Collect Dots Before You Can Connect Them


I maintain a logbook of things that slow me down. Not major architectural problems. Not company-level strategy. Small annoyances. Repeated code reviews. The same class of bugs appearing again. Manually tracing which build introduced a regression discovered two weeks later. Places where I find myself doing work that feels repetitive, mechanical, or unnecessarily difficult. I want to be lazy. So I write them down. If something repeatedly demands effort, I assume there is probably a better way.

What surprised me is how often the solution does not appear immediately. Some problems sit in the notebook for months. Others for years. I remember manually investigating regressions after they were discovered internally weeks later. I remember comparing review styles to understand why some reviewers seemed faster and more effective than others. At the time I did not have a good answer. Then GenAI arrived and suddenly several disconnected notes started connecting. Problems that looked unrelated became candidates for the same kind of agent, workflow, or automation. The solution was not created in a moment. The pattern was.

Tenet #5 — Think 10×, Build 1× at a Time. The 10× is not always a grand vision. Sometimes it is simply preserving observations long enough for a pattern to emerge. A single dot means very little. A page full of dots begins to reveal shapes. Like finding a unicorn in the clouds or seeing a kolam emerge from individual strokes on a temple street, the picture becomes obvious only after enough pieces exist. The lesson is not to solve every problem immediately. The lesson is to keep collecting dots so future-you has something to connect.

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