Wonder Notes is our weekly reflection on building Glia, an AI that co-authors your personal growth journey. We just released our second private beta to our first batch of users. More product features coming soon for a public roll-out. š¾
On Sunday, we released our second beta. I spent the morning in thought.
āEvery builder's first duty is philosophical: to decide what they are building for, in the deepest sense.ā1
Itās easy to lose sight of the big vision when thereās so much noise, clout, and opinion floating around. Everyone wants to get in and out quickly in what feels like a technological gold rush (that we are lucky to be a part of), but I wonder whether our technologies embody the future we want to live in ā what even is the future we want to live in?
So I went back to pondering our first principles:
Glia believes in the absolute power of people becoming fuller versions of ourselves. To us, self-discovery and learning are crucial to getting us there. Technology is a powerful medium we wield to aid that process.
Personal growth is a beautiful, ancient undertaking. Itās the only thing that helps us make peace with loss, the changes of the familiar, and this feeling so ever one-directional, irreversible journey that is life. Itās through this process we believe the better is possible, and a better world starts with individual transformations.
And Glia is obsessed with that journey. We want to make both the sprinting towards a purpose and the serendipitous discoveries more visible.
In Jane Eyre, one of the most beloved coming-of-age metamorphoses grows from the first sentence of the book:
āThere was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery and hour in the morningā¦ā
to the last chapter:
āReader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone presentā¦ā
Two centuries later, it remains a deeply riveting tale that illuminates the tender yet transformative beauty of chasing oneās becoming.
Empowering the journey of personal growth takes two crucial elements: idea and action. Ideas delineate the silhouette to our individuality, and actions move us towards knowledge and understanding.
And we live in an age where itās never felt more within reach to augment both. Before the democratization of knowledge via the internet, we relied on wise mentors, psychotherapists, social circles, and formal education ā wonderful yet gatekept only to the privileged class ā to become enlightened individuals. Today, one of the biggest transformations that LLMs will bring about is reasoning power for the masses.
What makes reasoning power so transformative is that it doesn't just deliver what is there to know at face-value. When designed and used thoughtfully, it becomes a fluid and dynamic force that can evolve and push our thinking by understanding our deeper purpose rather than merely tracking behavior patterns, reclaiming our attention and redirecting it toward what we truly seek.
I love the Chinese words for āexperience:ā
ä½éŖ (body, experience) or ē»éŖ (through, experience).
To experience something is grounded in something bodily, through and through. Experiences celebrate the unique human condition in both limitations and possibilities. Technology's role isn't to shortcut the messy, non-linear process of becoming (it canāt) but to serve as a more responsive witness to it. A well-designed instrument doesn't play music for the musician but extends their expressive octave. Our tools should extend our capacity for self-discovery without diminishing the irreplaceable work of living through it.
These principles shape the experience we want to bring alive:
Organization centric.
āWhat an organism does, is organize; and what a human organism organizes is meaning. Thus it is not that a person makes meaning, as much as that the activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making.ā
ā Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self
Growth is non-linear, wonder-full, serendipitous, and often messy. So we want to honor it by off-loading the energy it takes to organize. All your reflections fall into the right places.
Curating inspirations from intentions. Unlike big-data driven algorithms, the reasoning power of LLMs can deliver something aligned with our intentions instead of superficial desires and baited behaviors. A more introspective growth season is co-authored by time spent in front of old paintings, trips to UNESCO sites, early weekend mornings at cafƩs, and long calls with friends. These inspirations are more in touch with our intentional selves and have the power to transform us and deeply impact us.
Visualizing chapters of growthā¦ and future ones. Itās hard to know how far weāve come or how far we can go while simply moving through life. We want to create a kind of visualization that becomes an anchor to our growth. When thereās something to trace and map our journey, we wonder more freely and bravely.
Thank you for joining our beta program and helping shape Glia in becoming a part of the future we want to live in.
PS: our third beta is underway, and we canāt wait to unveil it soon.
With much love,
Erica & Serene
