I Wanted Too Many Things

Hey everyone,

What if curiosity was never the problem?

I have always wanted too many things.

When I was young, I wanted to be a commercial illustrator. Not vaguely. I could see the life. I wanted the drafting table and the markers and the portfolio and the feeling of making something with my hands that somebody would actually pay me for. I also wanted to be Stevie Ray Vaughan. I wanted to play guitar with that kind of ferocity and command, where the instrument stopped looking like an instrument and started looking like part of the person holding it. I wanted to write songs. I wanted to make records. I wanted to stand on stages. And I wanted to be a bodybuilder like my dad.

Those weren't phases I moved through and discarded. That's the important part. One dream didn't replace another. They accumulated. As I got older, my appetite for life got bigger instead of smaller. I wanted to build software. I wanted to start companies. I wanted to make films. I wanted to write. I wanted to design things. I wanted to understand machines. I wanted to make music. I wanted to build physical things that might survive me. I wanted to learn things that had absolutely nothing to do with whatever I was supposed to be doing at the time.

I didn't want to choose a life. I wanted ten of them.

For most of my life, though, the world had a pretty clear answer to people like me: that's not how this works. Pick something. Commit. Specialize. Put in your ten thousand hours. Become known for one thing. There is wisdom in that. Mastery requires commitment. I believe that more strongly now than I probably ever have. You don't become Stevie Ray Vaughan by watching a few YouTube videos and fucking around with a Stratocaster on weekends. You don't become a great songwriter because you figured out how to rhyme two lines. Craft has a price, and most of that price is paid in time.

But there was another side to that truth that hurt me for a long time. If you wanted too many things badly enough, eventually someone would tell you that your curiosity was the problem. Jack of all trades. Master of none.

I heard versions of that throughout my life, but one of the places it landed hardest was Durango. I went there because songwriting has always been one of the things I wanted most, and I was confronted with an uncomfortable truth: I had never committed enough of my life to that one thing to become the thing I desperately wanted to be. That hurt because there was truth in it.

There were people who had spent years doing almost nothing but writing songs. While they were writing their thousandth song, I was building software. Running a business. Training. Raising kids. Playing music. Learning something new. Chasing another curiosity. They stayed at the table. I kept crossing the cafeteria.

For a long time, I think some part of me believed that was a defect. Maybe if I had been more disciplined, I would have chosen. Maybe if I had wanted it badly enough, I would have sacrificed everything else. Maybe the reason I wasn't exceptional at the thing I loved most was that I loved too many other things.

There is a particular sadness in looking back at your life and wondering whether your greatest curiosity was also your greatest liability, because I never stopped wanting the other lives. Even as the years available to live them started becoming more precious. Especially then.

The older I got, the more absurd the math became. There were more things I wanted to understand than there were years left to understand them. More songs than I could learn to produce. More products than I could learn to build. More films than I could learn to make. More disciplines than I could possibly master. Eventually life forces the question: which versions of yourself are you willing to kill?

That's what choosing can feel like when you love too many things.

I've been thinking lately that my dad understood that feeling too. Maybe that's where some of it came from.

He wanted more than one life out of his life. He built things. He built his own Dynaco amps. He became the bodybuilder I looked up to when I was a kid. He could disappear into something and figure out how it worked because understanding it was its own reward. He had that builder's curiosity, that instinct that if something fascinated you, you should be allowed to put your hands on it and see where it led.

But he lived in a world where the walls between disciplines were much harder to cross.

If you wanted to learn something completely new, you needed the books. You needed the equipment. You needed access to someone who knew how to do it. Maybe you needed to go back to school. Maybe you needed to move somewhere. Maybe you needed money you didn't have. And above all, you needed time.

Curiosity was expensive.

I think about that more now that he's gone. Not with pity, and certainly not because I think he somehow failed to live enough. He lived his life. But I recognize the appetite. I know that feeling of looking across the room and thinking, *God, I want to know what happens over there too.*

Maybe I inherited that from him.

And then something changed.

AI arrived.

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story is also the boring one. AI makes you faster. AI lets one person do the work of five people. AI increases productivity. AI democratizes expertise. Fine. That's not what happened to me.

AI gave me access to rooms I thought I had run out of time to enter.

It didn't make me a filmmaker. It let me start learning filmmaking by making films. It didn't make me a great songwriter. It gave me a way to interrogate my own ideas, recover connections I'd forgotten, study my instincts and keep developing songs when I might otherwise have abandoned them. It didn't make me an architect, a designer, an engineer, a researcher, a producer, or an expert in every discipline that fascinates me. It made the doors easier to open.

And there is something bittersweet about realizing that I happen to be alive at a moment when some of the constraints my dad lived with are beginning to loosen. I don't get more years than he did because I have an AI sitting on my desk. Technology doesn't negotiate with mortality. There are still only so many mornings.

But maybe I can fit a little more curiosity inside them.

Suddenly the defining tension of my life started looking different. Maybe I didn't need to choose one room. Maybe I needed better ways to cross between them.

That distinction matters enormously to me because I don't believe AI eliminates mastery. If anything, using these tools seriously has made me respect mastery more. The machine can produce an answer in seconds. It cannot decide whether that answer deserves to exist. Taste is still my job. Judgment is still my job. Intent is still my job. Knowing when something is technically impressive but emotionally dead is still my job. Knowing when a lyric is telling the truth is still my job. Knowing when a product has become complicated because we're avoiding the hard decision is still my job.

AI doesn't absolve me of craft. It gives my curiosity leverage.

And maybe that's why I feel so differently about this technology than some people do. For me, AI isn't primarily a machine for producing more stuff. It's a machine for reducing the cost of crossing the room. I can spend the morning thinking like a software architect and the afternoon thinking like a songwriter. I can wander into filmmaking and bring something I learn there back into product design. Something from bodybuilding can teach me about deliberate practice. Something from music can teach me about restraint in software. Something I learned building a company can change the way I think about finishing a record.

Those lives don't have to compete quite as brutally anymore. They can inform each other.

And once I understood that, something else started clicking into place. The kid who never completely belonged to one tribe and the adult who never completely committed to one discipline were probably the same person. I spent years thinking those were two different shortcomings. I couldn't find the one table where I completely belonged, and I couldn't find the one thing I was willing to become. Maybe there was never supposed to be one. Maybe the thing I was becoming was the person who crossed between them.

That doesn't mean I get ten lifetimes. I don't. There are still choices. There are still sacrifices. There are still crafts I will never master and rooms I will never enter. Time remains stubbornly finite, and no technology is going to negotiate that away for me.

But the surface area of a life just got bigger.

That is what excites me about AI. Not replacing the illustrator, but letting me draw again. Not replacing the musician, but helping me keep chasing the song. Not replacing the engineer, but letting the engineer wander into filmmaking for a while and come back carrying something useful. Not manufacturing ten artificial versions of me to produce ten times as much shit, but giving this one version of me permission to remain curious.

And maybe there's another layer to that now that I think about my dad.

Some of the rooms I enter were shown to me by someone who isn't here anymore.

Every time I build something because I can't stand not knowing how it works, there's a little of him in that. Every time I train, there's a little of him in that. The craftsmanship that eventually became part of the philosophy behind Hewn didn't appear out of nowhere. I watched a man build things with his hands and care about how they were made.

I'm not living his unfinished life for him. I couldn't, and I wouldn't want to pretend that I could. His life belonged to him.

But lives bleed into other lives.

We inherit appetites. We inherit questions. We inherit unfinished curiosities. Someone shows us a room when we're young, and thirty years later we find ourselves walking through the door without realizing who first pointed it out.

Maybe that's another kind of crossing the room.

I spent a lot of my life apologizing, at least internally, for wanting too much from it. For wanting to make things I wasn't qualified to make. For wandering into disciplines where I hadn't paid my dues. For leaving one table just as I was starting to get comfortable because something interesting was happening across the room.

I don't want to apologize for that anymore.

I still believe in mastery. I still believe some things can only be earned through repetition, failure, patience and years of doing the work. I don't want AI to compress that. I don't think it can. But serendipity, access, exploration, the distance between curiosity and the first meaningful attempt? Compress the hell out of that.

Because maybe the tragedy was never that I wanted ten lives. Maybe the tragedy would have been convincing myself I was only allowed to live one.

I wanted to be a commercial illustrator. I wanted to be Stevie Ray Vaughan. I wanted to be a bodybuilder like my dad. I wanted to write songs and build companies and make films and design things and understand machines and keep wandering into rooms where I had absolutely no business being.

I still do.

The difference is that for the first time in my life, I don't experience that appetite as evidence that I failed to choose. I experience it as the thing I need to protect.

My dad gave me some of that appetite. Other people gave me other pieces of it. And now I happen to be alive at a moment when the walls between some of those rooms have gotten thinner.

There will never be enough time to become everything I once imagined becoming. There wasn't enough time for him either. There isn't enough time for any of us.

But maybe that's not the right measure of a life.

Maybe the question isn't whether I became every person I dreamed of becoming. Maybe it's whether I kept walking through the doors that mattered while they were open, whether I carried something useful back from each room, and whether I left a few doors open behind me for the people who come after me.

My dad did that for me.

Maybe I can do it for someone else.

Maybe one life can hold more lives than I thought.