Deliberate Reflection

I spent two months building out a sophisticated program to enable the AI agent to reliably perform dozens of actions in real time. We rarely talk about work, but I was so proud of this project that I told my parents about it. Exactly one week later, I received a text from my boss: "new AI model came out, supposedly twice as intelligent". I went straight to my desk to test the new model on my program, expecting to see a significant performance boost. The initial tests did not show any meaningful improvement. Assuming it was a fluke, I ran a couple more tests and got the same result: the model was twice as intelligent, but the program couldn't leverage it. This became an urgent problem for the company. I hoped my parents would not ask about the project the next time I spoke to them.

I spent most of that night thinking about potential solutions to the problem that would not require killing the program I'd built from the ground up. With very little sleep the next morning, I figured if I crushed some energy drinks and just started typing that a solution would appear. This cycle would persist for the next 3 weeks.

I've been meditating on and off for the past couple of years and one night decided to meditate on the pain I was feeling from this problem. Here is a timeline of events (in minutes):

• 1:00 - The pain becomes worse than before. I debate stopping the meditation.
• 5:00 - The pain has stopped increasing. I begin examining why I feel this way.
• 7:00 - I understand that I feel this way because of my repeated failures at work.
• 8:30 - But nobody at work sees me as failing. So who am I failing? Myself.
• 9:00 - Why am I failing myself? What do I expect of myself? Too much.

It took just nine minutes of sinking into the embarrassment for me to realize that what I expected of myself was completely impossible: perfectly predict the future and build a product that would last forever. It was at that moment, sitting criss-cross on my bedroom floor, that I knew a full redesign was a perfectly acceptable solution. Within a couple of days, I rearchitected the program to accommodate the new AI model.

Deliberate reflection turned weeks into days.

This was the first time I used meditation for the purpose of solving a problem. Getting caffeinated sounds more fun than sitting quietly in a dark room. But doing so avoids the pain that is necessary for change. Deliberate reflection offers short term emotional pain for long term clarity, a trade I am willing to make.