Somewhere in the middle of filming my Ironman training series, I realized I wasn't making content anymore. I was making the documentary.
Years ago, I wanted to make a documentary about the DJ world, the one you only see from inside the booth. I could picture it. What I couldn't picture was how I'd pay for the camera, who would edit it, or how many years I'd have to spend learning before I made something I'd be willing to show anyone. So it stayed on a list.
Curiosity used to be expensive. Every new interest came with a bill: years of skill, money, access, or somebody who knew how to do the parts you couldn't. Most of us could only afford one or two of them. So you picked the one that paid, and everything else got filed under hobbies. For a long time I told myself the DJ documentary was a discipline problem. Looking back, it was mostly a math problem.
Then the math changed.
A couple of years ago, I started filming a video series about my training. It began with me explaining why I'd signed up for an Ironman, and it ended at the finish line of my first marathon. All it took was a phone, an editing app, and an AI that could draft the parts I didn't know how to write yet. Not about the world I'd pictured, and not as a film, but the same want underneath it, finally getting made every week.
That's what I mean when I say AI changed the economics. The tools didn't make the series for me. What they did was carry me past the parts I couldn't do yet, fast enough that I was still curious by the time I reached the parts only I could do. Now I can follow a random curiosity way further than I used to, far enough to find out whether it's real before it costs me years.
But cheap isn't the same as serious, and I've got proof of that too.
I've been saying I'm going to write a book for over a decade. Different concepts, different titles, at one point a friend already lined up to write the foreword. When the tools showed up, I finally sat down and had AI help me outline one. The outline was the easy part, and there's still no book.
AI made it cheap to start, but it didn't make me care any more than I already did. Whatever that book was missing, it was never access.
That outline is somewhere on my hard drive. It's not alone in there. The internet is full of afternoon outlines now, because starting got cheap before caring did. So the scarce part moved. It used to be the skill or the money. Now it's the taste to know which curiosities deserve to be taken seriously, and the willingness to stay once the novelty wears off and it's just work.
The advantage isn't picking the perfect lane at 25 and staying there for thirty years. It's being the person who keeps getting curious, and has the discipline to take those curiosities seriously.
A career starts to look less like a résumé and more like a portfolio of things you cared enough about to get good at. DJing is in mine, and so are creative direction, endurance racing, and this, writing out loud about all of it. The documentary is in there now too, years late and in a format I never pictured.
The book isn't in there yet, and I've stopped blaming the price. Curiosity got cheap. Caring enough to finish never did.
Filed under Curiosity / AI / Career. Part of the OWNWARD series on tools and systems for people rebuilding in public.