Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI.
I think there are two ways to use AI. You can just go off the deep end and start building a crazy amount of things. While it can be fun with your dozens of Claude and ChatGPT and agents and all that, most of it will be abandoned and not get used by anyone in the long term. And this is where you start getting things like AI slop and psychosis and all the things that people are starting to hate about AI generated anything.
And the other way is to take a step back and decide that okay, in the previous world, I would have had to spend all this time just to take the first step. Now with AI, I can take that first step much faster and actually get back to the real problem.
I have seen way too many startup founders delude themselves into building more and more for months without a single conversation with a real user. The builders and the technical people really struggle with this. If all you know is how to build, and you just use AI as an excuse to keep building more and more and more, you are just procrastinating and avoiding reality. And the thing is that you were probably procrastinating before AI as well. And now it has just become much more obvious when you do it with AI.
What is already easy for everyone will not create any lasting value for you. I don’t think building a successful startup has gotten any easier with AI. It’s just that certain parts of it have gotten faster. I don’t think speed of coding or having the right landing page copy or the right deck or presentation was ever the bottleneck in getting your startup off the ground, anyways.
There are so many failed startups and founders who spend so much time building something that didn’t work out. You will almost always hear that even before the AI era, they built way too much and they built too many irrelevant things. Instead of really being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not.
And the things that make a startup work, that make anything work, have always been hard and continue to be hard today.
What is hard are things like:
- Taking real risk with your life
- Putting your name on something publicly
- Getting rejected to your face over and over again
- Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you
- Being willing to let other people down
- Being willing to see your friends and your network progress ahead in life while it seems like you are getting stuck
Did AI make any of these easier? I don’t think so.
I know you want to use AI as an escape. It is so tempting. You get to sit in your bubble and imagine everything and see it come to life and your agent buddy will keep cheering you on while you get nothing done with your life. And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.
Don’t lose sight of what is real. Figure out why you were put on this earth. What do you need to do with your life? What kind of impact do you want to create? What are the projects that need you the most? What are you naturally good at? What can you do that other people will want?
I think in the AI era, the only delta left will be in relentlessly chasing the truth. And the only way to get it is to punch yourself in the face with reality again and again.