The Mile Metaphor

A man complains to his coach: My son is doing poorly in school, my mother-in-law is living with us and giving me hell, my wife does not respect me. What should I do?

The coach says: yeah, it’s tough. Focus on what you can control. Look at you — you’re pale and out of shape. You should be outside more. How about jogging? Start by running just a mile a day. You will see, it’ll get better. Let’s circle back in two weeks.

Two weeks later the man calls the coach: “Thank you so much! Huge improvement! I’m 14 miles away from home and I feel great!”

---

The joke is on us. We think that running away from problems will make them go away — but it just moves the problems in space, because we take our problems with us wherever we go.

The coach is right. Just a mile a day creates a distance between you and the problem and makes you the best person to solve it.

I think the main goal of AI is to help us maintain stealth while we keep adding mileage between us and our problems.

The AI-DX version of this: AI doesn’t solve your problems. It gives you the space — the mile of breathing room — to become the person who can solve them. The developer who uses AI well is not offloading thinking. They’re buying themselves distance from the noise so the signal can get louder.