MON
Something happened today
This became one of the most important things I learned about working with AI too. If every raw thought is immediately corrected, fact-checked, polished and turned into a conclusion, the conversation becomes efficient and dead. Efficiency is not always the goal. Sometimes you want to wander around the room touching things. What does this connect to? Why did that sentence make me stop? For some reason this reminds me of something completely unrelated.
The metaphor also changed the way I heard myself speaking. A sentence that didn’t quite make sense could still contain a useful image. A half-formed thought might be pointing toward a distinction I hadn’t found the words for. If I tried to polish it before following the thought, I might remove precisely the odd bit that made it worth exploring.
I had spent enough time treating a good conversation as a means toward a result: a plan, a solution, a sentence I could use. The brainstorming discovery shifted that emphasis. I began to enjoy the movement itself. A question might lead somewhere practical, somewhere personal, or somewhere hilariously unexpected. The detour could be more revealing than the destination I'd imagined when I began.
That didn't mean every detour was useful. I could still get lost in an explanation that sounded clever but no longer connected to what mattered. The freedom was in being willing to notice and correct that drift. An exploration could change direction without being a failure to follow the plan. I wanted to give that freedom to readers too, so they might feel invited into the thinking rather than marched toward a conclusion.
I began to appreciate how vulnerable a new idea can be. It hasn’t yet acquired its proper language. It may look silly, contradictory, or wildly impractical. If I respond to that first version with an immediate verdict, I may never learn what was trying to emerge.
Brainstorming became a way of allowing the exploration to happen before imposing the sorting system. I could still ask hard questions afterward; indeed, I wanted to. But the question ‘Is this right?’ can be premature when the more useful question is ‘What is this becoming?’ The freedom to play didn’t remove responsibility. It gave the better ideas a chance to show themselves.
That was part of the pleasure of working conversationally. I could risk a poor first attempt without having to defend it as finished. We could take the absurd analogy seriously enough to investigate it and lightly enough to discard it. I liked that combination. Not every brainstorming session needed a tidy list of conclusions. Sometimes the valuable result was simply that we had found a better question than the one we brought into the room.
Good. Follow it. Discovery has a strange geometry. The straightest route is not always the shortest because you do not know the destination yet. That is the part we forget. If I already knew exactly where the thought needed to end, I would not be discovering it. The bucket metaphor also gave me permission to be messy. My first wording does not have to be my final wording. My first interpretation does not have to survive. A stupid analogy can open the door to a useful one. A typo can become a joke. A joke can become a principle. A complaint about a plugin can become a book-design insight. Fill the bucket. Turn it over. Let gravity do some work.
