Proof of the Supermind

This morning I woke up to find Punching Above Your Weight ranked #8 in Amazon’s Top New Releases in Artificial Intelligence.

I’m still a little stunned. I wrote this book in a week and published it within a month. There was no publishing house, no committee, and nobody to ask for permission. There was an idea I believed in, a lot of early mornings, and what the MIT professor Thomas Malone would call a supermind.

What a supermind is

Malone describes a supermind as a group of people, tools, and technologies acting together in ways that seem intelligent. AI is part of it, but so is everything else that went into this book:

• Me, writing with as much clarity and urgency as I could manage
• ChatGPT, helping me draft and tighten the structure
• Amazon KDP, putting the book in front of the world almost overnight
• Readers, who read it, reviewed it, and passed it along

None of this is science fiction. It’s people and tools pooling what they know to make something faster than any one of them could alone. If you want to go deeper, Malone’s book Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together is worth your time.

Why it matters to me

The whole book was an experiment. Could I take what I believe about AI, the frameworks I use, and the underdog mindset I’ve carried for years, and turn them into something useful in days instead of years? Could I get past my own perfectionism and put it in readers’ hands while it still felt urgent?

It turns out I could. The ranking is lovely, but it isn’t the point. What it proved to me is that constraints can make you faster and clearer, that writing, editing, design, and publishing can all be compressed with the right tools, and that people working alongside AI can do things that neither could do apart.

What’s next

This was round one. I’m planning a trilogy. I’m building AI products. I’m designing, teaching, performing, and sharing what I learn as I go, because a supermind is only as strong as its willingness to share what it knows and keep learning.

If you’re reading this, here are two questions to sit with:

What could you create if you stopped waiting for permission?

What does your version of the supermind look like?

The age of the lone genius is over. What comes next belongs to the people who can think, build, and learn together.