I'm Not Very Smart

In this post, I'm going to say some tech stuff, and you might feel awkward or lost. That's actually the POINT I want to talk about, so power through it? There's human stuff after the confusing stuff.

Yesterday, Brian at work turned me on to Ollama. You can basically (on a mac or linux) download the stuff to run your own LLM (like what ChatGPT and Gemini are) on your local computer. This means, if you wanted, you could train it on your own material, share with it stuff you wouldn't trust with the web at large, etc. Plus, and the is the more interesting part, you can tweak it and make it very much your own well-trained AI assistant/cognitive learning partner.

To use it, you have to be comfortable doing a few things. I'm on a Mac. Once you install Ollama, you have to be comfy using the Terminal, which lets you type in linux commands. Ollama runs on what's called a Command Line Interface (CLI). Luckily, between documents and YouTube (I particularly liked this guy's explanations), it's not that hard and not that scary. I had mine up and running in like three minutes, including downloading the somewhat large file of data it works from.

It's funny because I'm using a very tiny installation that doesn't require intense processing power. I have to. I'm on a four year old MacBook Pro. It couldn't handle much else.

To do this, I had to remember a bunch of linux commands, cheat and watch other people type them on YouTube and copy them, etc.

What I want to talk about is how scary it is to try new things.

People Are So Afraid to Look Dumb

I guess I get it. It's embarrassing, if you let it be. You have a chance to feel "lesser." My problem (and it's not a problem) is that I just don't think I'm somehow lesser for trying things I have no business attempting to do. I've done something more than a lot of people will have done by installing this thing and pushing it around on my little terminal window.

But we seem to all get anxious about looking bad/wrong/new at something.

I've made it a kind of brand. Yesterday, in our very important weekly executive leadership team meeting, I realized I lost some details of the conversation. I drifted off. Instead of just sitting there mutely, I spoke up:

"I'm sorry. I probably entered a transcendental state while Jagdish and you all talked about percentages of something, but did we decide on the full agenda for Friday's meeting?"

Guess what people did? They laughed. Sure, I couldn't get away with that at some huge important meeting where some customer was mad at us and we were arguing to save the company.

Life isn't always high stakes. We all watch enough movies and TV and some of us even read books, and maybe that's why we worry that everything is of the utmost importance. But life just isn't really like that. You can mess up.

It was Professor Anthony Kiedis who said, "Complete the motion if you stumble." He's right. Nothing horrific happens most times.

Discovery is a Gift

The littlest things come from daring to try new things, to learn stuff you have no idea about, and to explore beyond your comfort zone. One of #my3words for 2024 is "Fusion," and I chose that to represent learning applied to other learnings. Meaning, I don't just want to learn a thing; I want to learn something that glues to another thing.

For instance, I've got GPT 4 teaching me all about investing and business at larger scale. I'm learning lots about value investing by stuffing my little tutor full of documents and YouTube transcripts (I wrote about this before). Once it's smarter, I can then ask it questions all day like a pesky student with a very patient teacher. I did the same to learn more about agile and scrum.

Because I discovered how to use the big AI models out there to do my bidding, I felt bold enough to try loading one onto my own laptop and seeing what I could do. Turns out, I can't do hardly a thing. Yet. I'm back at "do-re-mi" and stuff. But my discoveries keep dropping off gifts I can apply to my next learnings.

I'm Not Very Smart

I get reminders of that every day. But in my case, it just means I can choose where I want to build up some more capacity. I'll never be a coder. But I can ask robots to code for me. I'll never be Warren Buffett, but I can start to tell you his principles enough that I can choose to emulate his overarching wisdom.

What are you learning? Where are you pushing yourself? Where are you not afraid to look wrong or new?

Chris...