Regret is proof of progress.

AI scales personal agency. It makes high-agency people more productive and low-agency people more dependent.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YtFOxNbmD38

“The future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.” David Brooks

Adversity is a terrible thing to waste. Almost all of the biggest periods of growth in your life have germinated from your lowest points. Once shock, grief and sadness subside, much more energetic emotions arise - pain, resentment, bitterness, anger and a chip on your shoulder. Change is hard, and deeply fundamental change requires an insane amount of activation energy, far more than is available by just *wanting it a lot*. This is why people change so much after losing a parent, enduring a betrayal, losing a job or going through a breakup. Not just because the past version of their world has been stripped away, but because they finally have enough fuel to get their new life off the launchpad. In the mid 90’s there was a single mother living in near-poverty in Edinburgh. When she left her first marriage, it wasn’t a quiet parting. She’s described the relationship as abusive. She fled to Portugal with her baby daughter and a suitcase that contained the early chapters of a book she was working on. At one point her ex-husband hid the manuscript, trying to prevent her from leaving with it. She was clinically depressed and contemplating suicide. She couldn’t afford to heat her flat properly so she pushed a pram to cafés to write while her daughter slept. The manuscript was rejected by twelve publishers. That’s twelve people telling her, in different ways, that it wasn’t good enough. The rejection wasn’t abstract - it was survival-level. If the book failed, so did her last attempt at building a life. The humiliation of those refusals became momentum. J.K Rowling went on to sell 500+ million copies in the Harry Potter series globally and became richer than the Queen. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: not all adversity becomes growth. Some people are crushed by it. Adversity is fuel, not destiny. The difference is what you do with the surplus emotion. If that energy isn’t directed, it curdles into rumination. The same fuel that could power a transformation can just as easily power self-destruction. There’s also a time window because pain calcifies. The chip on your shoulder becomes your identity. The story of what happened becomes the story of who you are. Anger gets you moving but it can’t steer - it’s rocket fuel, not guidance. Eventually the chip on your shoulder has to become purpose. TLDR: The worst thing that’s happened to you might be the only thing powerful enough to change you. Pain is temporary and fuel is rare. So if you’re going through a hard time, don’t waste it. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” — Cormac McCarthy Source: Chris Williamson Newsletter