A Random Walk

Inefficiency is a competitive advantage

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal

People often ask how I started writing consistently.

My 10-month-old wakes me up at 4:30 AM. He'd go back to sleep. I couldn't. Instead of optimizing that time with meditation apps, morning routines, or productivity hacks, I just let my mind wander. Those wandering thoughts became posts. My writing habit came from insomnia and an infant. Not strategy. Accident.

We've eliminated randomness in pursuit of efficiency. But randomness is where new ideas live.

Last week I posted on X that companies should send me swag instead of buying billboards. I walk miles every day. Mobile advertising. Vibe coded it on a whim. 300+ requests from startups for 50 days of walking billboard.

Built emdashguard to strip em dashes from text so it doesn't look like AI wrote it. Completely unnecessary. Watching people use it showed me how paranoid we've become about sounding human. That paranoia matters more than any LLM advancement. We're so busy trying not to sound like machines that we've stopped sounding like ourselves.

Walked into a restaurant without checking Yelp. Just hungry, just stumbled my way there. It's now my daily spot. The owner knows my kids' names.

None of these were efficient uses of time. They were the opposite. But they led somewhere optimization never could.

AI handles the optimized stuff now. Better than we ever could. It finds patterns, maximizes output, eliminates waste. What it can't do is be genuinely stupid. Being genuinely stupid might be the last human superpower. It can't have the random collision that changes everything.

AI raises the baseline. Randomness becomes the edge.

I leave my phone behind on walks now. First week was brutal. Week two, thoughts I didn't know I had started surfacing. It was full of things I'd been too stimulated to hear.

Write on blank paper instead of lined. Walk inefficient routes. Say hi to strangers. Build the thing that doesn't scale, doesn't monetize, doesn't make sense.

The ROI of aimless walks doesn't exist. That's why they work.

Every optimized moment is a moment you're thinking like everyone else. While we're maximizing productivity, AI already won that game. What's left for us is the inefficient, messy work of having thoughts no one's programmed yet.

Your next breakthrough won't come from another framework or prompt. It'll come from the walk where you forgot your headphones. The project that made no sense. The conversation you weren't supposed to have.

Everyone's optimizing for the same outcomes using the same tools. Same prompts. Same outputs. Same ideas. They're optimizing their way to irrelevance.

The random walk isn't just an advantage anymore. It's an act of rebellion. While everyone else optimizes their way to the same future, you might accidentally invent a different one.