Isaac Pitman was sixteen, working twelve-hour days as a clerk.
He still read until four in the morning.
A grammar book went everywhere with him. So did a blank notebook, where he’d copy passages he liked and memorize them—not for school, just because he wanted them in his head.
He had more ideas than time to get them down.
That was the actual problem, years before shorthand entered the picture.
Then he found Samuel Taylor’s shorthand system.
He learned it, practiced it, and something clicked: he could write six times faster than longhand.
It dissolved the exact wall he’d been hitting.
Years later, teaching 120 students, he ran into a smaller version of the same wall — there was no affordable guidebook for Taylor’s system, so he decided to write one himself.
He sent it to a publisher. The publisher told him it already existed.
Try something new.
That rejection is the real hinge of this story, and it’s easy to miss because it looks like a dead end, not an opening. It forced a harder question: what if shorthand wasn’t built on letters at all? What if it was built on sound?
He tested the idea on his students, on his siblings, for years. In 1837, he published it. No launch, no advertising — his own family hand-sewed the first copies and sent them out as a feeler.
Around the same time, Britain’s postal system got radically cheaper. Before 1840, a letter could cost more than a day’s wage, priced by distance. Then the Uniform Penny Post arrived — one penny, anywhere in the country.
Pitman didn’t invent the Penny Post. He used it to build something nobody else did: a nationwide, two-way correction loop, entirely on paper.
He mailed a one-page explainer to schoolmasters. Students mailed him their shorthand exercises. He corrected them by hand and mailed them back.
Here’s the part I keep turning over.
The Penny Post was open to everyone in Britain. Every schoolteacher, every clerk, every person with something to sell had the same penny stamp Pitman did.
Almost none of them built what he built.
Not because they lacked access. Because Pitman had already spent years doing something specific — reading obsessively, teaching, questioning how spelling and language actually worked — before the infrastructure showed up. That practice was the lens he pointed the new tool through. Someone else with the same stamp and the same system would have just written faster letters.
I think about this a lot with AI, and I’ll be straight about where I land.
There’s a real conversation happening about where this technology goes long-term, including people inside the biggest AI labs warning it could go badly if we don’t slow down. I’m not going to pretend I know if that’s right or overblown. Nobody’s boarding a rocket to Mars over it either.
What I do know is what it’s already doing in front of me.
There’s plenty of AI slop out there — content and software thrown together with none of the thinking behind it.
That’s real.
But it’s also true that we’re watching one-person companies hit billion-dollar valuations now, something that would have sounded absurd a decade ago. Both of those things are the same technology, in different hands.
For me, it hasn’t replaced the work only I can do. It’s cut through the noise around it — sharper research, stronger arguments, patterns in my own thinking I’d have missed after years of running departments and companies without it. A course I’d have spent twelve to eighteen months researching, I can now get to a genuine depth on in about a week — the searching and synthesizing collapsed, the reading and the judgment didn’t.
None of that makes me special. It’s a tool, and everyone gets the same one.
But there’s a difference between using it as a calculator, a search engine, or an actual thinking partner — someone to brainstorm with, argue against, catch the blind spots in your own reasoning. That’s a choice, and anyone can make it.
Except experience still decides how far that choice goes.
A creative director who’s spent years developing an eye, then spends a few weeks with AI, will outproduce a graphic designer who’s simply installed “creative direction” as a skill.
Not because the tool favors one of them. Because prompting is a lens — and a lens is only as sharp as what you’ve spent years learning to see.
For the low-stakes stuff — emails, a quick logo, admin work nobody remembers by Friday — none of this matters. There’s nothing to point the lens at.
For the work that actually counts, the tool was never the edge.
Pitman had access to the same tool everyone else did. Taylor’s system sat in the same bookshops, teachable to anyone who wanted to write six times faster.
He didn’t stop at faster. Twenty years of reading, teaching, and picking apart how language actually worked meant he looked at that system and saw something built wrong — not on letters, waiting to be rebuilt on sound.
That’s the lens. Not the tool.
Whatever you’re holding right now, you already know if you’re using it to write faster, or to see what it’s actually built on.