Struggling and Mentorship
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While I was building out this blog for Clearn, a platform that creates a beautiful asynchronous mentorship program for remote workers, I had a thought about struggling.
I struggled hard.
Because I didn't have ChatGPT at the ready to shape the UX the way that I wanted.
Of course, this made me struggle more, but in struggling, I realized how much I had to give thanks to some of the UI libraries (thanks Tailwind UI!)
And how little I know about how Tailwind CSS was working behind the scenes.
It is a very tricky proposition, however -- development, as I find it generally falls for me under one of two modalites:
1- I spend a hell of a lot of time reading a bunch of documentation and watching videos, occassionally getting involved in tutorial hell, or just frittering about, messing with the "UI" -- * aka, pixel-perfect procrastination*!
2- I spend a lot of time struggling and I do not always fix or achieve what I want.
For me, ChatGPT has introduced a new paradigm:
3- I can pretty much choose when I want to make progress, and when I want to learn, and I can use the LLM to "quiz" me and double click into the documentation to "shape" the LLM into whatever level of scalability / "correctness" feels appropriate.
Now, not everyone is a developer / coder / engineer / whatever ... but everyone is a "builder."
In the new LLM-infused economy, my take is that if you are not building, you ought to be. But that is for another essay ...
Who cares?
(Or, How does this relate to an async mentorship platform?)
How do you find the right balance between struggling independently, and getting a mentor / co-worker / whoever to give you tips?
It is a very interesting question to me, and not a straight-forward one.
For Clearn, what I would like to do is build in some of the same LLM magic in a democratized way so that even if you -- or your employees -- are not by default the kind that enjoy a struggle ...
Everyone -- and I do mean everyone -- who wants to get better at something -- and by something I mean anything -- will do well to put some struggle into things.
So, in the coming weeks, we at Clearn will be looking to introduce new features and technologies to incorproate LLMs that not only blindly follow you, but also offer a bit of resistance, so that you put in the hard work and struggle on your own.
You might say, like a real good mentor would!
That's all for now, Will
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