I notice I'm not scared of long ideas anymore.
Something I would have called a 10-year bet at 22 now reads as a normal calendar item. The idea didn't shrink. My read of it did. The thing that used to feel like a mountain feels like a direction.
Some of that is just age. You watch enough cycles to realize the people you assumed were on a different planet were mostly just earlier. The math you can run on ambition gets less flinchy with reps.
The bigger shift is AI. Not the speed thing. The thing AI quietly took off the table is the entire "can I build this" question. The technical bottleneck used to be its own act of imagination, figuring out the architecture and the auth flow and the deployment, and that work could swallow a year before you even knew if the idea was good. Now that part compresses into an afternoon. What's left is what was always the actual work. Seeing the thing. Imagining what it could become. Staying with it.
So the bottleneck moved. Creativity, imagination, time. Three things I can't delegate and AI can't shortcut. Creativity is what I see when I look at a problem. Imagination is what I think is possible after I've seen it. Time is whether I'm still at this desk in ten years.
The size of an idea isn't really a property of the idea. It's a property of whoever's looking at it. The same plan reads as "impossible" or "Tuesday" depending on what the person across the table believes they can survive. A 22-year-old me would have called the current plan crazy. A 38-year-old me will probably call it small. Neither of those reads tells you much about the plan.
This is the part I'm still trying to actually accept. The excuse "I don't know how to build that" is gone. What's left is "I haven't seen the right thing yet" or "I gave up." Both of those are about me, not the universe.
I'm not sure if this means I should be working on bigger things or just more patient about smaller ones. Probably both. Mostly I notice that "big" stopped being a description of the idea and started being a description of the timeline I'm willing to live inside.
— Simon