Adam's Blog

The Super Bowl is often discussed as a game, an entertainment event, or a marketing spectacle. All of that is true. And all of it misses what the Super Bowl actually reveals.

Most creative careers do not end in failure; they end in exhaustion. People rarely stop because they lack talent, intelligence, or ideas. They stop because they built a way of working that could not carry them through time—financially, emotionally, or structurally.

Every title tells a story, even before a single page is written. It suggests what kind of conversation the reader is about to enter. When I began working on this project, I had no title, just a question that had followed me for decades: How do people keep going? I had seen so many gifted creators, artists, founders, teachers, leaders, step into their work with extraordinary vision, only to step away when the world pushed back.

A creative life can stretch across decades. It can hold many careers, many mediums, many reinventions. Yet most people struggle to hold even one project without draining themselves. They treat attention like a resource that must be rationed, guarded, or forced into obedience. But attention is more alive than that. It responds to rhythm. It renews itself when given the right conditions.

Every generation of creators confronts a new technology that seems poised to make them obsolete. The printing press threatened scribes, photography unsettled painters, and radio worried stage actors. Each time, the tool that inspired fear eventually became an extension of human imagination. Artificial intelligence continues that lineage. It will not replace us, but it will show us who we are.AI functions as a mirror. It reflects patterns we’ve already made—our syntax, our aesthetics, our assumptions—and hands them back at high speed. When you use it, you are conversing with a distillation of collective human output. That can be exhilarating or unsettling. It’s exhilarating when the reflection reveals new connections. It’s unsettling when it exposes how predictable we have become. Either way, the mirror does not invent meaning; it amplifies what we give it.