Effort Is the Whole Game · juanloco.dev

A house, by a lake, three hours drive northwest. We went for three years. Ten visits a year, give or take, two directions a visit, comes to sixty crossings total. A man who has crossed the same water sixty times can be reasonably assumed to know something about it.

I did not.

The first time, I put the address into my phone and did as I was told, and the phone was very good to me. The route varied slightly on each passage, the scenery rearranging itself by a few degrees, because somewhere in a server farm an algorithm had determined that two minutes could be shaved by threading a small town, or that a wreck forty miles ahead was best swung wide of.

In sixty crossings, the navigation never once failed me. Neither does a well-made cage.

✻Cerebrated for 33s

●I'll go through the inbox and pull out anything that actually needs you.

Do you want to proceed?

❯1. Yes

2. Yes, and don't ask again this session

3. No, tell Claude what to do differently

At the end of these three years, a realization. It stopped me in my flawlessly mapped tracks. I could not produce even the beginnings of a route to this house by a lake. I had at my disposal the sporadic "We're in the outskirts of Santee" or, more commonly, the somewhat useful (but not really) "Oh, look kids, there's that farm with all the horses".

So I promised myself, next time, no phone. The night before, I grabbed a notebook, pulled up the directions on my laptop, and studied the route. I wrote it all down partly as insurance, but mostly, because the hand writing a thing, is the mind holding it.

Then I drove, and talked to myself the entire way.

In seven miles, exit 93 to 15 North. Some quick math, when the odometer reads 48,758, start looking. At every intersection, instead of dropping my eyes to the glowing rectangle and executing its instruction, I looked up, and I looked around, and I confirmed the world against my memory of it. Yes. This is Old River Road. This is the one.

That was the intent. It was not the effect. The effect was that I started seeing things. At Tee Vee and Old River there is a house. Behind it, a trampoline. On the lawn out front, listing slightly, gone a little to seed, an early-2000s Mitsubishi Eclipse. All of it had been there the whole time, every crossing, waiting with the patience of furniture.

✻Moonwalked for 12s

●The Power Broker has been on your list since 2019. It's 1,246 pages.

I can read it for you. How much of it do you want?

1. Nine paragraphs — the argument, plus the four chapters that would actually change how you think about anything

2. A page per chapter

❯3. Just tell me what to say about it if it comes up

Within a few months the whole apparatus went automatic. It stopped being "watch the odometer, then look for the exit". It became: "there's the water tower, take the next right". Landmark, location, and action, all melded. Three passes each way was all it took, more or less, and I never once got lost, though the first attempts did wobble. The effort thinned out and drained away and the route filed itself in the department of the brain that handles stairs, and chewing, and the words to songs I don't like.

In one sense I ended where I began. I remained a poor man to ask for directions, since my knowledge had encoded itself in trampolines and water towers and a listing Mitsubishi rather than in route numbers a stranger could use. The phone would still have done it better. The phone would have done it perfectly.

✻Cooked for 41s

●I read every support ticket from the last eighteen months, plus the cancellation surveys nobody exports.

Your churn isn't price. It's day four of onboarding — they never get to the thing the product is actually for. Seven customers told you this directly, in their own words.

Before I build the deck: this contradicts what you told the board in March. How do you want to play it?

❯1. Lead with the finding. Keep it simple.

2. Show me the quotes.

Was this effort worth anything?

One question, allegedly. Really it's two questions stacked in a trench coat, the top one does all the talking; the bottom one does all the walking.

Top question: what is the output worth? A sequence of turns that gets you from A to B. There's nothing particularly fetching about this sequence of turns. The machine will produce it instantly and without fault, anytime I ask it. Appraised honestly, the value of that knowledge rounds to zero.

Bottom question: what is the process worth? The obvious answer is that I was exercising some muscle, sharpening some faculty, keeping the machinery oiled against the long decline. Maybe. The value of the process is individual, and beyond empiricism. On a macro level I can produce no evidence to its worth.

The evidence I do have, however: I had driven that road sixty times and I did not know it. Two hundred hours of my one life, a passenger in the driver's seat.

✻Ruminated for 3m 04s

●Thirteen years on Saturday.

I went back...