We go through life creating things, most of them digital.
Some of that work can be distilled into a single item: a design, a document, an application, a drawing. But the production process behind it is usually a tumultuous sequence of iterations, moments of clarification, confusion, discovery, and resolution.
Most of the time, the work is judged by its results.
The story behind the result
What excites me is the story behind those results, a story that can be traced back to its very origins. Ask a recursive set of "how" and "why" questions and the finished item reveals a tree of events, intermediate products, and ideas.
There have been many moments in my own design work where, looking back after finishing, I could see every point where the result might have gone wrong, and every happy accident that pushed the project forward. Some were random sketches. Some were chance encounters with new people. Some were purely biological, like a good night's sleep followed by coffee and a particular piece of music that set off a chain of new ideas.
That day, or that encounter, might easily not have happened. So while I take credit for the final work, I can also imagine parallel stories in which I ended up with nothing.
Connecting the dots backward
It is a trick of the mind to think the outcome was obvious. In reality, almost nothing was obvious. It is easy to connect the dots retrospectively, once the dots are visible.
The process itself is mostly lost, or reframed later for marketing purposes.
And even when we try to be sincere, if we have no snapshots of the process, our minds deceive us about why certain decisions were made. In my experience, memory does not store the process; it rebuilds a plausible version of it after the fact. So no matter how honest we try to be, we are very likely to misremember the process unless we have a real-time record of it.
What a record of the process is worth
There is a second reason to record the process: to discover better ways to build.
Say we have finished a product and delivered it. With a good map of the process behind it, we might discover significantly better ways to build the next one. A discovery made in the middle of the work might turn out to be more valuable than the original task. There may be a specific moment where we asked a specific question, and posing that question to the right people at the right time might have yielded a far better result.
None of this is visible in the final product. It exists only in the record of how the product came to be, and if there is no record, it exists nowhere at all.
Ideas are fragile
I value human imagination, and I know it can create surprising connections and possibilities. I also know from firsthand experience how fragile those connections are. They collapse easily, brought down by doubt, ignorance, paranoia, and the opinions of others.
We are primates who occasionally produce something remarkable. And right now, it takes enormous effort to carry an idea into reality. That is why some people insist that perseverance, action, and grit matter far more than the idea itself. I understand the purpose behind the exaggeration: without execution, ideas evaporate.
But I think the exaggeration points at a deeper problem, and that problem is friction.
An idea should only need to occur once
In an ideal world, an idea would only need to occur once. Not once per person, but once, globally.
When a new connection is made by someone, or by a machine, it should spread with such speed and efficiency that it can contribute to any process that could use it. In that picture, life behaves a little like a single brain with vast resources, where all the neurons are actually connected to each other.
We are obviously far from that. Today the same insight gets rediscovered again and again in isolation, and most of those versions, I suspect, die quietly in someone's notebook or never get written down at all.
Reducing the friction
Some people call the far end of this convergence the singularity, the point where minds and machines merge into something continuous. My own position is a belief, not a fact: I suspect some form of this convergence is coming, and I think it would be beneficial on the whole. I cannot prove either claim, and I hold the timing loosely.
What I am more confident about is the path, because the path starts with humble tools we can build today. There are several fronts. One is the advancement of AI itself. Another is brain-computer interfaces. The third, the one I have worked on, is capturing ideas and processes as efficiently as possible with the conventional tools we already have.
That conviction is why I built FileMap, a visual workspace that lays out a project's files and ideas spatially so the process stays visible alongside the result. But the tool matters less than the principle. Whatever system you use, the goal is to record connections at the moment they form, before memory rewrites them and before friction erodes them.
Every second spent fighting a high-friction system compounds. Each poor interface, each distraction, each break in a flow state slows down the way ideas are realized and applied in the world, and the losses accumulate. In my view, building second brains with existing technology, and stripping friction out of the way we capture and share ideas, is among the most useful preparation we can do, whatever the future turns out to hold.
The finished work will always get the credit. But the process is where ideas are born, connected, nearly lost, and sometimes saved. How much of what your mind produced this year exists anywhere outside your memory?