The Ego Tax
Most of my friends are smarter than me. That's not false modesty, it's just true. And honestly I like it that way. It keeps me learning, it keeps me trying to catch up, it keeps me a little humble.
But lately I've noticed something strange. The smartest ones aren't always the ones getting the most out of this AI moment. A lot of the time it's the opposite.
It's not that they've been left behind, I'd never say that about them. It's that they haven't let themselves be open to it. They poke at ChatGPT once or twice, decide it's fine, and that's where they stop. And I get it, I really do. The world is moving stupid fast right now. New models drop every other week. Keeping up isn't easy, it's almost unreasonable to even ask.
But here's what I keep seeing, and I've caught myself doing it too. You sit a sharp, accomplished person down in front of one of these tools and the first thing they do is try to catch it being wrong. They ask it something they already know the answer to, find the flaw, and lean back satisfied. See, it's not that good. What they're really doing is protecting something. If the machine is better than them at a thing they're proud of, then who are they.
And that's the actual hard part. It was never about learning the tool. It's about letting your pride down. Admitting you've been humbled, and being okay with it. Being able to say hey, you won, thank you, and actually mean it. That's not easy for anyone. But the thing people forget is that life isn't zero sum. The tool being better than you doesn't mean you lost. With AI, and honestly with life in general, the move is to take whatever is in front of you and use it to your advantage.
I think of the cost of not doing that as an ego tax. Every time your pride makes you dismiss the tool instead of using it, you pay. The bill is small at first, and then it compounds. Dario Amodei talks about this a lot, why Anthropic is pulling ahead in the AI race, it's compounding, you start small and then it goes vertical, these insane growth numbers. Same thing PG says about startups, the whole game is growth rate. And the ego tax is just anti-growth. Every week you spend proving the thing is dumb is a week of compounding you skipped.
I can say this because letting my own pride down has changed my life these past months. Once I stopped trying to win and just started building, creating, letting my imagination run with Claude Code and Codex and AI in general, it got genuinely fun. You think of something and then you get to watch the pieces fall into place. That feeling is the whole reward, and I almost missed it because of pride.
There's a line I keep coming back to. "Be curious, not judgmental." People credit the great Walt Whitman, though I first heard it from Ted Lasso, playing darts, one of the great scenes. The judgmental person asks can it really do this and waits to be unimpressed. The curious person asks what can I do now that I couldn't last year, and goes looking. Same tool. Opposite lives.
I've got a friend who is the most anti-tech person I know. Doesn't trust the stock market, won't put a single dollar in it, on principle. Very I-can-do-it-myself. But here's the funny part, he fixes his own car off YouTube videos, because he's curious enough to sit down and learn it. And that's the whole thing right there. He already has the curiosity. He just hasn't pointed it at the stuff his pride won't let him admit he needs. Too proud for the mechanic, too proud for the tool.
And I'm not some tech person either, the story of why I never did a CS degree is an essay for another time. But I've built a bunch of these little pages, this one included, just by staying curious and asking questions I had no business asking. That's actually how this whole essay happened. I got curious, started poking around, and here we are.
And AI doesn't have all the answers anyway. Pedro Franceschi, one of the founders of Brex, said something that stuck with me, that the best answers still live inside people. So this isn't really an essay about being curious with AI. It's about living curious, period. Asking questions, talking to people, poking at things you don't understand.
That's the part nobody warns you about, it's just fun. You learn a stupid amount, you end up building things you had no business building, and as a bonus, people start thinking you're smart. So take it or leave it. Drop the ego and start playing. Ask the dumb questions. The people pulling ahead right now aren't the smartest in the room, they're the ones who were willing to look a little dumb for a while. Pay less ego tax. Get curious.