Persistence beats Perfection
July 23, 2026
Today I was reminded about something a high school swimming coach taught me: He believed that your swim stroke improves automatically over time. Your body naturally finds the most efficient way to move through the water. In other words, practice, repetition, and persistence eventually pay off.
The prompt for this reflection came from a someone I spoke with at the pool this morning. He was just starting to swim again after a very long break. He said that he had forgotten how technical swimming was—how challenging it was to get the swim strokes right. I told him what my old coach believed and suggested that all he needed was more time in the pool and everything would come back to him. Persistence.
Many universal forces benefit from the same principal of persistence: gravity and love come to mind. Both operate invisibly yet cannot be denied. Gravity literally bends space-time, forcing the paths of objects with mass to curve. Love operates in a similar fashion: bending the paths of our hearts—priorities, identities, and our futures. Both forces increase with proximity—physical and emotional closeness amplify the pull on two bodies. And both are persistent forces.
In the field of Artificial Intelligence, there is a concept known as Recursive Self-Improvement (“RSI”), a process whereby AI systems use their own capabilities to design, write or implement upgrades to their own codebase. Theoretically, RSI has the potential to scale exponentially and reach artificial superintelligence, proving that persistence will one day pay off.
AI will eventually become superintelligent through persistent, compounding loops where AI continuously improves its output, its processes, and ultimately its architecture—or, rather, the architecture of future generations of AI. These continuous improvement loops are like Six Sigma on rocket fuel.
Like gravity, AI lacks emotions. Gravity pulls you closer whether you like it or not. Similarly, AI will become superintelligent regardless of how you may feel about it. It is going to happen, so, if you haven’t started already, begin the Five Stages of Grief now.
Once we have accepted and witnessed AI becoming superintelligent, we will realize that intelligence can only accomplish so much. Intelligence can remind you that someone had a theory about something relevant to your work. But AI is not creative—it cannot decide to work on an important problem and then creatively wrangle disjointed concepts into a potential solution. AI is derivative, not creative.
It is the job of Humans to combine a typewriter with a television to create a personal computer. I say this because Human activity relies on intelligence, emotions, and judgment. AI’s power derives from the native logic inherent in our languages, not from its ability to emote or decide. Logic takes us only so far.
AI cannot love; therefore, it cannot create or decide.
Human love will bend AI’s priorities and define our identities and futures, not the other way around.