We live in an era where AI can build almost anything you can imagine. But in the middle of all this, do you know what the most important thing actually is?
I think almost everyone interested in AI, including myself, is completely missing it. Honestly, I am writing this column partly to ground my own thinking and remind myself of the truth.
The biggest problem with being able to do everything through AI is that people have started looking at the technology instead of the problem. Simply put, before figuring out what they actually want to build, they obsess over how to refine their prompt engineering or which specific technology to use.
Why does this happen? Because everyone's attention is focused there, and the FOMO hits hard. You feel like you will get left behind if you do not keep up. I went through that exact phase. I constantly checked for new AI updates, desperate not to fall behind, until I finally understood Why Learning AI Tools Is a Waste of Your Time.
But here is what I recently realized. The technology is actually not that important.
Is This a Real Problem?
The most important questions you must ask are: "Is the problem I am trying to solve actually real?" and "Are people genuinely suffering because of it?" People do not open their wallets unless they are in pain. The most crucial first step in any business is to quickly validate whether the problem is real.
Look at the founders of DoorDash, the massive American delivery platform. They graduated with Computer Science degrees from Stanford. Yet in their early days, all they did was organize food delivery orders on a simple Google Sheet. They knew exactly what the core problem was. Despite having elite CS degrees and access to cutting-edge tools, they ignored the shiny technology and focused entirely on the fundamental problem. They even delivered the food themselves just to talk directly with their customers.
We need to think exactly like them. The engineering is not what matters. Asking "Is this a real problem?" is infinitely more important. Always put the problem before the technology.
The Illusion of Automated Content
This exact same rule applies to content creation. The ultimate metric in content is whether the viewer actually feels value from it. I learned this the hard way.
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| Don't let automation drown out the one thing that actually makes people care |
Back when I was regularly uploading YouTube videos, I fell completely down the rabbit hole of a video automation tool called Remotion and started automating every single video I produced. Volume went way up. Revenue plummeted. Eventually I had to shut the channel down.
Churning out massive quantities of content means nothing if the viewer does not feel genuine value. Technology is a means to solve a problem. It should never become the goal itself. Whether it is a product, a service, or a piece of content, the customer and the viewer always come first. Technology and automation come second.
The Dopamine Trap of Infinite Options
The second major trap of the AI era is that we have too many options.
Because AI makes so many things effortlessly easy, a lot of people, myself included, started jumping from one shiny project to another like we had ADHD. This is especially dangerous because juggling different tasks feels fun and productive. It gives you a massive dopamine hit.
But the real world operates on the Power Law. A tiny minority takes the vast majority of the rewards. Executing one project that is slightly above average will almost always yield higher returns than running four perfectly average ones, a principle of intense focus that I explored in Why 4 Hours of Deep Work Is All You Need to Win in the AI Era.
In an era where the barrier to entry is so low, you actually need to hyper-focus on a select few things. The endless options AI provides can quietly become a poison.
The Power of Aggressive Subtraction
Steve Jobs said something that hit me hard when I heard it recently.
"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done."
To be completely honest, I have been testing out a ton of different ideas lately, jumping between this and that. Very few of them are making any real progress.
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| Have the courage to stand by your vision when others push back |
Jobs did not just preach this. He proved it. When he returned to Apple in 1997, the company was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The very first thing he did was scrap dozens of product lines, throwing everything away except for a tiny handful of truly essential projects. Countless engineers and executives pushed back hard. Jobs pushed forward anyway.
The result was the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone. He did not save the company by adding more. He saved it by aggressively subtracting what was already there.
We have to constantly practice the discipline of doing one thing. Do it well, and only then move on to the next.
While you are pouring everything into that one thing, you will inevitably think, "Am I falling behind everyone else?" But the people chasing every shiny new tool and dabbling in a hundred different projects are ultimately just spinning their wheels.
Stop draining your energy on the overwhelming buffet of choices AI puts in front of you. Focus entirely on the single problem right in front of you.
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