Ladies and gentlemen, we messed up.

↓
Badly.

But not unfixably.

(And don't you even dare blame it on the AI.)

Hey Reader,

It's been a long time since you've seen this in your inbox -- but I hope you're well.

I've been thinking of where to take it from here.

And as I was thinking (and thinking and thinking), I realized...

...We messed up badly.

We, the collective of people who use the internet. (Almost) all the 5 billion of us.

OK, it was mostly marketers and engineers, but everyone shares in the responsibility here.

Let’s rewind a bit and see where it all started.

​

1969 was a great year for mankind. Americans landed on the moon and stabbed it with the US colors. Woodstock gathered no less than 400,0000 people in the middle of nowhere and made pop culture history. Mario Puzo’s Godfather was distributed in bookstores for the first time.

…And somewhere in the background, a bunch of nerds involved in a U.S. military communications project launched ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet: the technology that enabled computer-based communication at scale.

Fast-forward to the late '90s and early '00s.

The internet’s snowball effect was already in full motion. AOL, Google, Myspace, Amazon, the early days of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the now-deceased Vines – all started to make their way into our computers and phones, our lives, how we learn, work, and connect with each other.

The internet was promised as the thing that’ll take mankind to new heights of knowledge, economic growth, and collaboration.

In some ways, it did.

But in the light of the birth of AI, one thing’s clearly painful: we lost our way, and it likely happened somewhere between:

• The rise of data-driven efficiency

• And booklets promising to sell you the one blueprint for the (allegedly) only definition of success worth minding.

The obsession with gorging on one-size-fits-all templates and an almost irrational fear of taking risks have all eroded the very nature of ideation, problem-solving, and creative acts.

Advertising, the once cornerstone of creativity, is now resumed to keywords and clicks.

Movies, the once ultimate goalpost of imagination, are all but an indigo copy of whatever-kids-these-days-like.

Tech businesses, the once renowned promoters of unstoppable innovation, are now chasing each other in a race to the bottom. Instead of fueling new ideas, the internet has almost conditioned us to run in circles.

If you’re a marketer, you need to read what marketers say.

If you’re an accountant, you can only consume titles that start with “The New Taxation System” and end with the year you’re in.

And if you’re an entrepreneur, you must, evidently, listen only to what successful entrepreneurs say. God forbid you watched a cheesy movie on Christmas Day. No, that’s for the losers who don’t know that hustling, grinding, and waking up before you go to sleep is the one way you can be ultra-productive.

We messed up when we started to use technology to fuel the myth of an ever-growing, always-dogmatic, never-anecdotal performance-based approach to… everything.

Here’s what, though:

Data is great. The AI is borderline miraculous (or is it?) The internet is still the greatest way to learn.

But data without insight is just a bunch of numbers.

Without good prompts, LLMs are nothing but calculators of linguistic probability.

And without critical thinking, the internet is just an empty shell feeding you the same perspectives. Over. And over. And over again. Scroll after scroll, click after click, TikTok after TikTok, you are binge-consuming the same ideas, ad nauseam.

If you run a business or a team, if you’re a creative or a creator, if you’re an engineer or an artist, you need good ideas. Now, more than ever. Because the AI-powered internet era we’re stepping in can be your greatest ally if you know what to feed it.

But it can also be the demise of entire industries if you rely solely on self-replicating algorithms and automation.

If you want to stay ahead of the competition and use the power of technology to advance your industry, you need to be able to come up with good ideas.

And good ideas aren’t born in contexts that chase their own tail.

They’re born when you step outside of your world and listen.

If Spencer Silver at 3M hadn’t failed at creating a very strong adhesive for the aerospace industry, we wouldn’t have sticky notes.

If Steve Jobs hadn’t taken a calligraphy course at Reed College, Apple’s Mac computers would’ve looked completely different.

And if Archimedes hadn’t decided to take the most interesting bath in history, he wouldn’t have come up with the principle of buoyancy. As such, he wouldn’t have figured out how to determine if the King’s crown was made of pure gold. And we wouldn’t be screaming Eureka! every time a good idea hits seemingly out of nowhere.

Good ideas are born when you connect concepts that seem incompatible. When you know how to let your mind wander. When you take the road not taken.

When you realize your invention's not great for its initial purpose, but could become something else. When you take what seems to be the most useless course possible. When you let your questions simmer in your brain and do other things.

Nine months ago, I started writing Procrastinatr, The Newslettr. My goal back then was not very clear. Now, though, almost one year into the AI revolution, I know what this newsletter was always meant to be: a way to explore creative, divergent, and lateral thinking in the light of problem-solving and ideation.

I think now, more than ever, we need to know how to come up with ideas. ChatGPT can handle (most of) everything else (theoretically.)

But ideas, human experience, and smart creative wandering?

That’s for you: the entrepreneur, the business leader, or the creative cranking up headlines and movie plots and paintings to decorate dentists’ offices and music people can listen to when they’re trying to come up with their own ideas.

So – what do you think?

Will stick around as a Don Quixote fighting the windmills of regurgitated content?

It’s free, but it could bring you praises from your boss, money in the bank, and the satisfaction of telling grandchildren the one story of how you were in a board room with a bunch of unoriginal people in 2024 and you awed everyone with an idea that made newspaper headlines.

• One story about creative, divergent, and lateral thinking
• Three links to help you fuel your randomness
• One creative exercise

Every week, in your inbox.

Random Fuel

1. This 3.5 hour podcast discussion Rory Sutherland and Rick Rubin, likely the best 3.5 hours I've spent doing something (somewhat) work-related in the last couple of months. If you haven't listened to it yet, do it. It's pure gold.

2. Grandma Moses' artwork, which makes me think of books I had as a kid, not because they're childish, but because they have a sort of ethereal energy to them -- kind of like childhood memories you don't want to give up on.

3. This quote, which has been living in my brain for what feels like a year or so:

Let's Play

According to the very detailed plan I have for this newsletter, this section is where you'll get a creative exercise every week.

Why I encourage you to play with it:

It will likely help you find new solutions to (old) problems

It's a great way to train your imagination, creativity, and divergent/ lateral thinking

It's fun.

​

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