Hey Work Fun Nation,

Four days offline after 46 days of daily posting.

Not by choice. System literally was running on fumes, jollibee, and lack of sleep. Got sick a day after the National AI Prompt Design Challenge ended.

At first nakaka-frustrate. 

Felt like I broke the streak right when momentum was building. Four days feels like forever when you've been showing up religiously for 46 straight days.

Pero it is what is is. 

A cool thing happened though: being forced to stop taught me something I wouldn't have learned otherwise.

Sometimes the best learning happens when you're not trying to learn.

Lying in bed with fever, my brain kept replaying moments from the competition.

Not the technical stuff. The human stuff.

Like listening to and learning from the best data scientists and engineers from the Philippines and Singapore, just taking in the knawledge. 

I kid you not when I say that I have never been so excited to learn from a 91-page blended AI + Powerpoint session before. 

And if you know me, I hate technical powerpoints. 

What I loved though, was being the dumbest person in the room and actually loving every second of it.

Old me would have felt intimidated. Would have tried to fake expertise or stay quiet to avoid looking stupid.

But something shifted during this self-imposed 90-day challenge.

I started asking questions instead of pretending to know answers.

"Wait, so you're telling me everything is just probability? There's no actual sentient thinking happening?" (at least currently, lol)

"How do 4000 vectors fit in a single token?"

"What do you mean by it ONLY 'resembles' the training data?"

The organizers didn't look annoyed. They were genuinely excited to explain.

These were people who chose to run an educational competition. 

Part of their mission was spreading AI literacy and it's responsible, safe, and compliant use. It was new data for them to use for future events like these.

In short, I was actually helping them do what they came there to do.

Being the dumbest person in the room wasn’t embarrassing. It was positioning.

It means you're in the right room.

It means you're learning faster than everyone who already thinks they know.

Getting sick forced me to sit with these realizations instead of immediately jumping into the next experiment or post.

The pause was the point.

Sometimes you need to stop building to understand what you've actually built.

Four days felt too long. But maybe it was exactly what I needed to see the bigger picture.

Back at it again starting today. 

But this time with a clearer understanding of what I'm actually doing here.

Want to follow along as I figure out what comes next? Join the newsletter:

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P.S. The contest results won't be out until next week, but honestly? The real win was learning I worked well with my teammate Adrian Gomez and getting comfortable being confused in public. That's where all the good learning happens.

🎉 Pst. Don't Keep Me A Secret. refer this newsletter to your freelancer friends. This REALLY REALLY helps me a lot, thanks! Or if you're done referring and you just want to buy me some coffee, I won't stop you.