Not Now, Not Never
Published on October 11, 2026 · 2 min read
For the past few weeks I’ve been restless with one thought:
How do I keep up with everything changing in today’s world?
In my Re-reading Who Moved My Cheese post I wrote about being positive towards change, and I still feel that way. The other side of it is whether we can actually keep up with how fast it moves.
A few years ago, if someone asked me to build something in a technology I had never touched, I would either say no or ask for time to learn it properly first.
Today I jump straight into the project, consulting GPT or Claude as I prototype. They usually meet my expectations. My experience still helps me recognize quality results and decide which questions to ask, but the entry barrier has effectively reached zero, and that has left me with endless side projects.
Starting at zero means every new idea appears worth a couple of hours. Before long I have a collection of beginnings and very few finished stories.
I used to blame a lack of discipline. Now I think we were never taught how to manage curiosity, and AI has made that gap much bigger.
The psychologist Robin Hogarth described some learning environments as “kind” and others as “wicked”. Chess is a kind environment, with fixed rules and immediate feedback, and the patterns you learn keep working. Open-sea sailing is a wicked one, where conditions keep changing and what worked yesterday may fail today.
The world used to feel closer to chess. You picked a skill and mastered it. Today, one month begins with calm focus, and the next month the rules change. I think these fluctuations cause my restlessness.
I don’t have a full answer, but three things are helping:
- Instead of asking what I should keep up with, I ask what I want to be good at for the next six months.
- A new idea goes into a note, not a new Xcode project. Writing it down lets me stop carrying it.
- A parked side project waits for a later season instead of competing with this one.
Chasing all of it hasn’t worked for me, so I’m choosing one thing and going deep enough for it to become real, and the rest can wait.