The greatest speech of all time, delivered by one of the greatest orators of all time, was the I Have a Dream speech from Martin Luther King.

Decades have passed, and these immortal words still ring true.

But why do we know it as the “I Have a Dream” speech, and not the “Civil Rights” speech, or the “Free At Last” speech?

It’s because he repeats a variation on the phrase over ten times in a near 15-minute speech.

That’s nine times more than most of us are comfortable repeating any one message.

Whether it’s a website, or a video, or a keynote, or anywhere our words need to be remembered, we’re terrified of repeating ourselves lest we look foolish.

But decades later, King’s ideas endure, and you still know exactly what he wanted you to remember.

In music, it’s a well-known phenomenon that we can tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak a project, often getting no better with each “improvement”.

This is why producers and songwriters have songs like Daylight_Master_Final_FINAL_FOR_REAL_Done_V21_Bass_up_DONE.wav sitting on their hard drives.

Case in point, even at the highest level, legendary mixer Bruce Swedien was asked to keep re-mixing Billie Jean 91 times because Michael and Quincy weren’t happy with the mix. Something could always be a little better. “Bring up the snare!” “The bass isn’t coming through.”

But which version made the record? 91? 86? 75?

Nope. #2.

After countless agonizing hours, they realized that they had had the magic right at the start. Luckily for us, they were smart enough to eventually realize their mistake, while many of us are so blinded by our quest for perfection that we lose all access to the voice of knowing within us.

Some will tell you to take a walk—to get distance from the project. Others will tell you to show your work to strangers.

But the most important thing to do, with anything we make or are ever close to, is to continually try to see our work with fresh eyes.

Whatever business you’re in, the effort is always worth it.

Modern VR headsets, like the Apple Vision Pro, contain the equivalent of two teeny-tiny 4k TVs, one for each eyeball.

Not long ago, it would have taken a supercomputer to push this many pixels, but now, a portable chip will do the job.

But there’s a trick happening here—misdirection worthy of a seasoned magician.

The truth is, today’s chips aren’t powerful enough to run two displays like that, even now.

But because these headsets can track our eye movement, they know to only really render the pixels we happen to be looking at. This is called foveated rendering.

The rest is an approximation that we don’t notice, because we can’t focus on the periphery. The change happens so fast, the illusion is that we have pixel-perfect resolution everywhere we look.

Not only is this clever, it’s also true of life: We see what we’re focusing on in incredible detail, and everything else is just a sea blurry shapes that feel more-or-less right without further inspection.

The question of “when is it done?” is not an easy one to answer.

When working on any project, we can easily get bogged down in details that don’t matter. But the problem is, many of them do.

We shouldn't be asking: “Is this font 1px too big?” “Are these wheels 10g too heavy?” “Is this video 5% too bright?”

The right question is: When does it sing?

When do all the elements come together to turn something from audio into music? From pixels on a screen into art?

All human work is art. And it either sings or it doesn’t.

You've heard of gaslighting—when someone makes you feel like you’re the crazy one—by pretending that something clearly wrong is actually normal.

The term comes from the film Gaslight, and it's become a well-known psychological phenomenon.

It’s the same concept behind “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: If everyone around you acts like the emperor's wearing clothes, but we know he's naked, we start to question ourselves.

When we post content online, we hope people will like it, share it, maybe even subscribe. We don’t love being criticized—especially for how we look or who we are.

But historically, even if a rando said something cruel, at least you knew it was a real person—a 12-year-old troll in his mother’s basement perhaps, but still human. It was part of the “town square” dynamic that platforms like Twitter (now X) were built on.

Now, that’s changing.

Soon, the majority of online discourse will come from AI bots.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but on X—leaning more and more to one side of the political spectrum (thanks to its almighty CEO)—you’ll see something disturbing:

Anytime someone from “the other side” posts something, it’s met with a flood of nasty, hateful, vitriolic replies. This creates the illusion that the entire world hates that viewpoint.

I used to scroll through YouTube or Reddit comments to gauge public sentiment on hot topics. But increasingly, many of those replies—especially on X—aren’t written by real people.

And that has a real effect. We start to question ourselves. We wonder if we’re wrong, or if everyone else sees something we don’t.

If everyone else seems to think one thing and we think another, our brains starts to say: “Maybe I’m wrong,” or “Maybe I’m just dumb.”

In a good faith system, questioning our values is a wonderful thing that can lead towards tremendous personal growth. But when our values are questioned/manipulated en masse by an algorithm, that’s gaslighting—by the system, at scale.

It chips away at our confidence, our logic, and our reasoning.

And that’s what makes AI so dangerous. It makes intelligent, thoughtful people question their own sanity.

So here’s my advice: don’t take any of it at face value.
Don’t doubt your mental capacity—trust it. Assume that if someone disagrees with you online, they might not be real. In fact, that’s increasingly likely.

Turn off comments if you need to. Turn off likes.

But don’t turn off your own brain.

Don’t let an algorithm convince you that you have nothing of value to say.