AI and the Expanded Sense of Self: Multiple Lifetimes in One

WR Essay expanded sense of self

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Michael Simmons dropped a link in a closed group chat: You're not using AI like THIS.

I almost didn't click it. Most AI videos offer one insight buried under forty minutes of filler. But this one was packed. Nearly a dozen ideas that landed.

One brought something into focus: "Expanded Sense of Self."

Not "10x your productivity." Not "automate your workflow." Not "build a side hustle in 30 days."

:pull Expanded sense of self.

That lens unlocked something I'd been circling for months but couldn't name. What follows is my attempt to excavate what was buried in that moment, and what it means for anyone asking the wrong questions about AI.

THE HOOK: The Wrong Question

Everyone's asking the wrong question about AI.

They're asking: "How can AI make me more productive at my job?"

They're asking: "How many hours can I save? How much faster can I work? How much more can I accomplish in the same time?"

These are optimization questions. Efficiency questions. Questions about doing what you already do, just betterer than the next person.

But what if that's not where the magic lies?

What if the real question, the one almost nobody is asking, is this:

What did you always want to be that you never had time to become?

THE SURFACE: What You Set Aside

You know that THING you set aside because life demanded you get serious.

Maybe it was music. You played guitar in high school, wrote songs in college, dreamed about it even when you were awake. Then you graduated, got a real job, and the guitar collected dust because there were bills to pay and a career to build and you couldn't justify the time.

Maybe it was art: drawing, painting, design. A creative spark you learned to treat like a hobby, not a direction. Not practical. Not profitable. Not "real work." You can probably still hear your parents' voices bouncing around up there.

Maybe it was writing. You always wanted to write. Had ideas, had a voice, had things to say. But every time you sat down, the words wouldn't come out right. Hours trying to stitch together a single paragraph that, in isolation, felt worthless. All these ideas, all these connections, and you just couldn't get them onto paper in a way that satisfied your harshest critic. You.

So you stopped trying. Not because you didn't care. Because caring hurt more than not trying.

Or maybe it was something else. That business you wanted to start. That subject you wanted to master. That skill you always admired in others but convinced yourself you didn't have the talent or time to develop.

The opportunity cost of specialization is brutal. So you chose the other path: the sensible one, the safe one, the one that paid. And every other version of yourself got shelved.

Not because you couldn't have been that person. But you had to choose security.

THE CAGE: Why You Stopped

That's the surface story. What's underneath:

You failed at something. And then you stopped trying.

The business collapsed. The career path didn't work out. The education ended before the degree. The creative pursuit never generated income. The thing you thought would be your life wasn't.

So you took survival work. Something that paid. Something stable. Something that didn't require you to risk failing again.

Bus driver. Project coordinator. Account manager. Payroll officer. Insurance claims.
Jobs you choose because they're steady, legible, and they pay every month. You just have to show up.

Survival work becomes a cage not because of the work itself, but because you can't afford to try again.

You can't afford the years to restart the business. Can't afford the time to retrain for the career. Can't afford the risk of investing in creative work that might not pay off.

So the thing you failed at stays failed. The thing you wanted to be stays impossible. And the identity you have (the survival job) becomes the only identity you can afford.

The cost of restarting was too high. So you froze.

Not because you didn't care. Because caring without the ability to act is torture.

You told yourself: "Maybe someday." "When I have more time." "When I'm more stable." "When the kids are older." "When I've saved enough."

But someday never comes. Because the restart cost never drops.

Until now.

:Pre-AI, identity was serial. You could be an analyst OR an artist OR an engineer. You couldn't be all three because time and skill acquisition were the constraints. If you wanted a second self, you had to pay years upfront.

Most of us made the calculation and chose the paycheck over the passion. We became what we needed to be to survive, not what we wanted to be to feel alive.

And then we forgot we even made a choice.

THE EXCAVATION: Parth's Other Lives

Three years ago, Parth Patil^[1] was a data analyst at Clubhouse^[2]. Clean identity. Clear role. He and his teammate Olivia were both data scientists, working with SQL queries and analytics code, doing the work that data teams do.

He had things he'd sidelined too: music, games, visual storytelling. Things he cared about but couldn't justify spending years relearning when he had a career to maintain.

Today, if you ask Parth what he is, the answer gets complicated.

He's still a competent data analyst. But he doesn't call himself a data analyst anymore. He calls himself a visual storyteller. An engineer. A :vibe coder (his phrase). Someone who builds and animates worlds.

Same human. Different portfolio of identities.

Listen to how he describes the shift: "I think of myself as a visual storyteller now. I think of myself as animating worlds and creating worlds. Even though I was a data analyst maybe just three years ago, now I'm also an engineer." Emphasis mine.

Watch the language. Not "I transitioned from data analyst to visual storyteller." Not "I left analysis for creative work."

"Now I'm ALSO an engineer."

The word is addition, not subtraction. Expansion, not replacement.

AI didn't just make him "more productive" at his job.

It made restarting affordable.

This is what he says about it, near the end of his conversation with Reid Hoffman^[3]:

"I think the main thing is that you should apply AI to something that you're intrinsically motivated by: your passions, your interests. I think there's a default kind of approach which is like 'I got to use this for my job, I got to become more productive' and that's fine but I think what's more interesting is using it to expand your sense of self."

Expand your sense of self.

Optimize your current self? No. Get better at what you already are? No. Expand into who else you could be.

He continues:

"Whoever you were before these tools came online, I promise you like you're much more than that once you start interfacing with these tools. You start expressing yourself through these tools. Now I think of myself as a visual storyteller... And I think it's like the expansion of the sense of self... I think of it as like I get to live all these other lifetimes. I get to be all these other things that I kind of like sidelined in favor of my career, but now I'm expanding back into them, coming back into them in a different angle."

"I get to live all these other lifetimes."

Read that again. Not "I get to be more productive." Not "I save time on tasks." Not "I automate the boring parts of my job."

:pull "I get to live all these other lifetimes."

The things he sidelined (music, games, visual storytelling) weren't dead interests. They were dormant selves. Versions of Parth that got deprioritized when he chose the data analyst path.

AI didn't make him a better data analyst. It let him resurrect the other versions of himself.

THE REBOOT: You're Not Training Skills, You're Running Auditions

Most people miss what identity expansion requires: not a mindset upgrade. A mechanics upgrade.

Pre-AI, becoming something new required years of :skill acquisition. Want to be a visual artist? Better dedicate thousands of hours to learning composition, color theory, technique. Want to be a writer? Better spend a decade learning structure, voice, revision. Want to code? Better invest serious time in syntax, logic, debugging.

The bottleneck wasn't desire. It was conversion cost: the price in time and effort to convert interest into competence.

So you made ruthless choices. You picked one path and committed. Because you only get one life, and the learning curve for mastery is steep.

And if that path failed? The cost of starting over was too high. You took survival work and accepted that the restart would never happen.

AI changes the economics.

It doesn't delete the effort required for mastery. But it collapses the cost of :early competence. It changes where effort is required.

You're no longer asking: "Can I justify spending three years learning to do this well enough to show anyone?"

You're asking: "Can I spend three hours seeing if this version of me feels real?"

That shift, from commitment to audition, from investment to experiment... is everything.

You're not training skills anymore. You're running auditions for possible selves.

Including the selves you thought you'd lost when the first attempt failed.

The Real Unlock: Making Restarting Cheap

":Multiple lifetimes" sounds like magical thinking. Like productivity-guru hyperbole. "You can be anything! Do everything! Have it all!"

The precision matters.

This isn't using AI to cheat your way into a new identity. It's using AI to reduce the friction of starting so you can get moving, make things, and let output (not fantasy) do the proving.

You still have :24 hours. AI doesn't give you more time. What changes is the conversion rate from hour to lived experience to finished artifact to identity proof.

Pre-AI: Interest → Years of Learning → Maybe Competence → Maybe Output → Maybe Identity

Post-AI: Interest → Weeks of Experimentation → Actual Output → Evidence of Self

You don't get more hours per day. You get more iterations per year. More shots on goal. More experiments that produce results instead of just practice runs.

And :iterations create the feeling of multiple lives.

Think about it this way: if you can go from "I wonder if I could write" to "I published an essay people read" in weeks instead of years, you can explore five different identities in the time it used to take to half-learn one.

That's not parallel processing. You still can't work on five things at once. It's serial rotation at high speed.

Music this month. Animation next month. Writing the month after. Each cycle produces output, not just learning. Each output becomes evidence that this version of you is real, not fantasy.

Over a year, you've lived what used to take a decade of serial commitment.

That's what "multiple lifetimes" means. Not infinite time. Compressed iteration cycles.

And for people who failed once and thought restarting was impossible? This changes everything.

The photography business that collapsed? You can restart it now. Not as a full business requiring years of investment, but as a portfolio you build in months using AI tools.

The writing career that never launched? You can restart it now. Not requiring a decade of craft development, but weeks of AI-assisted drafting and refinement.

The creative work you abandoned? You can restart it now. Not requiring thousands of hours alone, but hundreds of hours in collaboration with tools that fill the skill gaps.

AI didn't just make "trying new things" affordable. It made "trying again" affordable.

What Fear Blocks This

AI lowers the restart cost. But it doesn't lower the social and emotional cost. The fear isn't "can I do this?" It's "what happens if I can?"

What stops people from applying AI to their passions instead of their obligations:

Not fear of being bad at something new. Most people can tolerate amateur status if they're learning.

Not guilt about "wasting time" on non-productive activities, though that's part of it.

Not even uncertainty about where to start.

The :real fear: What would it mean if you got good?

Because "AI for obligations" is safe. It keeps your life structure intact. You use AI to be better at your job, make more money, optimize the thing you're already doing. Nothing fundamental changes.

But "AI for passions" threatens to rearrange the furniture.

If you discover you're good at the thing you always wanted to do, you have to confront why you're not doing it. You have to face the possibility that the "practical" path you chose wasn't the only viable option. That maybe you made a choice based on fear, not necessity.

And if you're good at it, people might see it. They might have opinions. They might expect you to keep doing it. You might become known for something other than your job title.

But for people who failed once? There's a deeper fear:

What if you try again and fail again?

What if the thing that didn't work the first time still doesn't work?

What if AI helps you produce output, but the market still doesn't care, or you still don't have what it takes, or the timing still isn't right?

The first failure taught you that trying is dangerous. That investing yourself in something that might not work is how you end up in survival mode.

So even though AI dropped the restart cost, the emotional cost of risking another failure stays high.

That exposure, being seen as something other than what you've been, and risking another collapse... requires :internal validation that AI can't supply.

AI can make the first draft. It can help you produce output at a level that surprises you. But it can't make you tolerate being seen in the middle of becoming again.

That's why productivity is easier. Productivity doesn't require identity change. It just requires efficiency.

The Shift From Nouns to Verbs

A tell you're experiencing identity expansion, not just productivity optimization:

Your :language shifts from nouns to verbs.

Old identity language is noun-heavy: "I am a bus driver." "I am a data analyst." "I am a copywriter."
Fixed labels. Useful for payroll. Not great for becoming.

New identity language is verb-heavy: "I'm writing essays." "I'm exploring animation." "I'm learning to code."
Verbs don't trap you. They signal motion. Output. Becoming.

This matters because AI collapses the gap between intent and evidence. It makes verbs easier to sustain because you can produce something real before your confidence arrives.

You're not "a writer." You're "someone who writes and publishes essays."
You're not "an engineer." You're "someone who builds tools people use."
You're not "an artist." You're "someone who creates visual worlds."

The shift is from identity as description to identity as promise. Not what you are, but what you'll keep making even when nobody's watching.

And for people restarting after failure, verbs offer what nouns never could: permission to begin again without claiming expertise.

You don't have to call yourself a photographer, especially if that word feels like a claim you haven't earned yet.
You can say: I'm photographing again. That's not branding. That's a fact.

You don't have to call yourself an entrepreneur, a loaded word after a collapse.
You can say: I'm building something on the side. Or: I'm testing a business idea.
Present tense. No baggage. No identity leap.

The verb-based identity says: I'm not claiming I've arrived. I'm claiming I'm in motion.

Titles trigger pressure. Verbs create momentum.

When Ambition Expands

Parth says something near the end that's easy to miss: "You'll be surprised at how much more ambitious you become when you see what you can do."

Nobody mentions this when they discuss AI productivity.

You don't just explore other identities and stop at the first small success. You don't generate one image and call it a day.

You generate an image and think: "Wait, I could build an entire world around this. I could create characters. I could animate a story. I could make this real."

Success breeds ambition when constraints lift.

Pre-AI, you learned to keep your ambitions modest. Dream small because execution cost was high. Don't imagine the big project because you'll never finish it alone.

And after failure? You learned to keep ambitions even smaller. Don't risk big dreams because you've seen how badly they can collapse.

AI removes that governor. The projects that used to feel impossible stop feeling impossible. Not because they're easy. Because they're startable.

The automation consulting gig. The faceless YouTube channel. The intellectual framework you always wanted to build. The website you wanted to launch. The creative project you shelved for "someday."

The thing you failed at before? You can see a path to trying it differently now.

These aren't productivity gains. These are capability expansions that unlock dormant ambition.

You stop asking "What should I do with the time I save?" and start asking "What becomes possible now that I can produce at the level I used to only imagine?"

The Third Shift

There's a :concept from Think and Grow Rich^[4]: the third shift.

You work 8 hours. You sleep 8 hours. What you do in the remaining 8 hours (the third shift) determines the life you get.

For most people, the third shift is narrow^[5]. It's boxed down to a fraction of time between obligations. Maybe two hours on a good night. Maybe weekends if you're lucky.

Productivity AI helps you do more within that constrained window. Write faster. Code more efficiently. Analyze data quicker. That's valuable.

But it's still optimization of a constrained resource.

The shift AI enables:

You're no longer limited by your current talents.

You're no longer limited by the skills you haven't acquired yet. You're no longer limited by the version of yourself you've become because following the paycheck put you in a box and told you to stay there.

You're no longer limited by the thing that didn't work the first time.

AI has, and will, shatter that box.

It said: You are not limited to your talents. You are not limited to learning curves. I can build anything you want. I can create anything you want.

But I don't know what "anything" is to you. You decide.

And you keep deciding, because I also don't know what quality is^[6]. Your judgment suddenly means everything.

This is the expansion. Not "work faster." Not "do more in less time."

Become someone you couldn't afford to be when skill acquisition was the bottleneck.

Restart the thing you thought was over when the first attempt failed.

The Portfolio Self

The honest frame that doesn't dismiss specialization^[7] but doesn't trap you in it either:

Keep one deep core. Build a small halo of :adjacent selves.

Depth as the engine. Breadth as the shock absorber.

Specialization builds depth. Depth compounds. It earns trust. It's how you stop being replaceable. There's real wisdom in my dad's approach: build three houses, sell two, keep one. He had to subsidize his diamond miner's pension, but the strategy worked. Focus creates value.

But specialization also creates hidden fragility. If the market reprices your lane, your entire identity takes the hit.

So the move isn't "abandon depth for breadth." It's this:

Maintain core mastery. Develop satellite competencies.

Data analyst as the foundation. Visual storytelling as the expansion. Engineering as the experimental branch. Music as the exploratory thread.

You're not trying to be equally good at everything. You're building optionality around a stable core.

This matters because AI weakens traditional hierarchies by making outputs more accessible. The winning strategy becomes less "climb the ladder in one domain" and more "demonstrate capability across contexts."

Less "recognize my credentials." More "watch what I can produce."

And for people in survival work after a failed first attempt?

The survival job becomes the stable core. It pays the bills, it's reliable, it's not going anywhere yet.

The restarted passions become the satellites. They're the proof you're more than the cage, they're the evidence you're rebuilding, they're the optionality for when circumstances shift.

You're not abandoning the survival job... that would be reckless. You're building escape velocity alongside it.

What You Discover About Yourself

When you stop optimizing current-you and start exploring other-yous:

You discover you weren't "one person." You were one context.

The you who works a job to pay bills is real. But it's not complete. It's the version of you that emerged from specific constraints, specific choices, specific circumstances.

Change the constraints, different versions emerge.

The you who turns creative vision into 3D worlds, like the :artist creating Nike concept stores in impossible locations, using AI to handle the technical 3D work that used to take years to learn. That version was always there. It just didn't have bandwidth when survival required full attention.

The you who codes websites, who creates visual content, who explores cognitive biases through interactive tools. Those selves weren't waiting to be discovered. They were waiting for permission to consume resources.

AI gives that permission by collapsing the cost of trying.

You're not becoming someone new. You're recovering versions of yourself that got deprioritized when you made the choice between passion and paycheck.

You're reclaiming versions of yourself you thought were dead when the first attempt failed.

The Application

When people say "I don't even know what my :passions are anymore. I've been in productivity mode so long I've lost touch with intrinsic motivation":

Don't start by asking "What am I passionate about?"

That's too abstract after years of running "usefulness" as your identity.

Ask instead: What :reliably gives me energy after I do it?

Not what you enjoy thinking about. What you enjoy recovering from.

That's the difference between fantasy and real pull.

Then use AI to run experiments that generate evidence, not ideas:

• Spend one hour using AI to write something. Anything. See how it feels to have words on a page that didn't require wrestling them into existence.
• Spend one hour using AI to generate visual concepts for that world you always imagined. See if seeing it makes you want to build more.
• Spend one hour using AI to prototype that tool you always thought would be useful. See if having a working version (even crude) changes how you think about your capabilities.

You're not committing. You're auditing possible selves.

Including the selves you tried to be before and couldn't make work.

And when one of those experiments produces something that makes you think 'wait, I want to keep doing this,' when you find yourself coming back without obligation, without external pressure: that's the signal.

That's the passion you didn't know you still had, or the passion you never knew you were capable of developing.

Or it's the passion you thought died with the failed attempt, and it didn't. It was just waiting for the restart cost to drop.

THE IMPLICATION: What You're Choosing

The productivity question ("How can AI make me better at my job?") is safe because it doesn't require identity change.

The expansion question ("What version of myself have I been unable to afford?") is dangerous because it does^[8].

Most people will choose the safe question. They'll use AI to optimize spreadsheets, draft emails faster, automate reports, save a few hours a week.

That's fine. That's valuable. There's nothing wrong with productivity gains.

But the magic lives elsewhere.

The magic is in what Parth describes: "You start expressing yourself through these tools... Now I think of myself as a visual storyteller... I get to live all these other lifetimes."

That's not a productivity claim. That's an identity expansion claim.

And if you're reading this and feeling something (not just interest, but pull), it's probably because you recognize the thing you set aside.

The music. The art. The writing. The building. The creating. The version of yourself that got shelved when you chose practical over passionate.

Or the version of yourself that failed, and you thought that version was dead.

AI didn't make that version of you impossible. Circumstances made it too expensive to explore.

The first failure made restarting too expensive to risk.

AI just made it affordable again.

The question isn't whether you can use AI to save time.

The question is: What will you do with yourself when becoming costs less than staying?

When restarting costs less than accepting the cage?

:x The Third Shift Concept

THE THIRD SHIFT FRAMEWORK

From Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937):

First shift: 8 hours work (survival, obligation)
Second shift: 8 hours sleep (recovery, necessity)
Third shift: 8 hours discretionary (becoming, choice)

Your third shift determines your trajectory more than your job does.

The AI twist: The third shift is already fragmented before AI arrives. Commuting, cooking, cleaning, childcare. You're lucky if you get 2 coherent hours. AI doesn't give you more third-shift hours or magically defragment your life. It makes each available hour (however small, however scattered) produce 10x the progress toward alternate identities.

Most people optimize their first shift (work productivity). The expansion happens when you aim AI at your third shift (identity exploration).

:x Serial vs Parallel Selves (The Economics)

THE IDENTITY ECONOMICS SHIFT

Before AI: One skill = years of investment. Want to try three things? That's your whole life.

After AI: One skill = weeks to see if it fits. You can audition ten identities in the time it used to take to half-learn one.

The bottleneck moved from "learning the skill" to "deciding what's worth mastering."

You're not getting mastery faster. You're getting evidence faster. Enough to know if this version of you is real or fantasy.

:x Fear Diagnostic

WHY "AI FOR PASSIONS" FEELS SCARIER THAN "AI FOR WORK"

Using AI for work is safe. It keeps your life structure intact. Nothing fundamental changes.

Using AI for passions threatens to rearrange the furniture.

The real fear isn't failure. It's success.

If you discover you're good at the thing you always wanted to do, you have to confront why you're not doing it. You have to face the possibility that the "practical" path you chose wasn't the only option. That maybe you made a choice based on fear, not necessity.

The diagnostic:

If you're using AI only for work but avoiding creative experiments, ask: "Am I afraid of failing at this, or afraid of succeeding at it?"

If the answer is succeeding, that's the signal. That's the thing you need to try.

:x Nouns vs Verbs

NOUNS VS VERBS

Nouns trap you in categories. Verbs give you motion.

"I am a bus driver" is fixed. It describes what you do for money. When that changes, your identity fractures.

"I'm building tools people use" is fluid. It describes what you produce. The evidence accumulates even if your job title changes.

AI enables verb-based identity because you can produce outputs (proof of capability) without years of credential-building.

The shift is from "I am X" to "I do Y, and here's the proof."

Quick test: How do you introduce yourself at work events versus creative spaces? To strangers versus close friends? In your head versus out loud?

Different answers = you're already managing multiple identities. AI just makes the non-work identities productively viable.

:x Passion Rediscovery

HOW TO FIND YOUR PASSIONS WHEN YOU'VE FORGOTTEN THEM

Don't ask "What am I passionate about?" That's too abstract after years of productivity-first thinking.

Ask instead: "What gives me energy AFTER I do it?"

Not what you enjoy thinking about. That's fantasy.
What you enjoy recovering from. That's real pull.

The experiment:

Pick something you used to care about. Spend one hour using AI to produce something in that domain. Writing, visual art, building a tool, creating music. Anything.

Notice how you feel 24 hours later.

The signal isn't "did I enjoy the hour?"
The signal is "do I want to do it again tomorrow?"

If yes, that's evidence of real passion.
If no, cross it off and try something else.

You're running auditions, not making commitments. Low cost, high information value.

:x Core Satellites

THE PORTFOLIO SELF: DEPTH + OPTIONALITY

Specialization builds depth. Depth compounds. It earns trust. It's how you stop being replaceable.

But specialization also creates hidden fragility. If the market reprices your lane, your entire identity takes the hit.

The AI-era move:

Keep one deep core (60-70% effort). Build a small halo of satellites (30-40% effort).

Your core is where you build deep mastery. This is your stability, your reputation, your compounding asset.

Your satellites are 2-4 adjacent domains where you maintain competence. These are your shock absorbers, your pivots, your optionality.

Example: Parth's core is data analysis and engineering. His satellites are visual storytelling, animation, world-building.

The goal isn't equal skill across all domains.

The goal is: Unquestionable in one. Credible in several.

That combination creates a resilient identity that can shift when context changes.

:x Multiple Lifetimes

MULTIPLE LIFETIMES: THE HONEST CLAIM

You still have 24 hours. You still can't work on everything at once. Mastery still takes years.

What changed: the conversion rate from hour to output to identity evidence.

Pre-AI: Interest → 3 years learning → Maybe competence → Maybe output
Result: 2-3 serious identity explorations per decade

Post-AI: Interest → 3 weeks experimenting → Actual output → Evidence of capability
Result: 10-20 serious identity explorations per decade

"Multiple lifetimes" means 5-10x more shots on goal over the same span of years.

Not parallel lives. Compressed serial exploration.

The feeling comes from:

Producing work in domains you never could access before. Seeing evidence that "writer you" or "artist you" is real, not fantasy. Accumulating a portfolio of outputs across identities in timeframes that used to be impossible.

You're not doing more things at once. You're completing more identity experiments per unit of lifetime.

:x Iteration Economics

WHY "MORE ITERATIONS" CHANGES EVERYTHING

Identity clarity = (# of attempts) × (quality of feedback) × (speed of learning)

Pre-AI: 6 months to produce something worth showing. Get feedback. 6 more months to incorporate it. After 2 years: maybe 3-4 serious attempts.

Post-AI: 3 days to produce something worth showing. Get feedback. 3 more days to incorporate it. After 2 months: 15-20 serious attempts.

More iterations means faster convergence on what you're actually good at (versus what you think you're good at). What you enjoy doing (versus what you enjoy having done). What people value (versus what you assume they value). Where your unique voice emerges (versus copying others).

This is why "multiple lifetimes" isn't hyperbole. If you can run 10x more experiments per year, you can explore 10x more possible selves in the same calendar time.

The bottleneck was never interest. It was cost per iteration.

AI collapsed that cost. Now the constraint is your willingness to run the experiments.

:x Vibe Coder

"VIBE CODER"

Parth's term for someone who codes not for production systems but to create aesthetic experiences and visual worlds.

Contrasts with traditional software engineering focused on functionality, performance, and reliability.

Think: coding to animate worlds, build interactive art, explore visual storytelling; not to ship enterprise software or optimize databases.

:x Mastery vs Competence

MASTERY VS EARLY COMPETENCE

Early competence: Producing outputs that work, that people can use, that demonstrate capability. AI can help you reach this in days or weeks.

Mastery: Deep expertise, nuanced judgment, innovation within domain. Still requires years of experience, pattern recognition, and judgment that AI can't shortcut.

A coding agent can help you build a functional website in days. That's early competence. Becoming a software architect who designs elegant systems at scale still requires years.

The identity expansion claim is about accessing early competence across multiple domains, not achieving mastery in all of them.

You're building a portfolio of "credible amateur" identities with 1-2 areas of deep mastery, not claiming equal expertise across all explorations.

:x Benjamin Benichou

BENJAMIN BENICHOU: FROM BRAND STRATEGIST TO AI VISUAL ARTIST

Benjamin Benichou spent 15+ years as a creative director working on campaigns for Nike, Adidas, ASICS, and Microsoft. Traditional path. Traditional skills. Traditional constraints.

When AI tools emerged in 2023, he didn't use them to get better at his existing job. He used them to access skills that would have taken years to master: 3D modeling, architectural visualization, motion graphics, world-building.

He created Nike concept stores in "impossible locations" (Mount Everest, ancient Greek ruins). AI-generated fashion campaigns blending samurai culture with luxury brands. Complex 3D environments that would have required teams of specialists.

The shift: Pre-AI, creating a 3D architectural visualization required learning Blender, Maya, lighting systems, rendering engines. Thousands of hours of technical training. Post-AI, he used tools like Midjourney, ControlNet, and Gen-2 to produce campaign-quality 3D visuals in days, not months.

He went from "creative director who hires 3D artists" to "visual artist who creates 3D worlds." Same person. Different portfolio of capabilities.

Now runs ©3.11LABS (AI creative studio) and teaches 600+ creatives through "Masters of AI."

This isn't about AI making someone more productive at their job. It's about AI making dormant capabilities accessible. Turning "I wish I could do that" into "I'm doing that now."

The technical barriers that used to require years of training collapsed to weeks of experimentation. The identity expansion happened because the restart cost dropped.

:x Passion Definition

WHAT "PASSION" MEANS HERE

"Passion" is a slippery term. This essay uses it to mean: activities that give you energy after doing them, that you return to without external pressure, that feel like expression rather than obligation.

This is narrower than "things I enjoy thinking about" (fantasy) and broader than "things I'm currently good at" (capability).

The test isn't "does this excite me?"
The test is "do I want to do it again tomorrow?"

Passion in this frame is discovered through repeated engagement, not declared based on initial enthusiasm.

:x Identity Definition

WHAT "IDENTITY" MEANS HERE

This essay uses "identity" to mean: the self-concept you hold about your capabilities and the evidence (outputs, actions, results) that supports or contradicts that self-concept.

Specifically: What am I capable of creating? What kind of work do I make?

Three types:

"I want to be a writer someday" - Fantasy, no evidence, doesn't count.

"I have a degree in X" - Membership, not capability, doesn't count.

"I write essays people read" - Externally evidenced, behaviorally defined. This is what counts.

Identity expansion means expanding the portfolio of things you can legitimately say "I make this" about, with work to prove it.

Not what you hope to be. Not what you studied. What you produce repeatedly.

:x Skill Acquisition Economics

SKILL ACQUISITION ECONOMICS

The "10,000 hours to mastery" figure comes from Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Ericsson later clarified that 10,000 was an average for elite violinists, not a universal rule.

But even that misses the distinction between mastery and useful competence. Josh Kaufman's The First 20 Hours argues that focused practice can take you from zero to reasonably proficient in just 20 hours. Not world-class, but functional.

The point isn't the precise number. It's the economic reality.

Pre-AI, becoming credibly competent in a new domain required significant time investment. Whether 20 hours or 10,000 depended on what "competent" meant and how you practiced.

AI doesn't eliminate the timeline for mastery, but it does collapse the time to "good enough to produce real output." What might have taken 100 hours of exploration can now happen in 10.

Exploration, not mastery.

:x Time Creation

TIME CREATION

Technically, AI can create time by eliminating tasks you'd otherwise do manually. If AI drafts your emails, analyzes your data, or generates your first-draft code, you do get those hours back.

But that's still productivity optimization: AI doing your current work faster.

The distinction: Using AI to save time on existing obligations versus using AI to explore capabilities you couldn't previously access.

Identity expansion isn't about getting more hours. It's about what becomes possible within the hours you already had but couldn't productively use for exploration.

You're not gaining time. You're gaining conversion efficiency: turning hours into finished work that proves capability.

Footnotes