The Flywheel Effect of Structured Learning
Why deliberate learning compounds differently from everything else we consume.
The journal · Theme
Taste & creative judgment
Judgment as the work itself, and taste as the thing that stops confident mediocrity. 24 essays, newest first.
Option A is the obvious answer and Option B is its mirror. The work worth paying for questions the brief itself, and AI is making A and B nearly free.
Intelligence is getting cheap to deploy. Deciding what to spend it on becomes the new discipline of leadership, as capital allocation once was.
Bradbury, Proust and a sleepless night. AI should take the friction out of production and leave the hard part, working out what the thing should be.
Reading Bank of Singapore's longevity report. AI pushes human value to the judgment-heavy ends of work, which turns experienced people from a cost into a scarce asset.
My Conversation with Ram: Why "I Am the Loop" Changed How I Work with AI
Notes from my podcast conversation with Ram, built around one idea: I am the loop, not the human in the loop.
Work is moving to a 40/20/40 split, with judgment at both ends and the machine in the middle. Feeling like the bottleneck is correct: you are what stops confident mediocrity.
Thom Yorke Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud. The Creative Industry Should Be Taking Notes.
Thom Yorke's Ivors speech, read through Radiohead's catalogue. The industry's risk-averse habits fail young talent who should be experimenting and veterans whose late work it undervalues.
Is This Really Creative? What a talk at Campaign360 taught me about the wrong question.
Every new tool has made creativity move rather than vanish. AI collapses the gap between imagining a thing and making it, so the value shifts to meaning.
My recent AI video moved like a shark, but sounded like a goldfish.
On presence, production, and the day I became a Foley artist.
Oh, The Places We Will Go: Why I Might Be Wrong About AI and Young Talent
I worried AI would kill creative apprenticeship. I now think the advantage lies in pairing AI-native young talent with veterans who have calibrated judgment.
AI Didn’t Kill Cinematography. It Made It Mandatory.
Generated footage looks impressive and feels flat. Camera movement, lens logic and color continuity now have to be specified up front, which makes the cinematographer's thinking essential.
If AI Becomes a Verb, What Kind of Verb Will It Be?
AI will become a verb. Whether it ends up a utility verb, a cultural verb or a creative verb decides whether speed, visibility or judgment wins.
AI only seems human because work culture taught us to prize fluency and speed over judgment. The real choice is between a cheap version of humanity and the full one.
Bad Work Is Fine. Public Bad Work Is Not.
Slop isn't new. What's new is that first drafts now go straight to the public, and taste depends on knowing what to keep in the drawer.
Teach Them What Good Looks Like
A question at a Google workshop: how do juniors build judgment without thirty years of experience? Teach them standards, because most organizations only teach them metrics.
Ghosts in My Notebooks, 0 to 1 thinking, and how I have moved past these.
Most of my ideas used to die as fragments in notebooks. Now I use AI to push each one far enough to judge whether it deserves to live.
We Gave Everyone the Same Tools.
Now Everything Tastes Like Beige. Creativity was never about the tools.
When Did “Good Enough” Become Good Enough?
A reflection on AI, apathy, and the quiet collapse of creative standards
The next creative reset must be emotional, not just operational.
Artificial Intelligence Gave Us Answers. Applied Intelligence Tells Us Which Ones Matter.
In a world flooded with outputs, the thing that matters is knowing what’s worth acting on.
What Miles Davis, Sir John Hegarty, and the Epilogue Economy All Know About Creative Maturity
Miles Davis said it takes a long time to sound like yourself. Creative voice and confidence come with age, and people over 50 are the most underused leadership asset in the business.
The Game We Think We’re Playing: AI, Creativity, and the Illusion of Control
“If you want to get the English interested in a war, you have to tell them it’s a game”. - Orwell
Wabi-Sabi in the Age of AI Perfection
AI's polished outputs are predictions, not truths. Japanese aesthetics and years behind a camera suggest the flaws are where the meaning gets made.