I was talking to a friend today. She has a kid who is 11. The kid has to go through a rigorous set of state-sanctioned exams that will determine his future education, career progression, and I suppose retirement community.
“It’s crazy!” my friend said. “Who even knows what will happen in the future?”
I have no kids and am generally clueless about what’s going on in the world. “Huh? Future? What are you talking about?”
“AI!” she said. “What will kids have to learn? How will that even look?”
I read an article by Paul Graham a couple weeks ago. I’ve written about Graham before in these emails. In a nutshell:
Graham is a kind of modern-day renaissance man — a painter, computer programmer, businessman, and investor. This last one is what he’s best known for.
Graham cofounded Y Combinator, the early-stage investing firm behind companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Twitch, Instacart, Reddit. Thanks to his stake in these companies, Graham is worth north of $2.5 billion.
Along with his many other activities, Graham also writes interesting online essays. He wrote a new one a few weeks ago.
In the future, predicts Graham, not many people will be able to write because AI has made it unnecessary.
Is that bad? In Graham’s words:
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Yes, it’s bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can’t make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:
“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
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Is Graham right about writing?
I don’t know. I have heard said that 2,500 years ago, smart people were making the same argument AGAINST writing, saying that it weakens critical thought and makes the mind flabby.
I can only report my personal results, today, in 2024.
Writing, at least in my case, causes me to think more and make distinctions I wouldn’t make otherwise. Plus, I even find it kind of enjoyable. And there’s no doubt that thanks to writing, I’ve achieved a level of influence I could never have achieved otherwise.
I am telling you this because I’m finally ready — with two days’ delay — to start rolling out my new Daily Email Habit service.
A key idea behind Daily Email Habit is that there’s value in writing.
And so this service is designed to help you start and stick with the habit of writing a daily email. A big part of how it does this is by giving you a new constraint each day, and narrowing the scope of what to write about.
At the same time, Daily Email Habit is designed NOT to narrow the scope so much that you end up filling out a template. There’s value in writing, and it’s something you cannot get by outsourcing your daily email to a template — or to AI.
I will start rolling out Daily Email Habit tomorrow.
If you’ve already written me to express interest in this new service, there’s nothing more you need to do.
But if you haven’t written me yet, and Daily Email Habit sounds like it might be useful to you, then write me and tell me what you like about this service. I will then add you to the priority list, so have a chance to try out Daily Email Habit sooner rather than later.