Do What Is Clearly Right and Easy to Begin

No one can map out the entire path to becoming a professional footballer in advance. Which club you will join, which coach you will meet, and which match will bring your chance are all impossible to plan. But one more dribbling drill today is unlikely to be wrong. Touch the ball with the inside of your foot, change direction with the outside, and keep it at the right distance from your body. None of this guarantees that you will become a professional. It only makes you more likely to control the ball when your chance finally arrives.

This is what I mean by doing what is “clearly right and easy to begin.” What is clearly right is not the outcome but the direction: if you want to become a better footballer, one more dribbling drill will not take you farther from that goal. Nor is the practice itself easy. Dribbling is tiring and repetitive, and progress may remain invisible for a long time. What is easy is deciding whether to do it. The ball is at your feet. Practicing is the obvious choice.

AI is developing so quickly that it is becoming harder to tell which jobs will disappear in five years, which products will emerge, or how long the tools we learn today will remain useful. More prediction will not make the future clearer. We can instead practice the AI equivalent of dribbling. When a new model is released, test it on a real task. When an important paper appears, read the original. When you see someone automating work with an agent, build one yourself. The models and tools may soon become obsolete, but first-hand knowledge of where they work, how they fail, and how to verify their results becomes your own experience.

The less clearly we can see the future, the more we should repeat actions whose value is not worth debating and that leave us with experience afterward. One attempt will not remove the anxiety or guarantee that we reach the destination we imagined. It simply keeps us from standing still and guessing where the ball might come from. The ball is still at our feet. Dribble it once more.