Punch yourself in the face with reality
Punch yourself in the face with reality
给自己一记现实的重拳
Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI. I think there are two ways to use AI. You can just go off the deep end and start building a crazy amount of things. While it can be fun with your dozens of Claude and ChatGPT and agents and all that, most of it will be abandoned and not get used by anyone in the long term. And this is where you start getting things like AI slop and psychosis and all the things that people are starting to hate about AI generated anything.
谁能最狠地给自己一记现实的重拳？这就是 AI 时代谁能胜出的关键。我认为使用 AI 有两种方式。你可以一头扎进去，开始疯狂地构建各种东西。虽然利用几十个 Claude、ChatGPT 和各种智能体来折腾可能很有趣，但其中大部分最终都会被废弃，长期来看根本没人会用。而这正是“AI 垃圾内容”、精神内耗以及人们开始厌恶 AI 生成内容的根源所在。
And the other way is to take a step back and decide that okay, in the previous world, I would have had to spend all this time just to take the first step. Now with AI, I can take that first step much faster and actually get back to the real problem. I have seen way too many startup founders delude themselves into building more and more for months without a single conversation with a real user. The builders and the technical people really struggle with this. If all you know is how to build, and you just use AI as an excuse to keep building more and more and more, you are just procrastinating and avoiding reality. And the thing is that you were probably procrastinating before AI as well. And now it has just become much more obvious when you do it with AI.
另一种方式是退后一步，意识到：在过去，我需要花费大量时间才能迈出第一步；而现在有了 AI，我可以更快地迈出这一步，并真正回归到核心问题上。我见过太多创业者自欺欺人，几个月来不断地构建产品，却从未与真正的用户进行过一次对话。开发者和技术人员在这方面尤其挣扎。如果你只会构建，并且把 AI 当作借口不断地堆砌功能，你其实只是在拖延和逃避现实。事实是，你在 AI 出现之前可能就在拖延，而现在，当你用 AI 来做这件事时，这种拖延变得更加显眼了。
What is already easy for everyone will not create any lasting value for you. I don’t think building a successful startup has gotten any easier with AI. It’s just that certain parts of it have gotten faster. I don’t think speed of coding or having the right landing page copy or the right deck or presentation was ever the bottleneck in getting your startup off the ground, anyways. There are so many failed startups and founders who spend so much time building something that didn’t work out. You will almost always hear that even before the AI era, they built way too much and they built too many irrelevant things. Instead of really being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not.
对所有人来说都容易的事情，无法为你创造任何持久的价值。我不认为有了 AI，创办一家成功的初创公司就变得更容易了。它只是让某些环节变快了而已。无论如何，我不认为编码速度、完美的落地页文案或精美的演示文稿曾是初创公司起步的瓶颈。有太多失败的初创公司和创始人花费大量时间构建了最终行不通的东西。你几乎总会听到，即使在 AI 时代之前，他们也构建了太多东西，且大多是无关紧要的，而不是诚实地面对自己所做的事情是否真的有效。
And the things that make a startup work, that make anything work, have always been hard and continue to be hard today. What is hard are things like: Taking real risk with your life, Putting your name on something publicly, Getting rejected to your face over and over again, Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you, Being willing to let other people down, Being willing to see your friends and your network progress ahead in life while it seems like you are getting stuck. Did AI make any of these easier? I don’t think so.
那些让初创公司成功、让任何事情成功的东西，过去一直很难，今天依然很难。困难的是这些事：冒着真正的生命风险、公开为某件事署名、一次次面对面地被拒绝、在没人相信你时依然有勇气坚持下去、愿意让别人失望、愿意看着朋友和人脉在生活中不断进步，而自己似乎停滞不前。AI 让这些变得更容易了吗？我不这么认为。
I know you want to use AI as an escape. It is so tempting. You get to sit in your bubble and imagine everything and see it come to life and your agent buddy will keep cheering you on while you get nothing done with your life. And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not. Don’t lose sight of what is real. Figure out why you were put on this earth. What do you need to do with your life? What kind of impact do you want to create? What are the projects that need you the most? What are you naturally good at? What can you do that other people will want? I think in the AI era, the only delta left will be in relentlessly chasing the truth. And the only way to get it is to punch yourself in the face with reality again and again.
我知道你想把 AI 当作逃避的出口。这太诱人了。你可以坐在自己的泡沫里，想象一切并看着它成真，你的智能体伙伴会不断为你喝彩，而你的人生却一事无成。我认为这是 AI 最大的危险：你让自己相信正在做有用的事，但其实并没有。不要失去对现实的感知。弄清楚你为何来到这个世界。你的人生需要做什么？你想创造什么样的影响？哪些项目最需要你？你天生擅长什么？你能做些什么让别人需要？我认为在 AI 时代，唯一的差异化优势在于对真相的无情追求。而获得真相的唯一途径，就是不断地给自己一记现实的重拳。