Catching a Vibe

I’m not very good at woodwork. I learned this the hard way when I took a sculpture class in college and decided, for reasons I can no longer fully recall, to build a Trojan horse. I’d imagine I wanted to say something about infiltration—this was 1999 after all. I had a sketch. I had the wood. I had an ambition to produce something that significantly outpaced my hands.

What I ended up with was a monstrosity. Something fragile and ugly that looked less like a majestic siege weapon rolling into Troy and more like a battle-weary nag. I got splinters. The wood split when I drilled too close to an edge. I grabbed the thing and slammed it on the floor. It bounced and wobbled on its gangly legs. I hated it.

But deadlines are deadlines. And as a theater kid at heart, I knew: the show must go on.

I went back to the drawing board. After a dozen false starts, dwindling materials, and with my midnight deadline breathing down my neck, I made a decision. I grabbed my key to the catering cabinet, I was a glamorous cater waiter back then, and I started setting a table: white tablecloth. Plates, napkins, flatware. A little vase with a flower I plucked from a bush outside of the art studio. I ran to the computer lab and printed place cards with phrases like “beating a dead horse.” I put a title card on a music stand in front of the whole scene: Dead Art For Your Consumption — Bon Appétit.

I got an A- in the class. In the end, it actually looked interesting. If not entirely original, at least coherent. There was an idea present. But I suppose, ideas were never my problem.

Oddly, I was a decent welder. I loved working in metal and built pieces that I ended up pulling into the one-man show I did for my senior project. It’s funny how that works. How the materials that cooperate with us shape what we pursue. Not just our hobbies and careers but our sense of what’s possible for us. Our aptitudes open some doors while completely obfuscating the existence of others.

There has always been a barrier between what we can imagine and what we can execute. A gap between idea and capability. Some windmills are just windmills and at some point, you stop tilting at them. 

In that workshop, I had a vision. I had a sketch. I had the material sitting right in front of me. But my hands wouldn’t cooperate. I couldn’t shape the wood to my will. And so the idea, the majestic, rolling, myth-laden thing in my head stayed trapped there.

That gap is the reason most ideas never materialize into something tangible. Not because they were bad ideas. But because the path to execution ran through a skill we didn’t have, a tool we couldn’t afford, a language we’d never learned. The imagination was there. The hands, the technical savvy, the craft, weren’t.

And so we learn to stop imagining certain things. We narrow what we bother to dream about down to what we know we can build. What we know we can execute. Whole categories of possibility go unexplored. Paths untended and hidden behind the overgrowth of doubt.

Something is changing. Now, when an idea arrives that once seemed doomed by the shackles of my ineptitude, I don’t dismiss it outright. I nurture it. I try to figure it out. I collaborate with AI and decide if the impossible dream is actually so impossible. These tools are unlocking doors that were once sealed shut.

I have an idea for an app—I can refine it with a few prompts. See if it is unique, differentiated, and viable. Within a day I can have working code that makes my idea tangible. I dream of having a short story I’ve written turned into a movie and I want to see the poster? I don’t need to spend hours learning adobe—I can use AI to generate the image. If there is a future for myself I am having a hard time visualizing, I describe it and get a view of what a day in that life would look like. If I can imagine it, I can create it. Might take some coaxing, but it is possible. In AI, I have a collaborator who is skilled in areas where I am not. A complementary angle, an improv partner really great at saying “yes and.”

But as many have experienced, not all improv is great. In fact, most of it can be pretty cruddy. And an exuberant partner can sometimes lead to a false sense of grandeur. Just because I can create something where once I was limited, doesn’t mean I should. I’m not blind to all that slop out there. So, when everyone can do anything, how do we decide what is worth the time and the resource? After all, these tools do come with costs: content glut hides the valuable stuff and the technology itself consumes vast resources. 

Context—because that is the most critical thing a human can truly provide an AI tool. Our unique context can push AI tools in just the right way to create something specific, something novel. So, when I approach a new project I keep pushing myself to define how something is uniquely me. I show up as a collaborator and not a client. As such I need to be able to articulate the value I am bringing to partnership. Not necessarily to the AI but to myself. I ask, “how is this something only I can do?” 

I’m still terrible at woodworking. I’ve made peace with the fact that this is not my journey. And there are people who are much better at it than I could ever be. People who understand the materials and can bring out its beauty or nature. I could have an idea of how I’d like something to look, but someone who knows wood—they’re going to be able to know if it should be oak or cedar. In the same way, I am selecting ideas and exploring opportunities where my ideas, my vision, are rooted in my experience, knowledge and passion.

I’m catching a vibe. I’m holding onto an idea, a concept, a feeling. Where once I might have discarded it as an impossibility, I am now riding it to its conclusion. I am finding fulfillment in creating something new and pushing beyond my own boundaries. My AI collaborators and I are finding the magic of a scene and I am ready to say “yes and…”.