Category: Creativity

Categories
Business Creativity Space SpaceX

Test like you fly!

There’s a phrase in the SpaceX documentary that keeps coming back to me: “Test like you fly.” It sounds like a slogan. The kind of thing that gets painted on a factory wall and eventually stops meaning anything. But the more I sit with it, the more I think it’s actually a philosophy that reaches well beyond rocket engineering.

The video — a 25-minute documentary SpaceX released last week — is ostensibly about Starship Version 3. New ship, new booster, new engines, new pad, new test site. Everything rebuilt. And they’re not shy about framing it as a reset, not an upgrade. One description I read called it “a quiet violence in progress.” That phrase stopped me cold, because it’s exactly right. Progress that looks violent from the outside — all that fire and metal — but is somehow quiet in its inevitability.

What moved me watching it wasn’t the engines. It was the engineers. SpaceX put the people on camera: the ones running cryogenic pressure tests at 80 Kelvin, stress-testing tank structures at 70% proof, explaining their failures and their data with the flat affect of people who have made peace with how long hard things take. There’s something almost monastic about it. You choose a problem that will not yield easily. You accept that the work will outlast any individual sprint of enthusiasm. You go back to it anyway.

I keep thinking about that in the context of what we’re doing with AI — the other enormous, fast-moving project that I spend so much of my mental energy on. The development arc is different: iterative releases, weeks not years between jumps, demos that blur into deployment. But the same principle is buried in there somewhere. The best AI teams I read about aren’t the ones shipping the most polished demos. They’re the ones building infrastructure for failure — evals, red-teaming, structured feedback loops. Test like you fly.

The Raptor 3 engines now produce 280 metric tons of thrust each. Thirty-three of them on a Super Heavy booster means over 17 million pounds of liftoff force. I have no intuitive frame for that number. What I do have a frame for is what those numbers represent: three years of iteration on top of five years before that, on top of a theoretical foundation laid by people who didn’t live to see any of this. There’s a compounding in that which I find genuinely moving. Nobody built the Raptor 3 in isolation. It came from everything that broke before it.

The hardest part of the documentary isn’t the engineering. It’s the implicit acknowledgment of how much remains undone. No Starship has yet achieved full orbital velocity with both stages intact. In-space refueling is still untested. The thermal protection systems need more work. And yet — SpaceX talks about unmanned cargo missions to Mars before the end of this year like it’s on the roadmap, not the wish list. That sentence used to sound like marketing. Watching the footage, it doesn’t anymore.

I’m not sure what to do with that feeling exactly. It’s something between awe and vertigo. We’re living in a moment when the audacious has started to have quarterly milestones. When the impossible keeps showing up on timelines and then — bewilderingly, uncomfortably — meeting them.

Test like you fly. Fail with rigor. Build the thing you actually need, not the thing you could more easily explain.

I keep turning that over. There’s a post in there somewhere about writing, too — about the drafts nobody sees, the structural tests that fail, the versions that taught you the one that worked. But that’s for another day.

For now I’m just sitting with the footage of those 33 engines lighting up, and the quiet weight of how much went wrong before they could do that.

Categories
Assumptions Creativity

The Question Before the Question

I spent hours with Paul Baran over the years, and I never quite got used to his mind.

He asked questions you wouldn’t expect. Not provocative questions, not contrarian ones — just questions that arrived from a slightly different angle than you’d prepared for. And the strange thing was the aftermath. You’d hear the question, feel briefly disoriented, and then — almost immediately — think: of course. Now I understand.

Paul invented the Telebit Trailblazer modem. If you were around in that era you remember what modems were: devices that negotiated a fixed speed and held it. The whole industry operated that way. Speed was a spec, a number on the box, a ceiling you bumped against.

Paul looked at the same problem and saw something different. He didn’t ask how fast a modem could go. He asked what a specific telephone circuit was actually capable of — this wire, right now, in these conditions. The Trailblazer was adaptive. It listened to the line before it decided anything. It milked transfer speeds out of circuits that conventional modems had already given up on.

That’s not a new technique. That’s a new question.

I’ve thought about Paul a lot since then, trying to locate the thing that made his mind work differently. I don’t have a single moment to point to. No whiteboard revelation, no conversation I can replay. Just the accumulated residue of hours in the room with someone who seemed to be operating on different premises than everyone else — asking the question that preceded the question the rest of us were answering.

Morgan Housel quotes Visa founder Dee Hock in Same As Ever: “New ways of looking at things create much greater innovation than new ways of doing them.”

I read that and thought of Paul immediately. What I took from all those hours with him wasn’t a method or a framework. It was simpler and harder than that — a habit of suspicion toward the assumptions already in the room. The ones everyone had agreed to without quite deciding to. The fixed speeds no one was questioning.

I still hear his voice when I catch myself accepting an assumption. Is it, though?

Categories
AI Creativity Programming Writing

We Are All Painters Now: The Era of Vibe Coding

For decades, the act of creating software was exactly that: writing. It was a distinctly left-brained, agonizingly precise discipline.

Programmers were typists of logic, translating human intent into a rigid, unforgiving syntax that a machine could understand. A single misplaced semicolon, an unclosed bracket, or a misspelled variable could bring an entire system crashing down.

Building software meant placing one brick after another, working meticulously from the ground up.

In this traditional paradigm, coders were the ultimate embodiment of Annie Dillard’s writer. As she noted in The Writing Life, “Writers… work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.”

When you wrote code, your mistakes, your refactoring, and your discarded logic were all part of a linear, grueling journey. If a feature didn’t work, you had to physically wade back into the text, debugging, reading line by line, and rewriting the narrative of the application. The discarded chapters were the endless hours spent wrestling with a single broken dependency.

But recently, a profound paradigm shift has quietly taken over our screens. We are transitioning out of the era of writing software and into the era of “vibe coding.”

Vibe coding fundamentally changes our relationship with the machine. With the rise of advanced AI coding assistants, we are no longer placing the bricks ourselves; we have become the architects and the creative directors. You don’t write the loop or manually construct the database query. Instead, you describe the feeling, the function, and the outcome. You tell the AI, “Make this dashboard feel more modern,” or “The logic here is too clunky, make it flow faster and handle edge cases gracefully.” You are coding by intuition. You are steering by the “vibe” of the output rather than the mechanics of the input.

Suddenly, Dillard’s other metaphor takes center stage. In the age of vibe coding, we have become painters.

“A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them.”

When we vibe code, we ask an AI for a functional prototype, and it gives us a canvas. We look at it, test it, and sense whether it aligns with our vision. If it doesn’t quite hit the mark, we don’t necessarily rewrite the code from scratch. We simply prompt the AI to try again, adding a new layer of instruction. The AI paints a new layer of code directly over the old one. The awkward, underlying iterations—the messy attempts at styling, the inefficient logic of the first draft—are obliterated by the newest prompt.

The machine covers our tracks for us. We don’t need to know exactly how the underlying pixels were rearranged or how the syntax was refactored. The final application emerges as a stunning obliteration of its own clumsy past.

As someone who has spent time wrestling with the rigid demands of syntax, there is a strange, quiet grief in letting go of that left-to-right process. There is a deeply earned, tactile satisfaction in building something manually, understanding the precise weight and placement of every line of code. Relinquishing that control can feel like a loss of craftsmanship.

Yet, there is also a breathtaking liberation in this new medium. We are moving from a world of manual construction to a world of artistic curation. The barrier to entry is no longer fluency in a specific, arcane language; it is simply the clarity of your imagination and your ability to articulate your intent.

The next time you sit down to build something digital, notice the shift in your own posture. You no longer have to carry the heavy burden of the writer, agonizing over every word and leaving your discardable chapters on the left. You can step back, look at the whole canvas, and trust your intuition. Let the AI cover the tracks. Embrace the obliteration of the early drafts.

We are all painters now, coaxing the future into existence one brushstroke at a time.

Categories
Creativity Writing

The Crucible of the Blank Page

There is a distinct, often uncomfortable silence that accompanies a blank page. It’s not a lack of noise, but rather an overwhelming cacophony of unformed ideas waiting to be given shape.

We often operate under the assumption that we must have our thoughts perfectly ordered before we sit down to express them. We believe writing is merely the act of transcribing a fully formed philosophy from mind to paper.

But the truth is far messier, and infinitely more profound.

Flannery O’Connor captured this beautifully when she admitted:

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

I find myself returning to this admission constantly, deeply resonating with the reality of it. I’m the same way.

The human mind is a brilliant but chaotic place, a swirling ether of impressions, emotions, half-remembered conversations, and half-baked theories. Left to its own devices, it rarely settles on a singular, coherent truth. It requires the friction of articulation—the physical, deliberate act of putting words into a sequence—to force those nebulous clouds into something solid.

In an era increasingly defined by the allure of frictionless output, there is a profound temptation to skip this wrestling match.

We are surrounded by tools and shortcuts designed to hand us the finished essay, the polished insight, the perfectly packaged takeaway without us having to endure the messy, chaotic energy of the drafting process. It is easy to look at the blank page as a hurdle to be cleared rather than a necessary landscape to be traversed. But bypassing that struggle is a critical mistake.

You cannot skip the work of wrestling with ideas. That struggle is not a barrier to good writing; it is the core chaotic energy that underpins it. It is the crucible where conviction is forged.

When you wrestle with a sentence, striking it out, rewriting it, abandoning it entirely for a new thought, you are not just editing text on a screen. You are editing your own mind. You are testing the structural integrity of your beliefs.

The chaotic energy of a rough draft—the fragmented sentences, the sudden leaps of logic, the tangents that seem to lead nowhere—is evidence of a mind actively searching for meaning.

It is through this very friction that we discover what we actually believe.

An idea might feel profound when it is floating weightlessly in your head, but the moment you try to pin it down with language, its flaws and hollow points become glaringly obvious. Writing forces a confrontation with our own intellectual blind spots.

If we outsource this process, or if we try to circumvent the chaos by relying on templates or taking the path of least cognitive resistance, we lose the very mechanism by which we come to know ourselves. We might successfully produce text, but we will not produce insight.

The value of writing isn’t just in the final product meant for a reader’s eyes; it is in the transformation that occurs within the writer.

To write is to step into the unknown spaces of your own intellect. It is an act of revelation as much as communication.

So, the next time you find yourself staring at a blank page, feeling the chaotic energy of unformed thoughts, don’t retreat.

Lean into the mess. Let the words spill out, rough and unpolished, and trust that in the wreckage of your early drafts, you will finally read what you say, and in doing so, discover exactly what you think.

Categories
Creativity Living Walking

The Medicine of Momentum

Have you noticed that an anxiety tends to creep in whenever your surroundings get perfectly quiet?

For a long time, I told myself that peace was supposed to be like a quiet day at home. But often I find my center of gravity when everything around me is a blur—whether I’m staring out the window of a train, driving with the radio on, or just walking on a local park trail.

I was reading Pam Houston’s memoir Deep Creek recently, and she absolutely nailed this exact feeling:

“Motion improves any day for me—the farther the faster the better—on a plane, a boat, a dogsled, a car, the back of a horse, a bus, a pair of skis, in a cabbage wagon, hoofing it down a trail in my well-worn hiking boots. Stillness, on the other hand, makes me very nervous.”

I love how beautifully democratic her list is. It really doesn’t matter if it’s a jet plane or a literal cabbage wagon. The vehicle isn’t the point; the momentum is what heals us.

For me, motion acts as a physical counterweight to the heavy, looping thoughts in my head. When I’m moving and taking in a changing world around me, my mind gets permission to unclench. The scenery changes, the wind hits my face, and whatever I’m stressed about is forced to keep up or get left behind in the dust.

But it’s the second half of her quote that really gets me—the idea that stillness makes us nervous.

Why does just stopping feel so threatening? I think it’s because when we stop moving, the dust settles, and whatever we’ve been outrunning finally taps us on the shoulder. Stillness strips away my favorite distractions. It forces me to actually sit with my uncertainties and unanswerable questions. We live in a world that tells us stillness equals peace, so it can be hard to admit that the quiet actually makes me more anxious.

Maybe the goal isn’t to force ourselves into a static version of peace that just doesn’t fit. If motion makes a day better, I think we should just honor that. I run, drive, and walk not to escape myself, but to process my life at a speed that actually makes sense to my brain. There is a beautiful quietude to be found in the center of movement—a peace that shows up when I’m finally going fast enough.

““The demons hate it when you get out of bed. Demons hate fresh air.”” (Austin Kleon, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad)

Categories
Biology Creativity Living

The Compost of the Soul

There is a pervasive pressure in modern life to curate our experiences like a museum curator arranges an exhibition. We want to catalog our memories, label our skills, and display only the pristine, unbroken artifacts of our history. We treat our minds like archives—dusty, organized, and static.

But Ann Patchett offers a different, earthier metaphor, one that feels infinitely more true to the messy reality of being human:

“I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow.”

This imagery of the compost heap is liberating because it removes the burden of purity. In a compost heap, you don’t separate the eggshells from the coffee grounds or the dead leaves from the fruit rinds. It all goes in. The triumphs, the heartbreaks, the books we read halfway, the conversations we barely remember, and the failures we wish we could forget—they are all just organic matter.

The magic, as Patchett notes, is in the digestion. We are not static repositories of information; we are active, biological processors. Time acts as the earthworms, breaking down the sharp edges of raw experience until it loses its original form.

We often fear forgetting. We worry that if we don’t hold onto a memory with a white-knuckled grip, it loses its value. But in the logic of the compost heap, “what you’ve forgotten” is just as vital as what you remember. The forgotten things are simply the matter that has broken down completely, becoming the nutrient-dense soil that supports new growth.

If we view ourselves as compost heaps, we stop fearing the “rot.” We understand that the difficult periods of decomposition are necessary to create the humus required for the next season of growth. We are not built to be archives; we are built to be gardens.

Categories
Creativity Curiosity Living Work

The Human Router

There is a distinct difference between information and wisdom, and often, that difference is measured in velocity. We are accustomed to thinking that faster is better—fiber optic cables, 5G, real-time Slack notifications. We want knowledge to travel at the speed of light.

But Dan Wang, in his book Breakneck, captures a sociological truth about Silicon Valley that defies this obsession with speed:

“When I worked in Silicon Valley, people liked to say that knowledge travels at the speed of beer. Engineers like to talk to each other to solve technical problems, which is how knowledge diffuses.”

It is a charming, slightly irreverent metric, but it points to something profound about how humans solve difficult problems. There is “codified knowledge”—the explicit instructions found in textbooks, API documentation, and internal wikis. This travels instantly. It is frictionless. It is also, usually, insufficient for true innovation.

Then there is “tacit knowledge.” This is the intuition, the heuristic, the war story about why a specific architecture failed three years ago. This knowledge is heavy. It doesn’t travel through fiber optics; it travels through proximity. It requires the social friction of a shared table and the serendipitous collision of two engineers venting about a seemingly unrelated problem.

Crucially, this mechanism requires a specific type of operator: the Connector. These are the unsung heroes of the “speed of beer” economy. They aren’t always the 10x engineers on the leaderboard. They are the “human routers”—the people who instinctively know that the problem you are facing today is the same one Sarah from the Platform team solved last year. They are the ones who drag the introverted genius out to the pub, not to distract them, but to plug them into the grid. They curate the environment where the spark can jump the gap.

In our modern drive for remote efficiency, we are optimizing for the transfer of data. But we must be careful not to optimize away the people who pour the drinks, literal or metaphorical. That slow, liquid diffusion of ideas is often where the real breakthrough hides—steered by those special few who know exactly who needs to talk to whom.

Categories
Creativity Writing

Longhand

“If you’ve never tried it, see what happens if you write a draft of something longhand. Before long, you’ll be forced to x out whole sentences. You’ll draw circles and asterisks and arrows. You’ll change your mind about what you’ve crossed out, and write “stet” in the margin. It will look messy, because it is messy. It should be that: a beautiful, complicated mess. Who knows? Maybe only one sentence will remain. Maybe the whole order will be upended. You’ll be able to see a road map of your progress as you build the architecture of your story.” (Dani Shapiro, Still Writing)

Categories
Creativity Educated

Software for your brain…

Categories
Creativity

Flow

Text excerpt discussing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of 'flow', emphasizing the importance of fluidity in creativity and productivity, alongside the book cover of 'Where Good Ideas Come From' by Steven Johnson.

I loved Steven Johnson’s description of “flow”: “it is more the feeling of drifting along a stream, being carried in a clear direction, but still tossed in surprising ways by the eddies and whirls of moving water.”