By Novae Caelum · Originally published
Trusting your gut, your skills, your info, and your taste
It used to be hard to gather information—research could take weeks, and you didn’t always know what you didn’t know to look for. Business research, craft research, any kind of surface research (that doesn’t require specialty science, at least).
I can send Fable off to gather up everything I want to know about a broad topic, like pain points for fiction authors, the fiction industry at large, all of it. Fable will come back with a comprehensive report, supporting documents to dig into, a very broad picture. At this point, he can and still will make some assumptions and mistakes, but there’s a broad enough picture to have actionable information.
Getting information isn’t the hard part.
Building isn’t the hard part, either. You can send any of the AI agent models off now for a several hours long coding job.
The hard part is decisions. What to do, what to change or keep when the AI returns with info or a build, what strategies to run, what directions to go in. Macro decisions, micro decisions, lots of decisions.
Decisions are fatiguing.
And ALSO I wonder if some of that is tied to the emotional weight we put behind them?
When I disappear for a weekend into playing something like No Man’s Sky, I’m making decisions by the boatload—which type of economy to send my starship to next to make the best trades, how I want to build my base, if I’m going to scan all the new lifeforms on a planet or just name it Batman and move on. (True story.)
When we’re playing games, we can happily make hundreds of decisions per hour. We actually call it fun.
When we’re doing business—we freeze up. Decisions become much harder, we take a lot longer to deliberate, we suddenly don’t trust our own gut or our years of experience, etc. We might even know which way we should go, but we don’t jump. Or, we might know that either way could be fine, but we still don’t jump.
And we’re faced with hundreds of smaller decisions in AI work, because AI collapses down the parts that aren’t decisions to modes of pure decision making.
If you can tell the AI to build anything, and it can do it, then what falls to us is telling it what.
I’m trying to get better at this.
I have been notoriously bad at dithering for years on some things, not knowing the right way to do it.
Part of it’s perfectionism, part of it’s all the weight I’ve put on a given decision—do I launch a series with way A or way B, where I’ve put all the financial weight on that series succeeding?
But what if, instead of spending three months dithering on that, lots of brain cycles, and a lot of hours trying to figure it out, I’d already launched that series and it was already making bank—OR showing me what doesn’t work so I can make the next one make bank—and now I have brain cycles free to launch the next one, or next project, or whatever?
I know that’s easier said than done.
But I keep coming back to—it is easier than we think.
If you set decisions apart from all the weight we put on them. And realize that the decisions are actually the momentum driving us forward. Stopped decisions = lost momentum.
There’s a difference, too, between thinking deeply, driving toward the goal, and spinning wheels.
When I’m playing a game, I trust all the hours I’ve put into that game and that lore already. I know that if I do X thing, I’m likely going to get Y result. Or, I might spend an hour going over game lore to figure out what I want to do next if it’s a bigger thing, but I always have the goal in mind.
No, there aren’t real world stakes to this. And yes, game decisions can get fatiguing, too.
But I’m an expert decision maker when I’m playing a game. I trust myself and my judgment. There is ease and flow to that.
So how do I pull that into the real world?
I don’t think we want to totally set aside consequences—you do not want to spend thousands in real-world monopoly money scaling a brand new ad strategy without testing, for instance. That is a bad decision.
But then, I can see that is a bad decision.
I think a lot of bad decisions are implemented based on fear, not based on what our gut and experiences are actually telling us about them.
I think this is a skill issue, too—people in high stress, high attention jobs like pilots and surgeons rely on their skills and their training and experience in the decisions they’re making on the spot.
I think we can reach a similar state of function, too. We just haven’t been taught how.
Or rather, we’ve been taught a lot of bullshit instead of good decision making skills.
Artists and authors, I think, are at a disadvantage here—we’re trained that every word should be placed in just the right spot, or that every book must be a bestseller, or everything we make must do something extraordinary. We attach our self-worth to these things.
And it’s bullshit.
It’s not sound business practice.
You can’t test products you don’t have. And you can’t make products if you can’t make the decisions that will get you there. You can’t plan on data that doesn’t exist, and that data for how your books or shows or art will perform won’t exist until you push it out there.
You can’t iterate on something that doesn’t exist.
I think, with AI especially, we need to figure out ways to get ourselves in game mind, trusting our gut, building in some guardrails for sure, but rolling with the flow of it. Making it fun.
With building we definitely have to do that. I think with craft and business decisions, we can learn that, too.
Most decisions are not dire. Most have many paths to success. Failure isn’t usually a final failure. (I mean, unless you’re a wing suit base jumping influencer for a living, you are probably not playing the game on sudden death mode.)
I think we can do this. And I think this is one of the keys to making things easier, and supercharging, and another skill we need to learn to really co-work and co-create with AI systems. Because they do require that of us. Or rather, our businesses do, in the age of AI.
How to make these decisions quickly and easily, assess if they’re working, and regear if they’re not. How to do the research (send the AI to do the research) to gather what you need to make a decision if you’re not sure. How to find the people who can help you learn to make better decisions. How to relax into the process and trust yourself and what you know. And that if you don’t know, you’ll find out.
I think that’s the next level.
-Novae