Build Something World Class

My mind is slowly realising the crazy adventure it is rolling into.

4 months ago, I signed a contract that ended my job of almost 3 years. I have a nice room, comfortable bed, good lamp, books, and guitars. But in a 2 mile radius around my house, the average has been ~60 years for a long time. I didn't see beautiful women on my way to groceries, like you would in Utrecht, Leiden, or Amsterdam. But, my rent is really low.

Why is all of this relevant? Because during those 3 years, I managed to save. Enough to last me a few years. And I'm finally rolling into those years. A few years worth of savings. If I can figure out a way to survive, doing what I would do if I had infinite money, a new level would be unlocked in life. A level my mind can intellectually fathom but emotionally can touch only rarely.

So really there's this single question hovering in front of me. Single but massive - how to build something so valuable that it attracts a living from the world out there? With the seemingly infinite degrees of freedom offered by computer code, modern LLMs, and the internet, there are a vast multitude of things to be built that can potentially achieve this objective.

But this opportunity is available to many more. The number of good products out there with a subscription model is staggering, the highest ever in history. Which turns this whole situation into a very personal and philosophical challenge.

What can you build that is world class?

I think there's beauty in building something world class. It's almost artistic. A world class airplane, television, or laptop is chalk-packed with brilliant ideas. And these ideas are not randomly strung together. They're arranged within a hierarchy of objective functions. So many minute design decisions go into an airplane all with a single objective - make it fly and land at will. Which then derives the next level of objectives - generate lift, maintain stability, correct for external environments and so on. And of course these objectives are composed of even more specific objectives.

Of course the frontier of what is world class is usually not static. World class airplanes from 50 years ago are decommissioned today. But that's okay, the point is to be world class today.

I have some ideas at the moment, but they need to be worked out and be thrown at the world to pass the 'world-class test'. This, I must admit, is an exciting game to play. Probably the most open-ended game I will ever play. Vibe coding, LLM prompting, neuroscience-or-spirituality-based self-hacking, Tweet-storm study of successful entrepreneurs, books, connecting dots between books, between books and other media, reading to absorb, writing to crystallise, building to test, building to iterate, building to sell, everything is fair game.

Let's go.