What would you (not) do if you weren't afraid?

Are you learning AI out of fear, or love?

Last summer I had major surgery and haemorrhaged 2.4 litres of blood. I only found out later that a person my weight has about 3.5 litres total — meaning I’d lost almost 70% of the blood in my body. For a few days, I fainted every time I tried to stand up.

About a month after that, I was lying on the sofa watching an AI tool tutorial on YouTube.

Not because I felt well enough to. Because I felt like I had to.

My LinkedIn feed was relentless — people shipping agents, automating entire workflows, building things that seemed impossibly sophisticated. The AI development pace felt like a treadmill someone had cranked up while I was in hospital.

I tried to catch up. I bookmarked tutorials, saved podcasts, signed up for courses. But the longer that list grew, the less I wanted to touch any of it. My body was still recovering, but my mind was drowning in a backlog I’d created for myself.

But I didn’t always feel this way.

. . .

Ages ago, a few years before ChatGPT existed, I was already tinkering with GPT-2. I spent evenings and weekends playing with no-code tools, messing around with SEO automation, learning data models and analytics. Nobody told me to. There was no career pressure attached to it. I did it because I found it genuinely interesting — the kind of tinkering where you lose track of time without meaning to.

That version of me wasn’t “keeping up.” She was just curious.

Here’s what I think happened between then and now: the AI industry got very good at manufacturing urgency.

The people who benefit financially from our anxiety — poeple who sell online courses, AI consultants, or, God forbid, influencers — have turned AI education into a fear campaign. The message, dressed up in different ways, is always the same: [Your job] is dead, here’s how AI is revolutionizing it, and if you don’t know how to use [latest tool] you’re going to be left behind.

And it works. I’ve had enough private conversations with solid, experienced product folks to know I’m not alone in this. Perfectly competent product leaders feeling secretly inadequate because they haven’t tried OpenClaw yet, or because they are still wrapping their heads around Claude Code, or because someone on LinkedIn just raised $100M on a project they vibe-coded over the weekend.

The problem with fear-based learning isn’t just that it feels bad. It’s that it doesn’t actually work.

I’ve noticed that when I’m learning to avoid falling behind, I’m not really learning. I’m performing learning. I bookmark the video, subscribe to the webinar, save the thread — and then avoid opening any of it. Because the motivation was fear and anxiety, not love and curiosity. And that’s exhausting to sustain.

Contrast that with how I felt tinkering with GPT-2 back in the day. I wasn’t trying to cover everything. I was just following whatever seemed interesting that evening. Things stuck because I actually cared about them. I discovered new skills. I built something small and immediately wanted to build something else.

. . .

Yesterday, I rebuilt Thinkers and Tinkerers website using Claude.

I would normally have reached for Carrd or Framer — reliable no-code tools that get the job done. But this time, I just started tinkering. HTML and CSS, back to basics, with Claude helping me figure things out as I went. The result is nothing impressive. It’s just a simple, static site.

But here’s what it did: it beat the inertia.

I’d been stuck in that paralysed state for months — saving things to watch, not watching them, feeling vaguely guilty about it. And then one afternoon of low-stakes tinkering snapped me out of it. Not because of what I built, but because I remembered what it felt like to be interested in something rather than anxious about it.

The bar for “starting” is so much lower than the LinkedIn feed makes it look. It doesn’t have to be an autonomous agent. It doesn’t have to impress anyone. It just has to be something you’re actually curious about.

. . .

So here’s the question I’m sitting with, and maybe you are too:

If you stripped out all the fear and anxiety — what would you actually want to learn? What would you explore just because it seemed interesting?

That’s the thing worth starting with. Not the tutorial that promises to make you “AI-native.” Not the tool everyone’s talking about this week. The thing that makes you a little bit curious, even now, underneath the noise.

Start with the thing you’d do if you weren’t afraid.