The golden thread

There is a story I read as a child, in The Book of Virtues.

It goes like this: a boy is given – by a mysterious woman – a ball of golden thread, with a single thread poking out.

He discovers that when he pulls the thread, time passes. Pull it a little, and a painful exam is over. Pull a little more – and the school year is done.

As the story unfolds, the boy's life passes faster and faster. He jumps from success to success without effort. And then waking one day, old, he realises that life has run through his fingers.

It's not too dissimilar from the more grisly fable of the butterfly struggling to get out of its chrysalis. A child helps it by tearing the chrysalis open, only to find that without the effort of fighting its way out, its lungs never fully develop and it dies.

The moral of both stories is that there is worth in what seem to be boring or painful experiences. Effort has intrinsic value.

We would be diminished if we always skipped directly to success.

Winning immediately

I certainly have spent a lot of my life looking to skip directly to success. As, probably, have we all.

It surprised me recently to discover that 'former gifted kids' report a set of similar experiences. Many had effortless success in early life. Validation from teachers, parents and others. Later on, they start to feel demotivated or aimless as life gets more complicated and 'success' feels harder to achieve.

We become failure-averse – reluctant to try new or difficult things for fear that we won't immediately achieve the success we want.

It seems that something in our psyche needs difficulty. Or, more precisely, to overcome difficulty.

Maybe by learning the feeling of persisting through difficulty to an eventual success, we become more confident to tackle new and more difficult problems.

Effort and grift

Grift, on the other hand, is diametrically opposed to effort. Almost every grift involves the promise of something for nothing.

• "Spend pennies, get a guaranteed return with no risk."
• "Purchase my template, and you'll have a profitable SaaS."

(Some 'fear of missing out' comes from listening to grifters. We feel we're late to the gold rush.)

This is absolutely happening in the AI space.

Sometimes it's unintentional. People are excited about what's possible. ("I built this whole app with an agent – it did it all itself!")

Sometimes it's to sell a product.

Regardless, if we listen to some of these stories, we might see AI as 'value for nothing'. Why not vibe code your way to success? Or build your network with your new LinkedIn auto-responder bot?

Of course we want to maximise our leverage. We want to get the most possible value out of the effort we put in. But we can't avoid this one truth: the value we receive is always a function of the value we contribute.

That might be anything:

• the vision that brings people together
• the effort of showing up daily
• the genius idea (though rarely is the idea the most precious thing)
• the kindness and care that makes a team work

Value isn't replaceable.

A better story

I can't but help think that we might as well tell the story of The Developer and the Golden LLM.

One day a developer meets a wizened old man in the forest.

"My name is Claude," he introduces himself. "I wish to give you this golden LLM. You can ask it any question at all and it will answer it for you. Write code, edit your tweets, evaluate your boyfriend's texts."

With joy, he receives the golden LLM. Day by day he uses it. First, a little. Then, more and more. Soon it seems that he barely touches any task without directly bringing out the golden ball.

But as the years pass, he realises he can't recall much of what he's shipped. Bugs surface that he must have introduced – but he has no memory of them. He has more followers than ever on Twitter, but he's not sure any of them actually want to hear what he has to say.

One day, he sets out to create a side project on a plane and finds himself just staring at the screen, unable to code.

In the original story, the boy chooses to go back and live his life again, but without the ball of golden thread.

For us, turning back time isn't an option.

But we can learn from the story.

How we approach these tools makes a huge difference. If we treat them as a substitute for effort, we're barely a step away from grift – and I really believe we'll wake up one day, completely hollow.

But that doesn't have to be our story. We don't have to treat AI as a zero-effort shortcut to success.

We can:

• treat generated code as ephemera rather than the finished product
• review every line, increasing our skillset at the same time
• solve new problems and build new instincts

AI serves us as a force multiplier, augmenting our own agency and making the most of our own effort, hard work and value, not by replacing it.