Newsletter. Issue 001
Issue 001. Revision 1. ~640 words. Field Notes.
I have been building with these tools since the day ChatGPT came out, and I have never written to anyone about it. That is about to change, so it seems fair to say why it took three and a half years.
Part of it is that I was busy. Part of it is that I did not want to be one more person with a take. But mostly it is that I was waiting until I had something worth reporting rather than something worth arguing.
Here is what I have got.
For three years I showed this technology to almost everyone I know. My best friend first, eight days after it launched. Then a team at a company I admired. Then a philanthropy group. Then nonprofits and ministry leaders and organizations I have loved for years. All of it free, all of it alongside a full time job, and all of it as carefully as I know how to do anything.
People were astonished nearly every time. Almost nobody adopted anything.
I would show someone something that clearly would have helped them, they would move their schedule to watch me work, they would tell other people about it, and then their Monday would look exactly like their previous Monday. A close friend, for whom I spent five days learning his profession so the demonstration would sit inside his actual work rather than next to it, was impressed and then did not touch it again for two years.
For most of that time I read this as a failure in people. Not out loud, and not unkindly, but I did. I kept thinking the next demonstration would be the one that landed, and when it did not, some part of me concluded that people were not paying attention.
I do not think that anymore, and the change is recent enough that I am still working out what follows from it.
It was not a failure of attention. It was that it was too early, and being too early looks exactly like people being slow. This is the fastest spreading technology in history and also one of the hardest to actually grasp, which is a combination nobody has had to handle before. It arrives looking like a party trick. You try it, it makes a mistake, and some part of you is relieved. Or you sit in front of an empty box and cannot think what to ask. Or you can, and the back and forth turns out to be tiring in a way that is invisible from outside.
None of that is a character problem. It is what the front edge of a hard adoption curve feels like from inside, and I was standing on the wrong side of it telling people the water was fine.
What I notice now is that the same conversations are going differently. The questions have changed. People are asking what to do rather than whether it is real, and they are asking it with something at stake.
So it is starting, three years after I thought it would, which means the thing I spent three years learning is finally usable by somebody other than me.
That is what this is going to be about. Every other week. What I am building, what breaks, what I get wrong, and what I think it means for organizations whose work runs on people trusting them. I will not be sending you news about AI. There is plenty of that and most of it is noise.
Nothing here will ever sell you anything. If I want to tell you about something I am selling, I will say so in one line and you can ignore it.
One question, and I would like an actual answer if you have thirty seconds.
What is the thing you have not tried yet, and what is the reason? I am not asking rhetorically. I have a theory that the reasons are more interesting than anyone admits, and I would rather learn them from you than keep guessing.
Josh
Subject line: I was wrong about people for three years
Chosen over three alternatives. It concedes something, it is about them rather than about me, and it is the rare first-issue subject line that does not sound like a launch.
Before this sends: confirm the hook is still the most recent real thing. The whole issue hangs on having changed your mind about why people were not adopting. If something from the last two weeks is truer, swap it and keep the structure. And the close friend in paragraph four should hear about this from you before he reads it.