around it. Cinnamon settles in underneath, warm as a hearthstone at the end of a long walk. The cardamom arrives last and small, a single cool point you could steer a whole night by.
Poured by Celestia, a Starlight Born druid and Inn regular who gets her best ideas lying on the roof counting stars, and her best decisions after she climbs back down with her Grounding Boots on.
Ask Celestia what the stars are for and she will tell you they never once told anybody where to go. They just held still while people worked it out.
❤️🔪
Music: "Teller of the Tales" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0