my yearly review, in one breath standing on one foot, because my previous reviews had cleared 10k words and I want to spend precious writing time going deeper into other topics. okay fine, maybe two or three breaths.
- I began the year thinking that my mission was to build an actually-good AI Secretary as a new business
- I worked on that for a bit but in spring I started realizing I was BSing myself about my priorities
- and in particular I started getting the sense that continuing on my current path with the secretary idea was likely to lead down the same old paths I’d gone with my previous business, intend.do, where it became a sort of half-assed lifestyle business but didn’t take me to the next level
- the other thing that happened was I backed up and started seriously reflecting on the fact that I wasn’t really pursuing a theory of change I believed in, or living a life that made sense given everything I’ve experienced—particularly the collective consciousness magic described in Wtf is the Synergic Mode?
- I reflected: huh, it’s as if I were a chemist who in undergrad found a molecule that might plausibly cure cancer, and I sometimes talked about that discovery but when somebody asked I would say ‘idk, I’m working on other stuff. but it would probably be good to follow up on that’
- it’s one thing to have a specific reason for not working on it, whether it’s “it’s too daunting” or “it seemed also maybe dangerous” or whatever
- but I didn’t have a clear reason (although I do think those two were part of it)
- thus I entered into life-crisis mode
- Jess (my wife) and I share a philosophy that life crises are good and if all is going well you should have one every few years. kind of like controlled burns
- I had major ones in 2020 and 2022, which are well-documented in those respective yearly reviews
- my main approach to having a crisis is, to the extent possible within my commitments, to stop letting my life go forward as usual and do almost nothing but journalling, going for walks, and talking to friends about my situation and confusion
- at some point I might write up a bit of a guide for this haha
- I did a lot of journalling about what might feel even plausibly viable in light of my experiences of we-spaces etc
- one main idea I had for unifying things was to build an LLM-powered app for helping people do 3SED (3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue), on all scales from personal conflicts to political conflicts to scientific paradigm tensions
- I still think this is a great idea, and I might hack on it on the side, but I still didn’t really trust myself to start another software business. maybe with the right cofounder?
- I also considered trying to start some sort of institute or foundation or other organization, and get some funding for researching this kind of thing, but I wasn’t really sure how to approach it
- in parallel to this, though not unrelatedly, I’d been writing up some ideas on the interplay between internal and interpersonal coalitions (aka “NNTD but realpolitik tho” – NNTD is my “non-naive trust dance” framework-etc)
- and that coalitions writing, combined with…
- to produce a massive insight about faith
- …which pairs very nicely with my 2020 insight about trust!
- (hope & love & peace & joy, watch out 👀)
- the effect is that while I don’t disagree with my “Mindset choice” is a confusion piece, I now feel like I understand what mindset choice is and how to do it on purpose, and how you’re sort of inevitably doing it so you might as well do it well. I’m still not that good at it, but I now see how to become good at it (and how to set up guardrails to approach it safely)
- and, excitingly, I now feel like I can approach leading in this kind of domain
- whereas before (particularly since NNTD) I’d been so fixated on the importance of bottom-up processing that I could kind of only take a critic role
- but also conceptually, this seems to have untangled a major blindspot I’d had since the NNTD insight, and I feel more space to be less dogmatic about all of this stuff
- in August, I was texting my friend Emmett Shear about various ideas and mentioned that I was back to the drawing board but probably wasn’t going to start a new software company, and I said “ok so i have another weird proposal” and pitched me on joining his organic alignment AI startup to do the human organic alignment of the company itself
- …basically my dream job?! I get to hack on software tools, but internally, not having to build and sell production apps… I get to tinker with applying cybernetics and active inference in an organizational context… I get to work with and learn from people with way more experience running real successful businesses… and I get to apply what I know about trust and how I’s become a We to a team that’s working on important technical and philosophical problems—a team with good feedback loops, not a navel-gazing community or research institute..?!?
- anyway, long story short, after a few smaller explorations, we decided to go for it, and thus began my first experience of full-time indefinite employment, as Softmax’s Organizational Development Manager
- (we’re hiring, btw! looking for a small number of very skilled Orchestrator-Engineers)
- definitely part of what drew me to finally exploring having a job was finding it hard to cohere my focus at home with a baby-okay-now-a-toddler-wow-they-grow-up-fast
- I was surprised about the extent to which I just liked having a job, and I think this contrast was part of it but far from all. teams are great. I’ve been lonely.
- in November I published one post a day for 30 days! some were quick ones I whipped up day of, and some were long pieces I’d spent many hours and months iterating on. I’d recommend:
- on the toddler/family front, I feel satisfied to have spent the first year of my firstborn’s life so actively involved in her care (Jess and I were basically 50/50) not so busy that I ended up not quite getting some of the core skills and ending up with a learned helplessness attitude about it
- but overall I have been loving my daughter and loving being a dad, even as I got clarity that I don’t want to spend quite so much time being just in baby mode
- relatedly, Jess is now taking much more than half, but she also wants time to get more work done, but we’re also not super stoked about most daycare or school premises
- instead, she’s working on creating a post-secular family coworking space, based on some ideas that both of us have been nurturing for awhile
Have your say!