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The Red Thread This Week:
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." — Annie Dillard
Birthdays are coming up for both my boys and we’re spending one of them in NY, as part of the annual 12U pilgrimage to Cooperstown to play Summer baseball.
I’m glad we’re at a point as a family where gift giving has mostly turned into “experiences” over things in boxes, but every year around birthdays or Christmas it’s hard not to get a little nostalgic for when the toys in boxes were everything.
Few things are more wonderfully painful as a parent than watching the gift you saved for, or did battle to win, quickly be discarded in favor of the large box that it came in.
But it makes sense. Because the toy arrived finished, and the box didn’t.
It needed to become something else. A fort. A spaceship. A drive-thru window with a busted flap for a speaker box.
It’s easy to dismiss this type of play as just “kid stuff”, but I’d argue that’s a mistake. Really we’ve just forgotten how to operate this way as adults, and it’s our loss.
A friend sent me a piece this week called "The Most Human Technology Ever Made," by Anish Acharya, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In it he borrows a line from Eugenia Kuyda, who has spent years building AI products:
“Most people aren't trying to save time. They're trying to spend it.”
Seems like almost everything anyone says about AI, whether they love it or fear it, is an argument about time. Will it take the job or speed up the job? How many minutes did it shave off the emails? How many hours did it save on the deck? Were the tokens worth the number of drafts we got back?
For it or against it, everyone's running similar calculations.
But there's another kind of technology entirely. The paintbrush kind. A paintbrush has never saved anyone a single minute, and we've kept them within arm's reach for tens of thousands of years.
So the Red Thread this week is about time. Specifically, about a question some of us have stopped asking: what is all this saved time actually for?
~ Jaime
🔑 The Unlock
The Story
Acharya builds his case on the neurologist Oliver Sacks. Late in his life, Sacks noticed something about the people around him.
Most of them treated "being present" as the goal. As if the entire point of living were to sit inside the current second and soak it up. And if you could truly “be present,” they argued, you could be happy.
He thought that was an incomplete picture.
The people he found most alive weren't parked in the now. They were stretched across all 3 tenses at once. Remembering. Planning. Dreaming. Living in the past and the future and the present at the same time.
Here's why that matters for your work.
1. Makers Are Time Travelers
When you make something, you're pulled across time whether you like it or not.
You're building toward a thing you can already see in your head. That's the future. You're pulling from everything you've ever loved and learned to build it. That's the past. And your hands are busy the whole while. That's the present.
Consuming runs on one tense. You scroll, you watch, you absorb. The clock moves and you don't.
We usually argue about making vs. consuming as a productivity question. Sacks gives us a better one: which type of hours spent make you feel like a person, and which make you feel like a spectator of your own life?
2. AI Has Changed the Math for Makers
For most of human history, the distance between having an idea and making the thing real in the world was brutal.
Years of skill. Money. A team. Permission. So most people's best ideas died inside them, unmade. Carried around for a lifetime and never built.
So instead we spent countless hours following instructions, attending the meetings, looking to the boss, and consuming, because that’s what was on offer.
Acharya's argument is that AI collapses that distance; he puts it in the same rare category as the printing press; a technology that eases labor and expands what a person can make.
It’s worth mentioning the obvious bias; Acharya and Andreessen Horowitz have a vested financial interest in bringing this version of the future forward. But that doesn’t make the insight any less true or useful.
It holds either way: when creating, making, and executing gets cheap, what gets built stops being an artifact of who has rare skills, permission, or funding, and starts being driven by who has something to say.
📌 Remember: An interesting question worth asking about AI is whether it gives you back the kind of time worth spending. The making kind. The kind that stretches you across all 3 tenses instead of just pinning you to the now.
💡 Mindset Shift
The New AI Class
In Acharya’s piece, he shares a couple of stories:
A master electrician in Kentucky, no computer science degree, used AI to build a load-calculation tool. He sells it for $12.99. It replaces a $500 service call.
A plumbing contractor, wanting software to manage his trucks in the field, canceled a $40,000 consulting contract after a single afternoon with an AI tool got him further than the consultants had scoped in weeks.
For most of computing history, if you couldn't code, you were a consumer of other people's ideas. That's over.
The people picking this up first aren't the ones anyone predicted. They're tradespeople who never once called themselves software engineers.
They’re subject matter experts who understand the unique pains and desires of the people around them.
They’re people and teams with years of accumulated knowledge and experience, waking up to the idea that they can scale their ability to help others move forward in new ways, like never before.
Which means the most human thing about you is becoming the whole point. The specific experience, taste, and point of view you hold; that's the work now, with all this time we're saving.
🎲 Prompt Playground
The Unmade Idea Audit
Use this to surface the thing you've been carrying around and never built, and figure out whether you’re really blocked.
Copy/paste this prompt into your AI tool of choice:
You are a sharp, honest creative strategist helping me find the idea I've been carrying but never built.
My context:
What I do and who I serve: [describe it]
An idea, project, or thing I've wanted to make for years but never started: [describe it, and be honest about why]
What I've always assumed I needed to make it real: [a skill, money, a team, permission, time]
Help me evaluate:
Of the reasons I've told myself I can't build this, which were real bottlenecks and which may have quietly expired?
What's the smallest version of this I could actually make in a weekend, using tools available to me right now?
What part of this idea is the most me, the part only I would think to include? Push me to protect that part.
If I spent the hours I'd normally spend scrolling this week making this instead, what would exist by Sunday night that doesn't exist today?
Be direct. No hype. Ask me one question at a time until you have enough to give me a real answer.
⚡ Before You Go
Here are other ways I can help:
🗓️ 1:1 call: Grab 15min on my calendar.
🚀 Speaking & workshops: Hit reply, let’s talk.
🤖 AI Prompt Library: 12 prompts to use AI as a strategic thinking partner for your next season of work.
And I’d appreciate your help:
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Both make a real difference.
One last thing. Somewhere between the cardboard fort and the actual drive-thru window, the world taught us that making was for kids, and the grown-up move was to buy the finished thing and save ourselves the trouble.
The trouble was the good part.
Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here.
~ Jaime