Think Week #43
Thoughtful Creation, Prompt Engineering, Artist Corporations
Read
The future of work is a battle between speed and art. When anyone can create anything at the click of a button, it loses all value at the click of a button, and we no longer value ourselves because we are deeply aware that we sold our soul to the mechanical life machines were meant to help us escape. You can't compete with machines where speed matters. That leaves humans with the domains of meaning, play, and signal.
—
When growth slows, it's natural to think that one must produce more to get back on track. This is a trap. We're now in the era of the artist. We're better off investing significantly more thought, care, and attention into one piece of work.
How do you get ahead?
You must be remarkable.
To be worth remarking about to friends, family, and colleagues.
Think about it, what have you created this year that a stranger would discuss at dinner with a friend?
This need paradigm shift lends itself to working with others more, not less.
They do many things with poor quality rather than one thing with undeniable quality. We're experiencing the death of thoughtful creation. The world is being filled with more factories rather than gardeners. Why?
Watch
Is prompt engineering dead?
Studies have shown that using bad prompts can get you down to 0% on a problem, and good prompts can boost you up to 90%.
This is a long episode but I'd treat it more like a mini-workshop.
You'll want to pause and rewind several times. Don't treat it like a task the needs to be completed in a single day.
One quick recommendation, stop using roles.
Role prompting (e.g. “You are a math professor. . .”) is largely ineffective, counter to what most people think. Sander breaks down the research showing that while role prompts may help with tone or writing style, they have little to no effect on improving correctness.
Listen
The internet craves more artists, and fewer creators.
An artist is a self-employed self expresser.
A creator is a self-employed commercial expresser.
—
The Future of Work is a topic I've always spent a great deal of time thinking about since I broke into the tech industry back in 2015. In the age of AI, it's now something that overwhelms the public discourse on a daily basis.
Some of us are excited.
Most of us are terrified.
One thing is certain, we're stronger together.
Everyone is on their own, and everyone is meant to do more.
Platforms like Substack cater to the solo founder, and many of us cherish the autonomy of building an internet business without employees or even peers that challenge our decisions.
However, this path is only getting more difficult.
We'll need to lean on human capital in order to cut through the noise.
We’ll need artist corporations to help govern this new world.
Think
What will you create when no one is watching?
The truth is, most people are too busy worrying about how they appear to spend much energy judging how you appear. We're all walking around in our own private theaters, directing our own one-person shows, convinced that everyone else has bought tickets to watch us stumble through our lines. But the theater is mostly empty. The spotlight we feel burning on our skin is usually just the harsh fluorescent lighting of our own self-consciousness.
Do
Use Anthropic's Prompt Generator.
Meta Prompting is still a thing and it's getting much easier.
We're all developers now, and we should act like it.
Sign up for a developer account with Anthropic.
Describe a task and it will generate a prompt that you can then use in Claude or ChatGPT. This simple step will drastically improve the results you get back.
Fin
This is wild, but I’m not surprised.
I try not to worry about being fired or laid off, but that doesn't mean I'm not preparing for a world in which tech companies no longer need me.
— Daniel
"The internet craves more artists, and fewer creators."
yes! the world craves more artists, and fewer creators.