The Age of Ideas

As a teenager, I was all ideas and no follow-through. Every week brought a new concept, a new scheme, a new startup in my head. I wore my imagination like a badge. But over time, I had to confront something uncomfortable: ideas weren't rare. They were a ten a penny, a kind of noise that kept me from actually doing the hard work.

For years, I leaned more and more into execution, to say less and do more. That balance—between thought and action—is something I wrote about in The New Generalist. But something is shifting again.

In the past month, I've started using tools like v0.dev and Cursor. These AI-powered assistants make delivery almost trivial. Want to spin up a landing page? Done in minutes. Want to scaffold an entire app? It's just prompts now.

Suddenly, execution isn't the bottleneck. We've entered the age of ideas—not because they're newly important, but because execution has become cheap. The only scarce thing is what to build, why it matters, and for whom. The tools will do the rest.

In a world where shipping is frictionless, discernment becomes the superpower.