Finding a Balance

My friend nishu shot me in the face with a question today.

What do you want to achieve this year?

I kind of made it up on the spot: "I want to make a dedicated repository of builds that serve as proof of work"

But as I thought about it, that is kind of a half truth and not a bullseye. Bullseyes are hard to articulate because they carry the risk of failure in them. Announcing your goals is often unwise for this reason. I'm not that wise though so I'm going to give it a try.

I spent the day bouncing ideas off my robot friend and I came up with some better definitions for the bullseye.

A few were:

• Make things that make peoples lives better.
• Make things people like enough they'd pay for.
• Turn doing something I love into a vocation. (Specifically making things with LLMs.)

I think I would really enjoy building systems for small businesses or starting my own small business but I may lack the true acumen to do it the right way. I'd probably need a partner, which would be inherent if I just worked for an existing business.

It would be great to merge my life as a creative (even if much of what I make is LLM builds these days) with real world applications rather than random tuesday builds.

In this though? The online arena? My twitter account fwiw:

I want to build authenticity without obscurity, resonance without pandering.

And that's far from easy. Obscurity can sometimes disguise itself as purity. “I don’t care if anyone gets it” can sound principled, but sometimes it’s just refusing to do the hard work of communicating. Likewise pandering can disguise itself as generosity. “I’m making what people want” can sound audience-first, but sometimes it’s fear of making something they might reject.

For now, we just keep walking the line, but I think this is close to the answer. To just make the things I want to make because I feel they have merit, and then communicating why they're important to me without the need or even desire to try to convince anyone.