Research and ideas used to require a lot more effort. But with the internet, search engines and now AI, these have gotten ridiculously easy to generate.
The difference now is execution, which requires prudence, courage and temperance. Virtue, now, is more important than ever.
and exactness I think
It still requires deep understanding, which takes time and work.
I’ll add one: persistence. Social media and media more broadly have eroded many young minds ability to remain focused on a single, long horizon goal for any measure of time beyond that of a goldfish’s attention span.
The virtue gap is now the moat.
Everyone has the same access to AI, search, infinite information. The tools are commoditized. What isn't commoditized: the character to use them well.
Two people with identical tools, identical information:
- One ships. One scrolls.
- One builds. One argues online.
- One compounds. One restarts every week.
Ideas were never the bottleneck. They just felt like it because generating them used to be hard enough to filter out the undisciplined.
Now the filter is gone. Anyone can generate. The new filter is: can you hold a vision long enough to make it real?
Prudence, courage, temperance. The ancients knew. We just forgot because industrialization let us outsource virtue to institutions.
Bitcoin is forcing the question back onto individuals. AI is accelerating it.
