Ero

On Being Present

Cover Image for On Being Present

Presence lets you think clearly under duress. It could be the reason you survive an emergency or land an opportunity.

...

I spent a third of 2019 living and working in the Gulf of Mexico. Life offshore is very routine. You ride the helicopter out, attend the safety briefing, eat/work/sleep during your tour, then helicopter back to shore and enjoy your time off.

On my first day on the Olympus TLP, the safety briefing mentioned there was a special fluid in use — Zinc Bromide.

“Nasty stuff… Don’t let it touch you.”

I’m walking under the rig floor during a tour of the platform when a pipe starts leaking about 5 feet from my face; Then it starts gushing.

Clear fluid.

“I wonder if this is Zinc Bromide?”

“There’s no way it could be Zinc Bromide.”

“No way they would ever let -”

The leak slows and eventually stops. The rig hand who was giving me the tour returns. I hadn’t noticed him leaving. While I was staring at permanent disfigurement, he ran off to alert the driller who stopped the pumps.

...

I had been trained for all sorts of scenarios.1 When the time came, I wasn't present enough to use it.

Agents at Work

Reading about the exuberance of the dot com boom, I would talk about what I would have done differently had I been around at the time.

When I arrived in San Francisco, there was a lot of energy around AI. Folks at events would tout all sorts of things as the future. Every new AI demo would be the one to change it all. People talked about a lot of crazy things.2 It all seemed very exciting, but most of it was hype.

AI agents seem to be working.3 Specifically vertical agents.

Why?

The subset of people who can prompt AI tools well enough to set up custom agent chains and are, somehow, unable to figure out how to make their own agents is very small.

Most of the agent ideas I experimented with came to me after seeing horizontal4 use cases and saying “Yeah, I can do that myself.” I'm still curious to see what works.

Spreadsheet users are quite savvy.5 Also, app-building agents.

How has this affected what I'm doing?

I could write bunch more words, but I think the quote below does a better job in less:

“Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.” — Paul Graham, How to do Great Work

Footnotes

  1. There was Shell's 12 life-saving rules, Helicopter Underwater Egress, H2S training, and so many safety briefs before every job. Safety was a big part of being offshore — everyone wants to go home in one piece. My favorite was fall prevention and the required 3 points-of-contact. ↩

  2. Excerpt from an interesting article: “Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.” ↩

  3. Cursor's Composer and Replit's Agent for software, Spellbook's Associate for legal tasks, 11x's Alice and Jordan (I'm biased here, of course) for sales, and a host of others. ↩

  4. OpenAI's GPT Store, Lindy, and Poe all require you to do a substantial amount of prompting and have very sparse integration with the tools people work with. Granted, Lindy has a boatload of integrations built in. SuperAgent pivoted from allowing anyone to make assistants and have now narrowed on the compliance vertical. Their assistant code is still open-source, to their credit. ↩

  5. Matrices and Julius (not limited to spreadsheets, but used by spreadsheet people) will be interesting to watch considering spreadsheet users are very savvy. ↩