Théo Louvel

What advice would you give someone who had your exact life — same constraints, same resources? I keep a bust of Beethoven at home, a sculpture my mother made when she was younger. Sometimes, when I feel stuck, I place him on the table, facing the sofa. Then I talk to him as if he were me, trying to force some clarity onto him about his current situation.

Things get surprisingly clearer when they're not about you anymore.

PS: I felt it was a weird thing to do for a while. I mentioned it to someone, who told me Gestalt therapy uses similar methods. It still feels weird, though.

Henry Ford famously said "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't — you're right". This has become somewhat of a motivational cliché, and is often waved as an encouragement to believe in yourself no matter what.

This is how I used to understand it, anyways.

Rereading Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker reminded me of it. It got me thinking that Ford's quote has more to do with the intuitive knowledge we develop of ourselves, of our strengths and weaknesses.

Drucker urges us to learn about them through feedback analysis. But we also need to act upon this knowledge by picking the work that calls upon our strengths and actively avoiding the rest.

Whatever Ford actually meant by that, I’ve come to think this is a more useful interpretation for it.

I mostly write with a fountain pen. It slows me down and helps me think. Every now and then, expectedly, it runs out of ink while I'm writing. And every time, I catch myself thinking: "Not now". Almost feels personal.

Running out of ink mid-sentence is inconvenient for sure, but when else could it happen? It's revealing how compelled we are to place ourselves at the center of the story, antagonizing the rest of the world.

Things just happen. Chances are, they have nothing to do with you. You can keep writing the same story over and over again, or you can start editing.

For a while now, I've been thinking about how LLMs push us to question our questions, thus improving our thinking. We used to search the web by stringing together a query composed of keywords (what I like to call hashtag thinking) to get a list of sorted results. We sort of understood the role of context, but were only able to express it through keywords.

With LLMs though, articulating ideas together matter just as much as the ideas themselves. Framing the problem influences the outcome. This open form allows us to include all relevant parts of a problem, not just a list of related keywords, and express the relationships between them.

I can't help but notice how the conversational nature of those tools pushes us to refine and rephrase further, propelling us into a virtuous feedback loop that ends up making us better problem solvers at the end of the day... I have this romantic belief that a well-defined problem is indistinguishable from the solution, as having no more questions to ask is equivalent to having turned over every stone.

A third way LLMs enhance our thinking is by distancing ourselves from our ideas, enabling us to become more of a critic, curating the good ones and throwing out bad apples. As Leslie Lamport puts it, "writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking is." It's hard to throw away bad ideas when you've tied them to your identity. Externalizing them helps untie this Gordian knot.

Those mental tools aren't exactly news, though, and neither is the need to improve our thinking by questioning our questions and beliefs altogether: The Socratic method has been around for a while. But when was the last time we came up with a tool enabling so many people to simultaneously work on asking better questions?

In my view, those three factors come together to produce somewhat of a Lollapalooza effect (the convergence of multiple factors that multiply each other to produce a result much greater than any of them would have produced individually). I can't help but think this will affect the future in many ways, and I'm curious to see what society will look like 20 years from now if we keep working on those systems.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” ― Marshall McLuhan

What will you ask?

PS: There's a gigantic blindspot in this analysis. Some people will focus more on the outcome and taking it for the absolute truth, leading to compounding ignorance, stupidity and surface-level thinking. The remaining question is what will the majority do, and how we can shape those tools to nudge users in the right direction.

"Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible — one-way doors — and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don't like what you see on the other side, you can't get back to where you were before. We can call those type-1 decisions. But most decisions aren't like that — they are changeable, reversible — they're two-way doors. If you've made a suboptimal type-2 decision, you don't have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type-2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgement individuals or small groups. As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight type-1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many type-2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We'll have to figure out how to fight that tendency." — Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Shareholder Letter, 2015

Not every decision is as permanent as crossing the Rubicon. Can you spot some reversible decisions around you — choices you could treat as hypotheses instead of commitments?

"If you're wrong, you will die. But most companies don't die because they are wrong; most die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is in standing still." — Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive

All teams hit analysis paralysis at some point. Getting out should be your number one priority. While you wait and lose momentum, time runs out and cash burns. Inaction tends to cost more than mistakes.

Go make mistakes.

PS: If you need one more minute of procrastination, listen to Willem Dafoe talk about trying to fail here.