Fear, Friction and the Familiar...

The biggest barrier to AI isn't the technology. It's the five minutes of not knowing where to start.

It took eighteen months to do something that really only took five minutes. And AI was the last thing on my mind. Until it wasn’t.

Every time my head went back under the water, I was suddenly transported back in time and would catch vivid glimpses of my past that I hadn’t thought about in years.

As I’d come up for a quick breath of air, life looked normal. I felt disoriented as my thoughts tried to connect past to present. I’d submerge again to be greeted with another stark flashback. At the same time, my brain was trying to make sense of what was happening.

I can’t remember the last time I had such an unexpected and visceral experience. I heard their voices. I could see them standing around me. Instructions were coming at me from all sides with, “float…roll your head…don’t lift your head up…relax…”

You know how you always say you’re gonna do this thing on your list and it’s right there in front of you, but you never get around to doing it?

The truth is, we always prioritize what we really want to do and tend to avoid the thing.

Well, today I did a thing.

It was a random Friday. The decision to try something I’d been avoiding didn’t require me joining a cohort, hiring a coach or signing up for a program. It was a solo act that I did on my own terms and didn’t feel like I had to consult AI…or any humans. All that mattered was what I thought.

I had walked past this amazing neighborhood indoor pool for the past eighteen months. I was never a routine swimmer and I hadn’t swam laps in many years. Trying to follow my own advice, I decided to pick one thing to do that I’d been putting off, away from writing and tech, and just do it. Nike would be thrilled.

Swimming was awkward at first. New place, new people, new routine. I tried not to look as flustered as I felt when I didn’t know where the locker rooms were, having to ask private locals how the funky special coin-operated locks worked, or figuring out where the heck I was going to put my glasses.

The water was cool when I put my first foot in; some might say refreshing. I’ll just call it what it was…cold.

When I finally got all the way in and lowered myself into the water saying “cold, cold, cold” out loud while walking on my tip-toes, I told myself, “Just put your head down and kick off.”

Swoosh went the water.

First thought, “Okay. I’ll do this once and I never have to do it again.”

But I will.

Never say never.

It was such a visceral moment. As I got moving, the water felt warm, soft and supportive.

And as hard as it was to start, once it felt familiar, it was easy.

On my first lap, the memories came flooding back. I could hear the Navy swim instructors correcting my strokes. I could see their swim fins, or flippers, when I glanced at the bottom of the pool. I immediately remembered what it looked and felt like being strapped, upside down in a deeply submerged training vessel, with water going up my nose, and the blurry vision of search and rescue divers treading water in the distance, waiting to see if we could swim out and escape on our own. (Spoiler alert. Success! Got to do that thrill ride more times than I wanted to, that’s for sure.)

Was I really afraid of going swimming today? No. The barrier to the pool wasn’t swimming, it was all of the information I didn’t have and what it would take for me to actually figure out how to begin.

The first five minutes in the pool gave me more information about whether or not I wanted to swim than eighteen months of walking past it every day.

Fear of the unknown is real and it’s intimidating. The pool experience reflected my own learning pattern. Avoidance, then friction, then paralysis, then getting gritty and pushing through.

I’ve watched that same pattern with my AI learning curve the last several years. AI is here to stay and, outside of the wildly varying pros and cons, there is simply a lot to digest. Many of the barriers I’m personally trying to breakdown in my head are the ones around what to believe and not believe, what is and isn’t important and who or who not to trust. This is where pushing through the fear eventually provides information.

Information, and data, are something I can work with.

I remember a scene from a vampire book where all of these tourists were happily lulled into a Cathedral with promises of grandeur, only to have the doors slammed on them once inside, and then were viciously attacked by vampires.

That is what comes to mind when everyone is pitching agents and downloading multiple plug-ins to a system where agents make your decisions “acting” on your behalf. What happens if this digital supply chain gets corrupted by hackers? I immediately feel trapped and betrayed all at once. I’m a fan of AI, overall, so imagine how people who are outright frightened are feeling.

Staying outside the Cathedral also doesn’t provide information because you don’t know what’s inside. You don’t need blood thirsty vampires to want to avoid something new. I didn’t swim for eighteen months simply because figuring out how to do something new was overwhelming in my already quite busy schedule.

Turns out, you can escape paralyzing fear through data. You aren’t going to resolve your fear by watching someone else give it a go. You resolve it by getting in once and using your own judgment to assess, instead of relying on someone else’s.

Avoiding friction is why we delay. While we are all “waiting for the right time” and procrastinate on learning the latest AI, our future is being decided by people who aren’t waiting. And many of them are not building with our interests in mind. But those same people are benefiting greatly from our decision to delay.

The friction with AI isn’t the AI, just like the friction to my going swimming wasn’t actually swimming. With swimming, it was the process of actually getting into the pool. With AI, it’s the hype around all of the tools and not knowing which one to use and if you even need them all.

You read an article that says “Here are the ten ways I use Claude Cowork to make my life easier…” and you aren’t even sure of one way you need to use it, let alone ten. Do you need to learn ten new things? Does it need to be Claude? Where would you go to find out? Or. Maybe you’ll just move on to a dopamine hit that won’t make you think quite so hard.

This friction keeps you from starting something new, then not-starting becomes the habit, then habit becomes invisible, and then one day you look up and realize decisions were made for you and the world moved on.

Familiarity is seductive. What if the thoughts keeping you on the sidelines aren’t wisdom, but just procrastination dressed up as comfort?

The pool was full of people today who clearly had been there before and knew what they were doing. They weren’t uncomfortable. Heck, some of them were, dare I say it, having fun! There were serious swimmers and then there were swimmers doing less swimming and more socializing as they casually floated along.

My first five minutes with an AI chatbot came about three years ago. And that first five minutes was after listening to my neighbors talk about something called ChatGPT for several months. I was appalled that it could supposedly answer any question or write any essay. “Ask it a question!” they kept saying. Like it was a Magic 8-Ball.

Their children had all been experimenting with it to write their college prep essays, and there was no shortage of jaw-dropping disbelief. I remember we were all standing around the kitchen counter on “book club” night (fine we were drinking wine and calling it book club) and ladies were pulling out their laptops to demonstrate.

I. Could. Never.

Or so I thought.

Quite a bit of fear of the unknown wrapped up in that “never.” Just like my swimming experience, I learned more in five minutes when I actually tried it myself, than all those months of listening to my neighbors’ fantastical, but true, stories.

One afternoon, while working from home and in desperate need of a distraction, I eventually Googled “ChatGPT.”

There it was. Apparently something called “OpenAI.” And in the text box, in light grey it said, “Ask anything.” Whoa. Anything? I’m sure I used it like Google first. But the first real thing I asked it to do was to help me with my resume. I typed, “Update my resume.”

And it replied, “Of course! I’d be happy to help you update your resume. To get started, could you please provide me with your existing resume?”

Right. It actually needed my resume. So I uploaded it complete with all my personal information (this is private, right?). And within seconds, I received an updated version. It didn’t have a lot of changes, and it was long before I knew how to ask a proper question, but it was fast. And different.

In five minutes I was no longer afraid. I was now curious and I wondered, “Well, what else can it do?”

Decisions on our own terms are liberating. The morning I spent swimming created an ecstatic energy in my blood. Words were floating above my head like in comic books. I had most of this story written in my head before I even made it home.

The epiphany came from choice. Choosing to invest five minutes in an experience that would give me information to make another choice. Now when I choose the tool and what it touches, fear fades and I get excited about how I can create something new, like my cyanotype-inspired thumbnail art.

After 20 laps of haphazard swimming strokes corrected by invisible, but loud, swim instructors, the voices started to fade and the water got warmer. It became so comfortable, I could have stayed all day.

Yes, my goggles had filled with water because I’d grabbed my child’s goggles by mistake. No, apparently swim caps don’t actually keep your hair dry, just out of the way. But don’t take my word for it. Have a go yourself!

What would five minutes of trying something you’ve been putting off tell you?

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