In Motion

I think it starts with creation. Not the type of creation that builds houses out of wood though. Maybe I mean innovation, taking what was before to make something novel. I mean burning down the house, taking the ashes and building a spaceship. Same atoms, different structure.

So how do I become an innovator? Well for one you have to have a half decent understanding of what was, is and could be, with the latter being the most important.

• Those who are experts of the past are historians.
• Those who are participating in today (that is the average of the bell curve of time where the mean equals the present tech) are the experts of yesterday's future.
• Those who make tomorrow must be futurists.

So what will my unique combination be? Well I think it starts with having a strong understanding of the forefront of technology and extends into the ideation of its applications. How? Two things: talking and consuming specifically and strategically.

• I must talk with the right people that know more than me. Always being the dumbest in the room is good if you now are the smartest in the previous room. No secret is ever yelled in public, for if it was it wouldn't be a secret.
• I must consume the most up to date information strategically. This can be seen as being the experts of yesterday's future.

Together this forms a simple dichotomy that I can understand.

Consume

How good ideas looked bad yesterday. This is the case study sense. I like Peter Thiel's framework of secrets for approaching the contrarian archetype. Find truths that were widely disputed, yet time proved to be true.

But finding secrets requires knowing where to look. My consumption strategy is built around three vectors:

• Understanding the past (how innovation actually happened).
• Mapping the present (what's changing now).
• Developing peripheral vision (adjacent fields that inform my thinking).

The historical lens comes from deep dives - Acquired's multi-hour breakdowns of how companies really built their moats, or working through Zero to One's framework for monopoly thinking. These aren't just origin stories. They're pattern recognition exercises. When I'm reading about vertical AI applications, I'm looking for the same structural moves that worked before, applied to new territory. The Contrary Research piece on the Vertical AI Playbook clicked because it mapped old SaaS go-to-market wisdom onto new infrastructure. That's the game: recognizing when yesterday's playbook applies to tomorrow's market.

The present demands real-time synthesis. I track Stratechery for market analysis, Menlo's State of GenAI reports for institutional perspectives, and academic papers on agentic memory systems to understand what's technically possible versus what's just narrative. The newsletter diet (TLDR for signal, The Hustle for market moves, Dense Discovery for design thinking) keeps me calibrated to what practitioners are actually building. When you're working on something like Middle Ground, stakeholder tracking with AI, you need to know both what the technology enables and what users will actually tolerate from a UX perspective.

But the most valuable consumption is orthogonal. LessWrong and The Codex taught me how to think about epistemology and forecasting. Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow rewired how I evaluate founder decision-making. Norman's Design of Everyday Things changed how I look at product interfaces. These aren't "startup books." They're mental models from other domains that give you an edge when everyone else is reading the same YC batch of advice. The future belongs to people who can synthesize across boundaries, who see the AI researcher's insight that unlocks a product insight, or the design principle that explains why a go-to-market strategy will fail. That's what I'm consuming for: the ability to draw connections nobody else sees yet.

Create

But ideas and unpopular truths are only valuable if you write them down, if you use them to create. So create. Creation must at a minimum involve the synthesis of what you've consumed and who you've talked to into something tangible. A memo. A prototype. A thesis. A company.

The worst thing you can do is hoard insights. They decay faster than you think. In the same way you don't dump your whole code base into a context window, you don't store raw notes in working memory. What felt like an edge last month is table stakes today. The only way to know if you actually understand something is to articulate it clearly enough that someone else can build on it.

This is where most people fail. They consume endlessly, network thoughtfully, but never close the loop. They mistake preparation for progress. But creation is the forcing function that reveals what you actually understand versus what you just think sounds smart.

Here's the test:

if: can you explain your insight to three different people
  and have all three understand it differently but correctly = TRUE
  return: you've created something valuable
  else: you haven't consumed or synthesized deeply enough.

The Motion

Here's what separates futurists from historians: historians stay still and watch the world move past them. They consume, they analyze, they synthesize - and then they stop. They become experts on a moment that's already gone. The futurist does something different. They consume, synthesize, create, share, and then immediately start again before the cycle gets stale.

Innovation isn't a credential you earn, it's a velocity you maintain. The loop matters more than the lap. I've watched people with encyclopedic knowledge get lapped by others who read half as much but ship twice as fast. The difference isn't intelligence - it's motion. Each time you complete the cycle, you internalize something new. Each time you stop, you start crystallizing into yesterday's expert.

This is why your insights have a half-life. Why that brilliant observation from your conversation last week feels less sharp today. The decay isn't a bug, it's a forcing function. Write it down. Build something with it. Share it before it becomes common knowledge. If you wait for perfect understanding, you're not being careful. Default towards action. Habits compound exponentially, but only if you're in motion.

The cycle compounds in another way too. Every time you create and share, you expand your luck surface area. The next conversation, the next insight, the next opportunity - they find people who are visibly in motion. Writing online, experimenting in public, showing up consistently in places with high density of talent. Luck isn't random. It's a derivative of smart work, done repeatedly, where others can see it.

So stay in motion. Read to be inspired. Talk to be challenged. Write to inspire. Build to prove you understand. The spaceship doesn't build itself. But the ashes are everywhere if you know where to look.