How To, or How Do I?
Value is a combination of utility and aesthetics, a protocol and a way of seeing. Which of your two terms is empty?
Value is a combination of utility and aesthetics, a protocol and a way of seeing.
Utility is value structured to travel. It is written down, standardized, delegated, and scaled, so that the doing can be detached from the doer. Anyone (or anything) can pick it up and run it. Aesthetics is embodied: a way of seeing that lives in a person, situated and particular, hard to explain and harder to hand off. It shows up as taste and judgment, in the micro-decisions you don’t remember making. It cannot be outsourced, because the seeing is the person.
We tend to treat these as a choice (craft or system, soul or scale), and organize careers around it. The specialist builds a protocol and sells it until it empties; the artist protects a way of seeing and refuses to structure it. Both are a response to the same fear: that structuring the self will cost the self, or that keeping it will cost a living.
The language gives it away. “How to” assumes the doer is interchangeable; it is the register of utility, an instruction that works in anyone’s hands, clean and transferable, and a little hollow, because nobody is in the sentence. “How do I?” keeps the self in it. It cannot be answered in general; it is situated and unoutsourceable, the register of aesthetics. The I is the whole point.
Take a job search. “How to write a cover letter” has a thousand answers, all correct and all interchangeable. “How do I write to this person, about this work, given what I actually care about?” has one answer, and only one person can find it. The first produces a document, and the second produces a conversation. Most of the time we search for the first and need the second.
Value is the combination of the two, and you always have both terms, but one of them might be empty. Utility with no aesthetics is a commodity; it works and scales, and is worth almost nothing because everyone has it. Aesthetics with no utility stays trapped in one person; it is real but unmoved, uncompounded, and unshared. Without economic articulation, it remains a private vision with no place in the world.
With AI, the first term fills up on its own. Anything structured can be run to infinity, by anyone, at almost no cost. Prompts are passed around like recipes, and the outputs start to look alike (competent, clean, interchangeable). When the protocol is abundant, it stops being where the value is. The scarce term is the one that cannot be prompted: the person asking, and what they see in the answer.
Most advice is written as “how to” and read as “how do I,” with the reader quietly filling in the missing self. When the translation happens, the instruction becomes yours; you bend it, drop half of it, and find the part that fits your situation. When it doesn’t happen, you follow the steps and end up with average value: a competent output that belongs to no one, with nothing in it to check against (n = 1 fidelity needs an n).
Filling the empty term looks different depending on which one it is. If utility is full, the work is to put yourself back in the sentence: notice what you see that others don’t, name it, and let it shape the protocol instead of disappearing into it. If aesthetics is full, the work is articulation: write down what you do, find the repeatable parts, and build just enough structure for your way of seeing to travel without you. Neither is comfortable. The first can feel like slowing down, and the second can feel like giving something away. Both are how a practice compounds.
The question is not which one you are, but which of your two terms is empty.
This week, I invite you to consider where you ask “how to” when you can be asking “how do I.”
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