Ship, but what?
Deciding what to do when words are free
One of my sons recently presented me with a hand-drawn picture. I stood firm on my self-enforced rule to never guess what it is. Eventually, he said: “That’s you at work. I’m going to be a professor when I grow up”.
My son doesn’t really know what I do. I sit in front of a Google Doc realising I have no idea what I’m writing about. Then I type furiously, sporadically. Procrastinate with a deep research query. Then I ship words early and often. Eventually a book or article comes out, a few years later. Hopefully.
But today AI has made shipping cheap. You can go from idea to executed piece, even if it’s not very good, extremely quickly. Grunt work isn’t grunty anymore. And so the journals, newspapers, linkedin and substack are inundated with generic content.
These days I find myself asking a different question: ship, but what?
At the playground, one airpod in my ear, I will speak to one of my robots. Claude, usually. Claude if I want clarity. But Grok if it’s a bit more spicy.
Other parents stare at me blankly while I quietly say:
“I have an idea for an article. Help me think about it. The basic argument is [5 minutes of rambling]. Draft this into a coherent narrative of dot points. Use short sentences and avoid adjectives. Be analytical. Don’t repeat yourself. Thank you.”
Sometimes we go back and forward. There’s always some words there when I get back to my laptop. Not always good, but semi-shippable.
And after a glorious year or two of amazing AI access, I’ve come to ironically realise that I spend more of my time deciding what to write about, not just writing it.
I delete most of those drafts from the robot.
Rather, I browse the internet and ask myself questions about the world.
Why start another new piece, and not fix up the other folder of drafts I have? Should I write about why Australia’s competition policy proposals are terrible, or about a book I read? There’s an election coming up in Australia, maybe it’s a good time to be yelling at the government. Spaceflight is fun, but does anyone care?
Shipping used to mean grinding out the output. You sat down and typed. Today, at least for a wide range of professions, and particularly for those in the business of ideas, outputs are cheap.
So what are the right outputs, and when?
This means I spend more of my time thinking about how to provide value to the world. To discover what to ship you need to have a vision, and one that other people share. It needs to matter to you and to other people.
How else could you decide how to use the amazing shipping capabilities we have available to us?
Do you want to accelerate or decelerate technological progress?
Do you want more freedom or less freedom?
Do you want more growth or degrowth?
Do you want abundance or scarcity?
(the answers should be the former)
Having a vision about the world has a premium now.
That’s how you decide what to ship.