Alt title: David Blaine is a madman

In the limited series Do Not Attempt, David Blaine travels the world in search of magicians and maniacs.

In the final episode, he travels to Japan. He finds a man who can cut a wooden baseball bat in half with his bare hands.

Blaine asks him what the secret is to destroying anything with your fists, and he says that if you try to punch a target, you won’t get very far. Instead, you have to envision a spot past the target so that you can punch through it with the proper speed.

When we have a goal, we need to aim far beyond it if we want to reach it.

Alt title: Maybe we’ll be able to see the Matrix after all

I got my start coding in middle school with one of the hardest languages there is: Assembly/machine code (in my case, Z80 for TI calculators).

From there, I learned PHP, HTML, and basic JavaScript by the age of 13. I was building websites for friends and family by the time I was 14.

But then I parted ways with coding for most of my life as I switched to theater, music, film, and literature. Sure, as a digital marketer, I’ve used HTML, PHP, and JavaScript pretty much every day of my 20-year career.

Still, I never followed up with any of the “full stack” coding that allows the real magic and provides the backbone of the modern internet.

For someone like me, AI and Vibe Coding allow me to get up to speed and back in the saddle after all these years.

Yes, I took a long detour, but the concepts never left me, and it’s fun to think about solving problems in this way again.

Of course, people like us will never be top full stack engineers. But we now have access to an entire category of problem-solving that would have been lost to us otherwise.

Awesome.

Every once in a while, you get a Jordan Peele—a “new” writer on the scene who changes the game.

But even though he exploded onto the film scene with Get Out, Jordan had written countless lines of dialogue and shot hundreds of Hollywood-esque sketches as half of, for my money, the greatest sketch duo to ever do it, Key & Peele.

But you’d be forgiven if you didn’t see Key & Peele as practice for making horror films.

Bruce Lee famously said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Sketch comedy is practicing hundreds of film genres, two minutes at a time.

Casablanca, arguably the greatest script of all time, wasn’t written by someone who had been sitting on a brilliant idea for 20 years.

It was written by battle-hardened studio writers, in-house, factory-style workers responsible for pumping out 5 films a year.

Great work is seldom precious. It’s the result of continuously honing and refining the craft.

Better to write five films in a year than wait five to write one.

Stop watching the news.

“It’s my responsibility to be informed!” you say. Don’t worry, the endless chaos, tragedy, and hopeless depression will be waiting to fill your entire brain any time you’re ready.

Is it self-indulgent to focus on what you want to? Maybe.

But our focus may be the last "inch" we have.

From V for Vendetta: “An inch...it is small and it is fragile, but it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.”

Back in the College Dropout days, when Kanye was still cool, he talked about doing “five beats a day for three summers.” The concept always stuck with me.

It’s not just something he did, it was a path—a prescription for those who wanted to master a skill.

This summer, I wrestled with two small children at home. In some ways, one of the hardest summers I’ve ever had, as my entire industry repeatedly turns itself upside down.

But in addition to watching two new life forms flourish, I got to feel something new.

I got to feel my favorite feeling of being alive: the feeling that only comes from experiencing the magic of technology.

I felt it playing the first game on a calculator. I felt it when I had my first synthesizer. I felt it when I edited my first video on tape in high school. I felt it the first time I owned turntables. I felt it when I learned the superpower of SEO. And now, I feel it with this magical new wave.

Is part of this time terrifying? Sure. But it’s also unbelievably exciting, like a dream come true in some ways.