​

Here's something worth sitting with: we're living through the fastest technological acceleration in recorded history, and the people building the most interesting things are deliberately going backward.

Not out of nostalgia. Out of strategy.

Austin Kleon put a version of this idea in Keep Going that I haven't been able to shake.

His rule for when creative ideas dry up: find a popular idea you hate, then go find the old, forgotten opposite that everyone abandoned. Dust it off. Resurrect it. The freshest ideas aren't ahead of you. They're buried.

I've been watching this play out in real time. Designers pulling from 1960s print magazines. Creators building with formats that pre-date the internet. People writing long-form essays again, by hand, on purpose. Not because it's efficient. Because it's theirs in a way that a generated output never will be.

The lazy critique of all this is that AI is making us dumber. That people are outsourcing their thinking and losing the ability to do it themselves.

That's not wrong for some people. But it's the least interesting thing happening right now.

The people actually winning aren't using AI as a shortcut.

They're using it as a floor-raiser. More time to think means more time to go deep, to go backward, to find the thing everyone else skipped over because it was too slow or too hard or too old.

Which brings me to something I heard this week that I keep coming back to. The idea of floors vs. ceilings.

Most people set goals at the ceiling. Go viral. Build the audience. Hit the number. Then they stare at it until the motivation drains, they do nothing for three weeks, and call the goal unrealistic.

The people actually building something set floors. A floor is a non-negotiable. Something that happens regardless of how you feel, what came up, or how uninspired the morning is. One post. One email. One hour of deep work. Small enough to be undeniable. Consistent enough to compound.

Here's why that matters: every time you hit your floor, you're stacking proof. Evidence that you are, in fact, the person you're claiming to be. Do that long enough, and the ceiling stops being a ceiling. It becomes a natural next step.

Most people are reaching for the ceiling. The ones building something are quietly raising the floor.

So what does "going backward on purpose" actually look like?

Three moves worth trying this week:

Find the forgotten opposite. What's the dominant belief in your niche that you think is wrong or overrated? Now go find what people believed before that became the default. It might be a format, a strategy, a style, a philosophy. Bring it back with a new frame. That's not copying. That's archaeology.

Commit to a format before you feel ready. The era of showing up and hoping the quality speaks for itself is done. What people recognize in 2026 is a show. A recurring format. A face they can tune into. You don't need to be perfect at it. You need to be repeatable.

Raise your floor by 1%. Not your ceiling. Your floor. What's the one thing you'll do every day even on your worst week? Start there. Do it for 30 days without evaluating the results. The results come later.

​