Build Now

You open Twitter, it's there. Same for LinkedIn, heck even my conversations with my colleagues at work. Everyone is talking about it. And it forces me to think. I have never felt like this before. Every night I go to sleep, I think I am getting behind. Someone drops a new toy, a better model is released, it's all too fast. My intuition tells me that this might be the best time we can have to build something. Anything we wanted. Anything we dreamt of. But We have to start now.

why now?

But Why now? Why not 4 months down the line? Or a year later? The "Now" part implies urgency. As if this full-filling but formidable task can not be pushed any later. What could possibly be the cause of this urgency?

If you think yourself as builder, I believe that you are constantly on the outlook for the next biggest idea. Big ideas are indicators of a tectonic shift, a paradigm change. Advent of computers -> the internet -> smartphones -> (now what?). I think we are seeing a much larger paradigm shift right now. And as much as I hate riding a trend bandwagon, you know probably know what I am about say- "AI" [1]. It might just be the biggest urgency of our lifetime and you have an extreme advantage.

I have a thing for reading good blogs. More so the one on the intersection of tech and startups. Read this or this to get a sense of the urgency I am referring to. They are good with words and I am not there yet to drive home the point. But in short, if and when you realize that whatever problem you are currently working on is not making you jump out of the bed in the morning - daily - in excitement, you should change something about it. Figure out what excites you and take a leap of faith. It's true - "Life is not a dress rehearsal", make it count.

Information Asymmetry

All the self-made people we know became that way by some leverage. A leverage is created by an asymmetry. And we are smack-dab in the middle of probably one of the biggest asymmetry of our lifetime - AI. If you observe around you, there is clearly an information asymmetry right now. The information trickles down, creating filters. There are filters on who will be able to get the leverage -

between people who know about the emergence of AI and those who don't
those who believe it and those who don't
those who are building and those who are watching from the sidelines

Those who don't know about this are emotionally safe. For now atleast. We will not focus on them for now. Those who know about it but don't believe it are placing a bet against it. Odds are stacked heavily against them. But if they are right, they will be able to take a deep sip from a very tall glass of "I told you so". Not much else.

Now we come to the most interesting filtered group. Those who know about it and believe it. The optimists.

The question is, do you building something or not?

Watching from sidelines could be fun. You get to see all the toys everyone is building. You can write a linkedin post about it - overhyping, overanalyzing. Joking with your buddies how your jobs might not be safe because chatGPT writes better code than you. You ask a bot to write you a poem or create a painting so that you can impress your crush. But you don't get your hands dirty. You have probably the biggest lever ever you will ever get in your lifetime. And you have decided to play snooker with it. Impressing people who are just behind you in this information asymmetry game.

Being optimist is fun. But it's not enough. You need to be a builder. You need to build something. You need to build something to get rewarded for your optimism.

The last generation of builders

Optimism is good. But paranoid optimism is better. It shows you things that others optimists won't see. If you squint your eyes hard enough you will realize you only have a sliver of opportunity before this assymetry is gone.

This world is a chaotic place but every asymmetry has to be balanced out. And this one will be too. You have a measurable period of time until the world shifts. The leverage would go away. The world will move to those who can think from those who build. Building will be a menial task not worthy of a human when a bot can do it in a fraction of a second and dare I say better. We might be the last generation of builders. But the one setup for success in the best way possible. You can iterate as speeds never seen before. You can validate your ideas at dirt cheap costs. This period of leverage and information asymmetry is your best bet to build something. Take the leap of faith. It's time for you give it everything you have - for all those times you have said that you feel a builder at heart. Because this very well might be your last time to be a builder in a world where everyone else will by default by the virtue of the tools we will create. So to you I say - build now.

References

If you haven't heard about it yet, there are two possibilties. Either you are not a builder, in that case, this thing should not bother you. If anything your life is going to be better off of it. But if you are a builder, you are an unfortunate one. Who has surrounded themselves with things or sources that subtract from them. Take away from them.