The Principle I'm Circling

Bret Victor has a talk called Inventing on Principle. His argument: the most meaningful creative work doesn't come from chasing passion or solving interesting problems. It comes from committing to a principle, and letting that principle constrain everything you build.

His example is Larry Tesler. Tesler believed no person should be trapped in a mode. He didn't write essays about it. He built cut, copy, and paste. By the time you used his software, you were living in a modeless world whether you knew it or not.

Eight weeks into this newsletter, I think I've found mine. I can't compress it to a sentence yet. But I can name the fight.

The people closest to the problem are structurally excluded from solving it. And the small teams doing the hardest work have the least infrastructure to do it with.

Two halves of the same wrong. You see it in AI adoption that stalls because nobody invested in context for the humans using it. In boardrooms where decisions get made without the people who'd actually live with them. In open source projects where willing contributors can't help because no one built the surface to plug into. And in foster care systems designed without lived experience experts at the table.

Eight weeks ago I would have called those four separate projects. Running technology for a merchandise company. Building a nonprofit. Learning AI. Figuring out fatherhood with a diagnosis I wasn't prepared for.

The writing collapsed them. Not into a brand. Into recognition.

Here's what I didn't expect. I started this newsletter to package what I knew. The Lyft hack at 6 AM. The system that curated a decade of my emails. The three phases every builder moves through. Stories I'd been carrying.

Around the fourth issue, something shifted. A piece about a tattoo, a talk I almost skipped, and a slide on open-source infrastructure. I stopped packaging and started discovering. A business architecture diagram mapped onto foster care. Open-source contribution models looked structurally identical to what I was trying to build at Foster Greatness. I wasn't choosing those connections. The writing was surfacing them.

The issue about my daughter Jessie surprised me most. She has Rett syndrome, is four, nonverbal, and the reason I run. The piece was about putting her in the stroller and running until she fell asleep. Building a bond at speed, facing the same direction, without a word between us.

That piece wasn't about technology. But the structure was the same. When the expected path is closed, you build what you have into a way through. A stroller and a long road, or a small team and the right infrastructure. The move is identical.

I used to think I was a tinkerer. Financial AI agents. Email tools. Coding experiments with no clear purpose. I thought that was just how I learned.

I think now it was something else. It was searching. Building an inventory of tools and patterns, waiting for the thing that would organize them.

The building was never going to do that on its own. The writing is what made the principle visible.

Victor says the hard part isn't finding the principle. It's the commitment. Once you have it, every project gets evaluated against the fight. Some interesting problems won't fit, and you walk past them. That's the cost.

The closest I can get to the sentence right now: build the surfaces, the tools, the data, and the contribution paths so the people closest to the problem lead the solution. Make the infrastructure open enough that a three-person team can do what used to require thirty.

That's what I'm building. The writing is how I keep finding out why.

P.S. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is one of the best talks I've come across on organizing your work around something you believe. The full transcript is on James Clear's site. If you've ever felt like your separate projects were actually the same fight, it's worth the read.