On Sunday, I saw part of an interview with Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist. He was talking about how introspection and retrospection are largely damaging to progress, and his primary advise to people is just to “Go Forward.”
Friends, I just about blacked out from frustration.
The ability to look at your actions, your goals, your relationships, and your work and make determinations of what is working, what is not, and what you need to do to be more effective is the very nature of humanity. That act of examination is what allows you to build habits that work, allows you to break down systems that don’t and recompose the components into systems that do.
Joan Westerberg has a really thoughtful response on this:
Andreessen’s advice to himself, and apparently to others, is directional without being specific. Forward, he says. Forward toward what? His manifesto obsesses over abundance, over the elimination of material suffering, and a future in which technology has lifted constraints that currently limit human possibility. These are goals I can get behind. But “forward” presupposes that you know where you’re going, and knowing where you’re going presupposes that you know what you want, and knowing what you want doesn’t happen without exactly the examination the man has ruled out.
What this feels like is a techno-utopian fantasy view where the application of technology by itself is a goal, and if problems appear, well gosh, we can sell you the solution to those, too, even if we have to invent it on the fly.
IT departments are no strangers to forced marches to new technology, and it feels like we’ve seen a lot of that with the AI push for the last few years. I sure have gotten my share — and probably yours, too — of people trying to sell me an AI-enhanced solution that doesn’t seem to understand what AI is for, or why it makes sense for their product line.
Without spending time establishing what problems you’re having, or what kind of solution you actually need to solve the problem, rushing to solutions based on vibes is a great way to buy the wrong thing, or lose your cooperation with other teams. And yes, you do have to spend time thinking not just what to buy, but how to integrate it into your environment. Failing to account for implementation buy-in processes is a great way to overspend and under-solve for your organization.
I would encourage everyone to spend time introspecting. Then act. Don’t just act without thinking, and don’t only introspect.
After all, as Metric says:
To permanently see in reverse / take the remorse out of defeat
Because everything that’s under my skin / where I end and begin
Still belongs to me
Looking back is how we know where to Go Forward, Marc. And how fast. And how hard to push. Without it, we’re just blundering around, and that doesn’t help anyone the way you think it does. At least not without harming a bunch of people you probably care about, and putting everything at risk.
Cannonball 