What Excites Me?

I keep seeing the same promise online.

“Open Cursor. Type a few prompts. Let AI write the code while you drink a coffee. You do not need to know how to code. You just need an idea. One or two hours a day is enough.”

Whenever I hear this, one question bothers me. If making money were really that easy and that reliable, why are you telling me? There is no such thing as a free lunch. It is such an old phrase that it almost sounds tired now. Maybe that is because we keep needing to hear it.

This is not the first time. There was Bitcoin. Dropshipping. AI videos. Every time, the language was strangely familiar.

“This is your chance.” “Almost nobody knows about this yet.” “You only need two hours a day.”

Then, not long after, the secret that “nobody knows” is being sold in a $390 course. Only the tool has changed. We have not. We still want a large result from a small amount of effort. We want to know before everyone else. We are afraid of missing the opportunity. More than anything, we are afraid of standing still while the rest of the world moves ahead. That is why few promises are more powerful than the promise of an easy path.

AI may make this even worse. Now, apparently, we can build anything. An app. A video. A book. A one-person business. Maybe that is true. But that is where the real problem begins.

“In a world where we can make almost anything,

what should we make?”

Lately, I have been trying to change the order of my questions.

“Will this make money?”

I am trying not to ask that first. Instead, I ask questions that are slightly less exciting.

“What problem have I spent a long time thinking about?” “What do other people walk past that I somehow cannot stop noticing?” “Do I have enough knowledge and experience to understand that problem?” “And if I do not, am I willing to spend years learning?” “Could my experience and knowledge eventually help not only me, but someone else?”

These questions are not very exciting. They will never get as many clicks as:

“Make $10,000 a month in 30 days.”

But strangely, I trust them more. Perhaps, if I stay with something like that long enough, money may eventually follow. Maybe it will not. But at least I will not walk away empty-handed. The problem was mine to begin with. I was trying to solve something I genuinely needed solved. At the very least, I have helped myself.

And the knowledge remains. The judgement remains. The failed attempts remain. Then, when I try to make something else, I have materials my former self did not have.

Elon Musk once said:

“Aim to make more than you take. Pursue providing useful products and services. Money will come as a natural consequence of that. You can’t pursue happiness. You have to pursue things that lead to happiness.”

Maybe money works in a similar way. So perhaps the first question is not:

What can I build that will make money?

Maybe it is:

What still excites me enough to pursue, even if it does not make money yet?