Sharpening Your Intuition

In The Stars of Technology, the author describes Richard Feynman with a simple yet striking phrase: He’s been deliberately sharpening his intuition.

That line struck me deeply.

From a cognitive science perspective, intuition is not magic—it’s the brain’s high-speed information processing in action.

Think of an experienced driver: no conscious calculation is needed. The moment danger appears ahead, the foot moves to the brake—effortlessly, instantly.

Intuition is often described as instinctive or automatic perception. But here, it’s something richer: professional intuition—a rapid, reliable judgment forged through years of domain-specific experience and knowledge.

A seasoned entrepreneur, for instance, can glance at a business model and instantly sense whether it will generate real profit. That kind of intuition is rare—and invaluable.

Experts make fast, accurate calls because they’ve internalized countless patterns. A chess master sees the board whole; a novice must analyze move by move.

So why did Feynman consciously cultivate intuition? As a physicist, he knew formulas alone rarely crack deep problems. You need feeling—a visceral grasp of how nature behaves. That feeling is professional mastery.

In the AI era, that mastery has become even more essential—and harder to replace.

Why? Because the barrier to intellectual output has collapsed.

Before, producing a decent (60–70 point) strategy might take a week: research, synthesis, iteration, discussion. Today? You speak your request into an AI—and in under a minute, you get a polished plan rivaling last year’s best work.

But here’s the catch: if you lack deep domain intuition, you won’t spot the flaws—the hidden assumptions, the logical gaps, the misaligned incentives buried in AI’s output.

With strong professional intuition, though, you feel when something’s off—and you can direct AI to fix it, fast.

There’s another emerging risk: AI may deepen not just information bubbles, but intelligence bubbles. As models learn us better, they’ll serve only what confirms our views—what we like, what we expect, what feels safe. That’s not just narrower than old-school echo chambers. It’s quieter, smoother, and far more seductive.

Brain Fitness

DeepSeek’s Chinese writing ability already surpasses 90% of human writers in China.

Soon, you won’t need to write well—you’ll just need to articulate intent clearly. AI will do the rest, and do it better than most.

So what’s left for writing? For many, it becomes brain fitness: mental training, much like physical exercise is for the body.

In agrarian societies, no one “worked out”—everyone moved constantly. Physical fitness was built into daily life. Only when movement vanished from routine did we invent gyms.

Our brains are heading the same way.

Before AI, short-form video had already eroded attention spans. Studies now show average human attention has dropped to ~13 seconds. Hard to believe—but plausible. Cognitive capacity, like muscle, follows “use it or lose it.” And in the AI age, that decline may accelerate.

Some call this trajectory “silicon-based pet domestication”—an exaggeration, yes, but a telling one.

So writing’s highest value for most people may shift: from producing content to training cognition. Not for productivity—but for mental health, clarity, and resilience. Just as we lift weights not to farm more efficiently, but to stay capable, whole, and alive.

The North Star Action

This is the single action that, once achieved, unlocks everything else—the highest-leverage move in the system.

It doesn’t just advance the project. It triggers a chain reaction: activating feedback loops, reinforcing behaviors, and spinning up a growth flywheel.

Facebook’s classic example: they found that new users who added seven friends within 24 hours were dramatically less likely to churn. So instead of optimizing homepage design or ad targeting first, they poured energy into accelerating that one action—making friend-finding frictionless, delightful, and inevitable. That became their North Star Action—and ignited explosive growth.

For small teams, I’ve learned this the hard way: perfectly crafted plans often fail—not because they’re wrong, but because they’re unexecutable. Resources are thin. Energy is finite.

So don’t start with vision. Start with leverage.

Find the one action that, if done exceptionally well, lifts everything else. Then commit 80% of your focus to refining it—relentlessly, obsessively—until it’s 10x better than competitors’ version.

The logic is clear:
→ Map the system
→ Identify all influencing factors
→ Pinpoint the critical leverage point
→ Translate it into one concrete, immediate, repeatable action
→ Execute—and optimize—that action, exclusively, until it becomes reflex

Start from a single core metric. Ask: What’s the smallest necessary action that moves it—and that’s both highly leveraged and sustainably improvable?

In practice, the North Star Action matters far more than the North Star Metric. Metrics tell you where you are. Actions change where you’re going.

The State of Freedom

We often mistake freedom for “doing whatever you want.”

But if desire runs unchecked—if every impulse is obeyed—you don’t gain freedom. You become its slave.

Absolute freedom, unmoored from awareness or constraint, tends toward chaos—not liberation.

True freedom is subtler: the capacity to choose deliberately, within the reality of limits.

The key isn’t absence of constraint—it’s presence of agency.

That state feels grounded. It’s where calm lives. Where meaning emerges. Where happiness settles—not as euphoria, but as quiet alignment.

For most people, reaching it requires material stability. Wealth doesn’t guarantee freedom—and can even corrode it—but without basic material security, sustained agency is nearly impossible.

Yet for a rare few—those with extraordinary self-knowledge—freedom persists even in extremity. Viktor Frankl, imprisoned in Auschwitz, wrote that while Nazis controlled his body, they could not control his attitude. In that narrow space—choosing how to meet suffering—he retained his humanity. That’s freedom, distilled.

How do we see further ahead? Wang Xing once shared three practical ways:

  1. Read history—to recognize recurring patterns, especially those rooted in human nature.
  2. Read how others envision the future—e.g., Homo Deus—to stretch your own mental models.
  3. Read how people predicted the present—e.g., The Future Is Faster Than You Think (Chinese edition published January 2021).

That book is just four years old—but today, some of its AI-related forecasts already feel dated. AIGC exploded faster than even bold futurists imagined.

Still, much of its framing remains useful. Its questions still matter. Its lenses still clarify.

Predicting the future is harder than we assume. We rarely get the details right.

But certain fundamentals hold: human behavior repeats; systems amplify small inputs; technology reshapes incentives before it reshapes tools.

History doesn’t tell us what will happen—but it shows us how things tend to unfold. Especially when people are involved.