Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Start at the bottom and work your way up is the general plan.
Lets pause and look at this dude standing at the top of the mountain.
Cool dude. Look at him climbing a mountain in jeans and a jacket.
Here is a question I’ve been thinking about this week.
Are we overindexing on the productivity side of AI and underindexing the purpose/creativity/fulfilment side?
So much of AI is like money, jobs, efficiency, are we going to die? robots, automation, productivity, time.
Its all very industrial revolution, its all very scientific and its all a bit lab-ratty for me. I don’t buy that we will ever live in this perfectly productive society and in fact that would suck. For every timesheet management system we need Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Suits. For every Salesforce conference we need a Quidditch conference.
That’s why I’ve been turning to Abraham Maslow this week, an American psychologist who thought about why humans are motivated. Wikipedia had this to say about him.
Maslow had an optimistic and humanistic view of humanity. He regarded people's innate drive towards self-actualization beneficial to society as a whole. In Maslow's view, once people's basic needs were met, they were free to explore their abilities and strive to further develop those innate abilities.
The way I think society conditions you is that the above sentence sounds cool but it is what you do in retirement, or “one day.” You can’t be “creative” or “fulfilled” now! You have bills to pay! You have a boss, obligations, you have 100 things that get in the way of the top of that pyramid.
But it turns into a lot of this type of talking.
One day I will write a book
One day I will learn to paint
One day I will learn pottery
One day I will learn photography
One day I will learn to run, go hiking, go rock climbing
One day I will do what I like
For me getting cancer at age 33, I stopped taking old mate “one day” for granted. I started trying to think about what it was I even wanted to do one day and then started working backwards from how I could start doing it today.
That’s why this week has been epic for me, because a “one day” goal of mine was to build a game. I’ve wanted to build a game for 10 years. I tried lots of ideas but none of them stuck and I was forever in prototype land.
Now I think I’m a combination of Edison (trying things 1000 times) and Newton (If I succeeded its only because I stand on the shoulders of giants, or in my case AI) but finally, I’ve dragged a one-day thing into the present day.
I built the freaken game. Check out the website here.
Heck yeah. Taste that retirement. Taste that one-day.
The game is like Scrabble, except you kill things.
It’s got sound, it’s got enemies, it’s got animations, I have been so fulfilled, it has been so much fun.
It’s going to go live on the Steam store soon and it’s honestly something I never thought I would actually do. I literally thought I would get to game making when I retire, but AI has changed everything. It’s meant I was able to build this thing all by myself.
And it’s just made me think, maybe this is what AI is about? Maybe it isn’t just about productivity and taking meeting minutes and writing PowerPoint presentations? Maybe its deeper than all of this. Maybe its about making the thing you thought you would do “one day”.
I view it as an invitation, AI asks you, what do you want to do? What makes you happy? And if you really want it, you keep trying and it helps bring things that you never thought you would have done into today.
This has been a build up for me
I think the game represents an arc of creativity that AI has unlocked in me. I get so happy because now I go around the internet with all these tools that I designed just for what I want.
I have readerprint that gives me great book recommendations.
I’ve got a site for taking down ideas/quotes/things I learnt in the day.
I’ve got blogwritingtoolkit.com which allows me to make blog posts really quick.
And as mentioned last week, we have now have a bunch of products at work.
Contract maker
Timesheet system
Project management system
Coding Agents
AI slide maker
Everything custom made. It’s so epic.
I think this is the way, it’s not just building one thing, its just about solving problems and falling in love with the problems in your own life.
Doing this leads to creativity.
This book is only $2.99 on Kindle at the moment, it’s well worth it.
I helped my dad
In the spirit of one-day goals I helped my dad bring to life his idea for a game. It’s like Scrabble and monopoly combined.
Again this is something that he always wanted to do and we were able to make that. It’s so great being able to do this.
So how can you get started
I think this week I’d just like to encourage you to think about your one day goals, to think about the thing you always thought you couldn’t do, the thing that is fun, the thing that makes you happy when you are doing it.
This is another book that I would recommend. Again so much of the world has changed and the self limited beliefs of your past can now be dropped thanks to the technology that we have.
View the War of Art on Amazon here.
I’d like to help you with your one-day project
There is a famous essay that I love, do things that don’t scale. The idea is that when you are small you should do things that don’t scale as opposed to scale as that is your superpower. And pulling a leaf from Paul Grahams book I’d like to do something that wouldn’t work at 100,000 subscribers but would work now.
So on that note, if you are reading this and you have an idea but don’t know how to get started send me an email chris@cubdigital.co.nz
I don’t want to charge you money or anything, I’d just like to help. If you have a website/game/book idea, I’d like to just help give your idea a nudge to get you started and help you setup the first version. Its quite fun for me and I think I’d like to make a guide for people so maybe this would be good practice for that.
The good thing is that I don’t get that many email responses from Substack yet, so honestly I’d be surprised if I get 1 response to this haha, so definitely reach out if you have an idea.
Other articles I wrote this week
I’m an Amazon affiliate, you can help support me by purchasing a book as I get a commission if you do :)
