Ambition's Gravity

Riding the Technology Sandworm

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Wednesday!

There’s something electric happening. Optimism is spreading. People are doing big things. And you can, too.

Let’s get to it.

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Ambition’s Gravity

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

Aside from the doomers who believe that AI will kill us all and the techno-utopians who believe it will solve all of our problems, there are three main ways that people seem to be thinking about AI. 

At one extreme, you might fear that AI will take your job. Certainly, you’ve read as much in the press, and it does seem to be getting better and better at the things you’re paid to do. On this extreme, AI is scary. 

In the middle, you might feel AI FOMO, feel that you need to “learn AI” or “leverage AI” because everyone else is doing it and you don’t want to miss out. From this position, AI is overwhelming: how can you ever keep up? 

A third, far more productive approach is to first determine what you uniquely want to accomplish with your life, and then view everything, including AI, through the lens of whether it helps you accomplish your goal. From this perspective, AI is a tool and you are the one who wields. 

You can wait for the Sandworm to swallow you whole or set a thumper, grab your hooks, and ride it. 

Would a practically free army of near-genius employees help you accomplish the one thing you want to accomplish? Is GPT-4 or Claude 3 or Gemini 1.5 Pro or Mistral Lage better at what you need it to do? Or is each better at one particular thing you need them to do? Oh! Look, this new model just dropped and it seems like it solves exactly the thing I’m looking to solve. I’ll hire that one, too. 

It’s more than just AI, though. We are lucky enough to be alive in the most incredible time in human history. Beyond AI, people are making rapid progress across a number of fields at the same time: space, manufacturing, robotics, energy, bio, crypto. 

All that progress can be overwhelming or empowering, and which of those two it is is entirely up to you. 

I’m here to tell you: you can simply decide to do big things. 

And I’m here to argue that you should spend the time to figure out the most ambitious thing you could dream of doing with your one wild and precious life. 

When you name your ambition, it seems that the world conspires to help you achieve it, because you become more aware of all the tools at your disposal. 

In naming your ambition, name something big, something you can uniquely achieve.

You’re lucky enough to be alive at a time when the world is building new, more powerful tools to help you achieve your goal at a faster clip than it ever has. 

Let me get more specific, with something small that I have experienced so many times that I know it to be true. 

I read in two modes: aimlessly or with a goal. 

When I’m reading aimlessly, I simply enjoy the words and the stories. Maybe I learn something that influences my thinking, or gives me an idea for an essay, or tucks away into my subconscious to surface when the time is right. But it’s a form of entertainment. It’s a passive thing. 

Reading with a goal is a different experience altogether. When I have an idea for an essay in mind, useful nuggets jump off the page. Not just the page. In everything I watch, listen to, see, in every conversation I have, every daydream, every otherwise-mindless Twitter scroll, some relevant tidbit leaps out. 

Every experience becomes more active when I have a goal in mind, I become more active. More aware.   

Take this essay. 

I had the idea for the essay on Saturday morning, then I wrote a few of the paragraphs you just read, then I scrolled Twitter as a form of plausibly productive procrastination. Within one minute, I kid you not, I saw three highly relevant tweets. 

Anton, Beff, and Patrick

In the very first paragraph of Self-Reliance, Emerson writes: 

“To believe our own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.”

I mean, come on. 

I realize now that I might be talking about what some call *~manifestation~*. So be it. I’ve come to believe that woo woo has a basis in reality; I’ve lived this particular woo woo in my writing process.  

This is its mechanism: name your aim, and you will be more aware of the things that might help you achieve it. It’s that simple, like directed Baader-Meinhof. No magic required. 

Now, we’re talking about an essay here. Small potatoes. But it works at more consequential scales, too. 

When you have an idea for a product you want to build, for a community you want to form, for anything you really and truly want to make exist in the world, when you can’t stop thinking about making it exist, the tools you’ll need start appearing. New technologies, research, even people. The world becomes a menu. 

It may even work better the more consequential the scale, if you need others to join you on your quest. There’s a simple reason for that, too. 

Ambition is like mass. The more you have, the stronger your gravitational pull. 

Read any account of working at SpaceX or talk to anyone who’s worked there. It sounds brutally hard. And yet, SpaceX is one of the most highly sought after employers in the world, in large part because of Elon’s ambition to take humans off this world. Only one group of people will be the first to make humans multiplanetary. 

Those who met him still speak of Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field, nearly thirteen years after his death. His ambition warped the fabric of reality around his goals. 

Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonymously wrote that individuals could rebuild the financial system with their computers, and sixteen years later, millions have rallied to the leaderless cause.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the rumors of Sam Altman’s $7 trillion fundraise to build the chips to power AGI has made recruiting at OpenAI even easier. 

For a budding example, study what’s happening in El Segundo. A group of twenty-somethings are telling anyone who will listen that it’s possible to do seemingly impossible things, like control the weather or turn nuclear into hydrocarbons, and people are starting to believe. Their ambition attracted young engineers from around the country to fly out to California for a Defense Tech Hackathon, for no pay and on their own dime. 

It’s no surprise that Ernest Shackleton’s ad, real or not, has resonated through generations. 

In each example, there’s a call: you can do big things. And there’s an admonition: you must do the biggest thing you can do with your one shot. 

But what to work on? What’s the biggest thing you can do with your one shot? 

That’s a question only you can answer, based on your talents and your own definition of “big.” There’s no right answer. You don’t have to cure cancer. I write a free newsletter. 

One way to start thinking about it is by asking yourself what you would do if you had all the resources in the world, because increasingly, you will. 

Much is made of the fact that a common person today consumes products that kings and queens of old could never have imagined – iPhones, televisions, air conditioners, cars, medicine, airplanes. 

What’s less well-appreciated is that the common person today has access to tools with which to create that industrialists and CEOs of old couldn’t have fathomed, and that the toolkit is expanding every single day.

With a big ambition in mind, it’s like you have 8 billion people – and soon countless more digital ones – working to provide you with exactly what you need to do the thing you were put on this earth to do. You have the world’s best entrepreneurs, scientists, and researchers working to build things that make your thing cheaper and more powerful. Their outputs become your inputs. What an unbelievable gift. 

In this direct way - outputs becoming inputs – and in a less tangible but equally impactful way, ambition is contagious. 

SpaceX was the four-minute mile for deep tech. It inspired (and trained) a generation of founders to go build things harder than they previously thought possible. That generation is inspiring a new generation. Elon memed the current deep tech explosion into existence, and the meme is spreading. 

Optimism shapes reality, and it sets off a chain reaction. It bounces into people, unleashing their energy and firing their own optimism into the next person to unleash more energy and more optimism. 

This reaction is underway now. You can feel it. There’s been a vibe shift. 

I’m here to tell you that you can, even must, take part. 

If you have some time today, this weekend, or in the coming weeks, spend some of it thinking through what it is you want to do. Name it, give it a shape and weight. 

I’m not saying you need to awaken AGI or commercialize fusion. I write a free newsletter, who am I to tell you what big means for you?

As Isaac Asimov wrote half a century ago: 

Is the individual person wise enough to know what he or she can best do? —Why not? Who else can know? And what can a person do best except that which he or she wants to do most? 

What I can tell you is that you have the agency to do something bigger than you think possible. You can simply decide to do it, and the world will bend itself to help you. 

A couple of weeks ago, I spent time in San Francisco, a place where you can practically see ambition’s chain reaction with your own eyes. I was talking to a founder about a challenge I was thinking through, and after half a second of thought, she told me, essentially: “You need to go much bigger.”

That sparked something in me, changed the way I approach the world. It gave me new confidence and raised my ambition. As I’ve pursued that ambition over the past couple of weeks, everything I’ve written about in this piece started happening. I’ve noticed the right tools materialize, pulled co-conspirators I have no business co-conspiring with into my orbit, and felt more energized than I have in a long time. We’ll see what happens, but it feels good. 

In the meantime, I’m passing that spark on to you. 

Name your ambition. Make it big, something worthy of your unique talents. Approach the chaos of change with the clarity of purpose. Don’t let the machines take your job; put them to work for you. 

You only live once, and you get to live in the most magical time.

So tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

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Thanks to Dan and Claude 3 for editing!

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That’s all for today! We’ll be back in your inbox on Friday with a Weekly Dose.

Thanks for reading,

Packy