July 16th Newsletter
Thought for the Week: We are in extreme weather season, hot and stormy where I live, and I’ve felt a little constricted by having to stay inside when I don’t want to. Sometimes the right thing to do is just relax and do nothing. Let go and go with the flow.
I don’t think the United States is any longer a nation that can solve problems and when a nation stops being able to solve problems, I don’t know how you’re supposed to move forward together.
In multiple places seemingly every month, lives and property are being swept away in enormous “unprecedented” floods.
The answers from our leadership and our citizens are
“thoughts and prayers” aka throwing our arms up and shrugging
cutting funding for the National Weather Service and NOAA aka making the problem worse
offering as possible causes “weather manipulation”, aka conspiracy theories
It all sounds so familiar to the ongoing tragedy that has existed nearly every year of my entire life, mass school shootings.
If all you have to offer to a solvable problem is shrugs, worsening the problem, or conspiracy theories, you’re done. Cooked. It’s over.
The problem is that nearly half of the United States is so mind baked from reactionary politics, the politics of getting mad online and at the TV, that we are totally unable to do anything collectively.
Let’s unplug America and start again.
My daughter got a bicycle this week, she’s 3, just turned 3 actually. She has been campaigning for a bicycle off and on for 6 months. She’s a big kid, 99th percentile on height, weight, and head size (room for brains!) and she’s been able to climb on a bike in the store for months and make it move.
I decided to hold off on getting the bicycle until she could really go on her tricycle and since she’s turned into a tricycle rocket, I decided now was the time to pull the trigger.
So on Sunday, she hops on her bicycle and wants to go zooming down the road.
First, bicycling is hard if you don’t have the muscles developed to do it, so despite her efforts, it was slow.
Second, the positioning and holding of the handlebars is a new skill.
Third, our road is a little pitched because of the insane volume of water that comes down our street every time it rains and the pitch helps to keep the water in the ditches (well, mostly) instead of in the street.
So, as my beautiful child starts to wobble down the road, I was thrilled to be watching her and wasn’t paying attention to these factors.
She wobbles to one side, the bike turns over (it hadn’t occurred to me that training wheel bikes turn over). She spills off the bike and goes face first into the ditch water.
Thankfully, she was fine, minor scratches and very dirty from the water splashing up.
She was heartbroken and scared. We shared a long hug on the street to soothe her (and me, if I’m keeping it real).
I wasn’t sure what would happen next.
The kid grabs the bike and hops right back on it and wants to go some more. This time with a little dad assistance to help steer until she got more comfortable.
Look, I’ll be proud of my daughter because she is my daughter.
But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t beaming with pride watching her fight to learn this thing she wanted to learn. She was scared, of course, she didn’t want to fall again. But she didn’t give up.
I think this is absolutely the most important skill to learn.
It took me a long time to get really comfortable with failure.
I’ve failed a lot!
There’s no path to learning things you want to learn that doesn’t involve failing.
Kids need to fail, adults need to fail, we all need to fail.
If we’re not failing, we’re not trying hard enough things.
I don’t mean this to be some kind of achievement post, I think all human life has value regardless of what you achieve.
But whether you’re trying to learn to ride a bike, build an app, fix your house, whatever, the path to success runs through failure.
Failure is the beginning of success, not the end of it.
If you’re afraid of failing, you’ll never learn anything.
My biggest failures were…
failing out of grad school the first time
failing to get married earlier
failing to have kids earlier
failing to buy a house when it was cheaper
I’m going to fail a lot more. It happens. Oh well, get on with it.
I hope I can instill in my daughter that failure is good. Failing is not only okay, it’s the right thing to do.
Something for you to try….
If you haven’t heard of “vibe coding”, it’s slang for using AI to build applications without actually knowing how to code. You tell the AI with text what you want, it becomes the coder.
You should give it a shot. There’s a learning curve to it so it may take some iterating before you get how to do it.
A lesson I’ve learned is to go slow. Don’t say “build me an app that does this and this and this”. Build on incremental steps with each prompt. Sometimes doing too much at one time confuses the AI.
If you don’t know what to do, ask the AI what a good process would be and follow that. Ask it to break it down into incremental steps.
The best app is going to be something you know you could use either for work or personal. One guy I heard was trying to build a payments system for his church, this is a solid idea.
Send me a link with what you build, I’d love to test it.
I will say that these AI built apps can be a little limited. If you want to scale it into a business, you will definitely need to hire someone to rebuild and scale functionality. However, you can get pretty far with just the AI.
Happy coding!