Nikola Tesla Greatest Secret EXPOSED 2017 The One Thing He Said That NOBODY Mentions.

I understand this topic may be a little heady for you (smile), but your mind has no power. There is no power in your mind that you can focus outward by your thoughts or anything else in order to make something happen. None. The self-help gurus have sold you a bill of goods. Accordingly there is no power reservoir you can tap into purely from your own brain either. But, here we are living amidst a…

I'm definitely spinning my wheels wondering what it means for me if I don't have to do the work. If I can outsource mental tasks. If I can let Large Language Models take over more of the work I put into reading and writing.

There's a reason for that, thank goodness. I'm trying to get an idea on its feet by forcing myself to articulate what I know, what I think I know, and absolutely providing my doubts with as much oxygen as they'll consume. Which will go a long way to helping me sound like a sane professional adult. 

So.

What does it mean for me if I don't have to do the work? Do I gain a new ability while losing an old one? Am I making progress? Am I just straight up losing something? And if I outsource, if I had outsourced all the reading and writing into which I invested myself over the years, how would my life be informed? 

How would I be different?

Right now, how would I be different?

The image I came up with, by the way, to represent these thoughts was a massively complex hedge maze. Like the one at Blenheim Palace in England. Only bigger. Even more likely to get you lost. You literally walk into it... and you're lost.

Now, in this image I imagined, the person who's supposed navigate the maze is wearing a jet pack. Therefore they don't have to put any work at all into navigating the maze. They can just fly to the other end of the maze. Skip it completely.

So I guess the hundred million dollar question is What's the point of the maze?

What does it.

Do for me?

Similarly, what did my academic education and school experience do for me? How did the academics and experience impact the person I am today? 

Every book I read. All the papers I wrote.

All that math I crunched. 

All the history I was subjected to.

Chemistry. Statistics. Cultural Anthropology. Political Science. French???

For sure my university degrees and subsequent associate of arts are directly connected to my career today. 

But the rest of it?

Did any of that invested effort contribute to who I am today, my abilities, what and how I think?

Yeah.

Because the mechanism by which we access knowledge and solicit answers is changing in such a way as to call into question the very need to acquire knowledge, my gut is screaming at me that the acquisition of knowledge, processing it, analyzing it, restating it, explaining it, using it... is the point. Is how we're shaped through requirement and through choice.

In the end, we're shaped by what we experience and engage, by what we analyze and process, by how we analyze and process the fundamentals of human knowledge. And we do have a measure of control over that process that's fully ours from birth.

Wait. That doesn't make sense.

Well, it is ours from the time we can't possibly exercise control... to the time we're out of the house. Somewhere in there we start taking control of the process or it takes control of us. We are shaped by our own intent or we're shaped by random circumstance, whatever comes our way, good and terrible.

Think of it like purposefully navigating white water rapids as opposed to allowing those rapids to carry your raft where they will.

So.

My gut is screaming at me that what we do with knowledge, how we do with knowledge, shapes our minds as we grow into our bodies, as we learn how to successfully engage the world around us. 

All of that shapes us. Defines us in a foundational way as human beings. The difference, it seems to me, between prompting for answers and actually navigating our minds to answers is foundational to the definition of human being. Our brains, after all, are figuring-out machines. Literally. It's a difference that's definitely qualitative in nature, subjective of course, yet strikes at the very truth of who we are and how our experiences are shaped. It's the lens through which we interpret what's happening to and around us.

And so my gut's screaming at me that we outsource human mental ability at the risk of losing ourselves, of diminishing ourselves in a way that's hidden from our understanding if we never fire up our brains in the first place. 

The answer, then, to the question

"Why should I read Shakespeare" is this: 

"Because it will literally change you."

What we engage, analyze, process, create for ourselves literally changes us. Literally.

Changes us.

If I'm honest with myself, I would say it bugged me—bugs me still— that I couldn't think outside the box when I was a young, young adult.

Think outside the box?

Yeah. I wasn't actually aware of that except in school, any time we were asked to connect dots. For example, in one of my business classes, we were presented with a fictional case study in which a number of different companies were described and we were subsequently asked about the possibilities for synergy between the companies, how specifically they might work together, how they might cooperate in such a way as to produce outcomes greater than what was possible for each of the companies on their own.

Yeah.

I had no idea.

I had no.

Idea.

But inevitably others in class jumped that hurdle with ease, seeing the connections. They could see the specific ways in which the companies could work together. They intuited which parts of each company had overlapping interests and complimentary expertise. And, to my sense of time, they knew these things immediately. While I just sat there, mentally spinning my wheels.

I couldn't see it and yeah. That feeling still bugs me whenever I think about those kinds of business thought exercises.

So why...

Think of them?

Because later, I can't tell you exactly when, I got a touch of that ability. 

Now, if I had to guess, it's most likely a product of my experience as an editor. After all, the editing process involves juxtaposing not only images and sounds... but words and ideas. Themes. The experience strives to identify connections both obvious as well as all kinds of levels of metaphor. Sometimes, even, you might say... out of the box.

It's the connections piece of editing I'm focused on, though. A repetitive experience that, across years, sensitized me to a huge category of Things That Go Together. 

Don't know when it happened.

It just happened.

To the point where, when I grab a hold of some new piece of information that fits somewhere in the processes of production and post-production, that information automatically fills in blanks where I didn't realize there were blanks. Technology that enables us to operate faster, better, in ways we had not considered before.

In ways we had not.

Considered.

So instead of a generalized thought experiment on businesses, my thoughts are swirling around anything and everything than can help me, can help everyone I know, can help every project I touch wherever it is I come into contact with those projects. The new information simply flows into these spaces where suddenly there's synergy between the tech, the projects, and our processes.

So.

Much as I might feel a little frustrated on behalf of young adult me, I feel absolutely fantastic about the me today whose brain's actually in gear these days.

Not just spinning its wheels.